But perhaps one place to look at the effect that price has had on competing hardware makers is the video-game console business. At the launch of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, Sony’s system cost about $200 more, and yet, at the end of their lifecycles, the two systems ended up selling about the same-Sony sold about 80 million PlayStation 3 consoles, which was about the same number of Xbox 360 consoles sold by Microsoft. It’s hard to find a good parallel in tech-industry history to help predict how things will turn out for competitors in the burgeoning VR industry, a business representing a difficult mix of gaming, entertainment, and wearables. (For the record, Quartz tried out both consumer headsets at CES, and found them both to be enjoyable experiences, but something about the level of interaction and freedom of being able to walk around inside VR worlds while using the handheld controls to build new worlds indeed seemed to make the Vive, even in its earlier iteration, stand out over the Rift.) (Oculus will be selling handheld controllers, but haven’t said how much they will cost, or when this year they will be released.) HTC also said its headset will also be able to make and receive calls and texts-HTC is a traditional mobile-phone company, after all-and a front-facing camera will allow you to see the outside world while wearing the headset if you want, which the company says “demonstrates the ability to combine both realities without losing touch of either.”Īccording to some reviewers, the experience the Vive gives-including the level of immersion and the way it can track your movements-means it’s worth shelling out the extra $200 over the cost of the Oculus Rift. Bundled with the headset will be two handheld controllers (the Oculus ships with an Xbox controller) as well as movement sensors that allow the system to track the wearer’s movement around a room. Developer kits are available for $300 though, so that should give us an idea of what the retail pricetag is going to look like.The Vive will launch with a few features that the Oculus won’t have. Oculus is still a ways out from retail, though they won't give any specifics on when or how much one of these bad boys are going to cost. Leap is also playing around with a mobile implementation, which we're looking forward to. Conveniently enough, the Leap Motion guys were right around the corner from Oculus at CES, and they've already been tinkering to get their high fidelity infrared motion sensor to play nice with the headset. It's hard to put such a believable world in front of someone's eyes and not expect them to try to reach out to touch it. That said, the only thing that's obviously missing at this point from a feature side is hand and gesture recognition. After taking off my headset, Joe said "welcome back", which is entirely apt - you certainly lose yourself in whatever virtual world you happen to load up. It's hard to look at people using VR headsets and not see them as just a little silly, but when you strap on something like the Oculus Crystal Cove headset, you very quickly stop caring about what you look like to the outside. After playing, it's very easy to see that Oculus stands to expand user interaction, not just viewing. As you can see from the video, it took me a little while to get rid of old habits, though the amazing amount of immersion also made it hard to concentrate on anything the nice Oculus guy was trying to direct me to. You could be looking over your shoulder to get a missile lock while trailing bogeys ahead of you. What took me awhile to learn is that moving your head actually enabled a second set of crosshairs aside from the traditional front-facing ones. When I walked in to try out Oculus for the first time, I assumed it would just expand my field of view, which in and of itself is great. This is a beautiful sci-fi dogfighting game where players climb into a realistic space fighter, and shoot it out with other players online. The game that's making the biggest splash on this early hardware is EVE: Valkyrie.
#EVE VALKYRIE OCULUS TOUCH UPDATE#
The update also includes refinements which significantly reduce motion blurring. This tech enables all sorts of new interactions when bobbing and weaving your head, not just rotating it around a fixed sphere of perspective. What differentiates this model from what we've seen over the last year is that an array of sensors on the front of the headset transmit to a camera which is connected to the computer you're using in order to provide greater positional information. At CES 2014, Oculus was demonstrating their latest virtual reality headset prototype, the Crystal Cove.
0 kommentar(er)
