S3NTRY11

By my calculations, and if you merely want 2DOF - pitch/yaw (is roll all that necessary? Nice, yes, but necessary?), and you already have yaw, adding pitch could cost as low as 1 byte (given reasonable rotation restrictions). I guess by extrapolation, you could get away with 1 byte per DOF. Doesn't sound all that costly to me. But I'm probably missing something in my relative naivety. With VR becoming a thing* this could be a real boon for immersion.

Regarding "killer app" for the Vive, they already have a "killer feature", and it's very obvious - a standing experience, and therefore anything that uses that feature well could be seen as a "killer app" - Hover Junkers for example.

I think Oculus will be THE option for the majority of simmers... We don't really need the extra tracking of the Vive, unless we're doing peripheral tracking, etc. Also, although they are the same res (?), I think the Rift will have the better optics - all speculation on my part. Regarding twin-tracking for the Rift and overall cost, if you were going to go for that, by the time you added up the cost, and worked out the value, Vive may still come out on top, and as argued by myself, be the technically superior option in that case. I'm still leaning towards the Vive for its versatility out of the box, rather than waiting to see whether the Rift peripherals are up to scratch. Not to mention that I'm not a fan of Oculus' walled-garden approach to software. And I'm not a huge fan of Facebook either, but that's entirely personal bias.

For the Vive fans: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2982422/software-games/why-the-htc-vive-is-still-the-most-immersive-appealing-vr-headset-on-the-horizon.html

Great stuff! Any Russians in the audience able to swing by my place and share my couch in order to translate? J/K

Sahweeeeeeet!!!:joystick: *cough* trees need to blend better *cough* please don't hate me.

You got rep, but then you lost it by flying into the building! :megalol:

Never mind, I 'Googled it'. Now I feel all empowered, and, in the spirit of giving, am going to replace all my previous posts with 'Google it.' Sharing the love.

Wat

Pardon my ignorance, but what do Gaming Evolved/Raptor do for you? Is it just an overlay, ala Steam?

Specific to DCS? We don't know for sure that it will. What we do know is that ED have a dev kit, and that the last word from wags was "looking positive, but no promises".

Fair point re NDA, but in one of his Q&As, answering a question on cockpit fidelity and objects-at-range with the Vive, wags did mention the possibility of a general assessment of the Vive being posted in here at some point in the future. A general assessment without comparison would be good, but yeah, probably still wishful thinking.

wormeaten did have a good point about marketing though - and aside from the hard facts of res and frequency, that's all that quote is. In raw terms, the stated res of the Vive screens means 120 more pixels in the vertical (if I've read it right). Now whether that is enough to move the Rift/Vive from "barely usable" for flight sims in the DK2 (my own assessment), to "good" or "great", remains to be seen. The increased res, coupled with independent screens (meaning less "wasted" pixels per eye), will hopefully make the difference, but personally I think we still have a few years to go before compute and res are good enough to really please flight simmers. Racing sims are going to be the sweet spot in 2016/17 in my opinion. I'll still be getting one though, because I love this stuff. And comparatively speaking, anything will be better than the DK2, which is still usable. As an aside, Michael Abrash of Oculus (formerly of Valve) has stated that 10k per eye is the aim for genuinely good fidelity. Yowza! I'm hoping an ED dev will pop in to give an assessment on the Vive res at some point, but that may be wishful thinking.

The Rift and Vive both aim to support glasses within the headset, so you should be all good!

You have many misunderstandings and inaccuracies in your post. Leapmotion is considerably less accurate/reliable than Vive. Or the Rift for that matter. Not sure where you got those resolution specs, but they are way off too.

Not to mention the fact that all those juicy VR-centric GPU improvements are going to have to come along thick and fast to comfortably drive those resolutions! Fun times ahead. I agree with the point about early adopters being hurt, but damn if I'm not bracing for the pain :-D

Their tracking system works fine as it is, but can it be easily extended by 3rd parties and modders? Can it handle many more arbitrary devices? They have to deal with modulation and image processing to extend their system, where Lighthouse appears to be much more 'plug and play'. The 'bottomless pit of money' rationale doesn't really work for me. Hypothetically, what if Oculus simply don't want to licence Valve's proprietary tech, or that it would drive the end-user cost too high, hurting uptake, and they feel that what they have at the moment is fine for the first commercial version of something that is going to go through many evolutionary stages? If they're comparing the Vive to the DK2, then, at this stage, that's pretty apples-to-oranges, so yeah, the Vive will sound amazing by comparison, but I've seen and read many comparisons between the Vive and the latest Rift prototype where people are saying that the Vive is fundamentally better. Taken that for what it's worth though, I guess. The Touch controls do look pretty good, no doubt! Absolutely!

I'm not running DCS with DK2 as yet, but I have a feeling it may actually be your video drivers causing the problem. Make sure you have the latest VR-ready drivers, downgrade to an earlier runtime (not sure what runtime DCS uses, but it will need to be compatible - it's the reason you are getting the "older runtime version" message). I run Win10 and the 0.5.1.0 runtime no problem with other titles, but did have the same error until I got the specific set of AMD drivers that supported the Rift. Hope that helps! With 1.5 not too far away, you hopefully don't have long to wait until a lot of issues with the Rift and DCS should be resolved. Bit of a lottery as to which SDK they're using though! Fingers crossed for 0.7.

I have a leapmotion, and unless they drastically improve tracking, use in something like DCS would be a frustrating nightmare. Particularly where cockpit controls don't have great clearance. Now something like Control VR, on the other hand, with IMUs, etc... oh hell yes!

It's a really great question that I think you also partially answered. My personal thoughts are that in the medium-term, if the peripheral options are there, hand gestures / hand tracking will be the way it's done. In the short-term, and as a baseline, the way that mouse interaction is implemented by FlyInside will be the way to go, but DCS 1.5 will answer that short-term question, I think. Long-term, it would be great to have a modular, open standard for complete 3D-printed cockpits, either wired-up, or in combination with hand tracking, but that's a bit trickier.

To be honest, that is exactly what I would expect Palmer to say. I've seen enough interviews with Luckey to know that he is both smart, and good at towing the company line - not mutually exclusive attributes, I know. As yet, we have seen nothing from Oculus that demonstrates the body/facial tracking capability, and their recent peripheral prototypes have come with no demonstration of the capability either. I'm not saying that it's not true, nor that they have nothing in the works along that line, but the problems with that tech are the problems with the Kinect. And the prototypes shown have all used point tracking. Not to mention the high load involved in all image-processing mechanisms; Load leads to lag. This is why I love the Vive tracking implementation - it's low load and infinitely more extensible - out of the box. Yes, I get that I am sounding like a bit of fanboy, but I was all for Oculus before seeing what HTC/Valve rolled out, because it was the best. Was.

I've recently had a bit of a go with P3D and FlyInside.. I thought it was pretty good too. Like you, I hope ED have met or exceeded that level of quality. Regarding Vive and cockpit, because of the fundamental difference in the way Oculus and HTC do their tracking, the Vive is inherently more extensible, to the point that you should be able to plonk-on some sensors to everyday items, match them up to VR-space models and away you go - that item is now tracked in VR. Perhaps even having entire 3D printed cockpit facsimiles created? I don't think it will be impossible to do similar with the Rift tracking system, but I think it would harder, and occlusion/frustum/tracking seems like a much bigger issue (actually the facsimile cockpit probably is almost impossible with Rift tracking, but everyday items are likely doable). There's a great interview by Norm from Tested with the guy that created the lighthouse system discussing its scalability and extensibility: @gtrdrt I feel the same about 0.7. As for my next card: TBA at this stage. I might well swallow my words and stick with AMD if their DX12 performance is all it's cracked up to be.

Hoping for carrier ops, but thinking it will be hormuz

Though technically true, that feels a little misleading.. DCSW 1.5, which is a major shift for DCS, is imminent (by the end of this month). Having said that, I don't think there's too much wrong with OP installing the current version to become familiar with the ecosystem.

I haven't heard anything specific regarding sdk versions. I am hopeful that the fact that DCS is one of the best VR technology demonstrators means there is some type of ongoing relationship between oculus and ED, and with that, regular review and integration of the latest sdk. Not sure how wishful that is though - fair to say ED have their hands full. I for one am leaning more towards the vive - seems like much better base-tech to build around - especially for things like VR cockpits and the like. Not much news on that front other than that ED have a dev kit, and things are looking good. As a side-note i have not even been able to use my DK2 with DCS, being a soon-to-be former AMD customer.