> Is the room scale tracking somehow inferior when you sit in a chair?
Nope. The Rift is definitely more comfortable for most people and looks more like a finished product, but that's about all the good I can say about it. I used a Rift demo station about a week before my Vive arrived and it immediately made me happy about my choices. Roomscale is huge and while Oculus technically can be used that way the official support is still largely based around forward facing.
Things will change when Oculus Touch comes out. I don't understand why people are already dismissing the Rift as if it's the final revision, especially in such an immature market such as VR.
Oculus is still more focused on non-roomscale experiences for now, but they're already starting to change how they talk about it, no doubt in preparation for Touch. The tech is there, the games are there (from Vive-land), the only thing really missing right now are the controllers.
Oculus' tech is excellent. That is not disputed. But their management is hot garbage. And if anything can kill an excellent product, it's poor management. HTC and Valve have been much better stewards of the Vive than Facebook and Oculus have been of the Rift.
Oculus has burnt a lot of good will in the developer and consumer communities, with the delays, the shady exclusivity deals, the walled garden app store, the broken promises on open source and Linux and OS X support, etc.
No, that computer is good enough. It's the devs making the app you played that are not.
Oculus is playing a game with their specs. On one hand, it makes their peripheral look like really cutting edge technology if it can only run on the latest and greatest hardware. And on the other, it keeps them from having to try to fulfill even more orders over what they have already proven they cannot handle.
Simple graphics + room scale VR is an amazing experience. AAA games need whizbang graphics features to be able to compete with each other because they haven't had any new gameplay features to show off in nearly 15 years. But a lot of this effects are unnecessary in VR--sometimes even a bad idea! Normal mapping, for example, is has been reliably shown to cause motion sickness in people with a relatively high ratio of estrogen to testosterone (not just women, but men with hormonal imbalances. Women with high testosterone seem to do fine).
I think Valve and Oculus understand that AAA game studios don't have a lot to offer to VR. You're not going to really adapt Call of Duty to the Vive. So they are banking on the huge cadre of indie developers to rapidly make the first content for them. And that is going to mostly be fairly new devs using Unity, not really understanding what they are doing other than following tutorials. Optimisation is not exactly a strong point.
This study went into some of the changes in depth perception experienced by people going through hormonal therapy for gender reassignment operations: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10341369
Good enough for what? I used the first build of WebVR with my DK2 on 2013 Macbook Pro and tried a simple Quake level viewer. Sure, no AAA graphics but it worked, and well!
The new drivers removed my ability to experiment with WebVR. I could no longer use the hardware not due to limitations with my computer, but limitations imposed for marketing purposes.
That's an excellent point. It's a shame that Apple doesn't make either of (a) good computers or (b) moddable computers anymore.
Meanwhile, I've got a Windows PC that I've thrown together over the years, I just put a new SSD in it, and I'm waiting on buying either a new RX 480 or 1080, and I've got a 3D-capable PC, more capable and also much cheaper than the $3K Mac.
I think a lot of people want the Oculus to fail, because it's Valve vs Facebook. Valve is generally loved, Facebook is generally disliked. Had Palmer not sold to FB, I think they would have much stronger support and it would be a very different story. People were behind team Palmer+Carmack until they used the kickstarter dollars to "sell out." Oculus definitely didn't help their standing in the community once they started trying to buy exclusives and add DRM.
Kind of reminds me of the Makerbot fiasco. Like Makerbot, Oculus has lost much of the early adopter community, but if they can hang on long enough, they can capture the mainstream adoption wave and it might not matter.
"Valve's work up to 2013 had made real-time tracking in VR a viable proposition. But although it had worked out the fundamentals, it wasn't about to build its own headset. And why would it? The public had already voted with its wallet, funding Oculus to the tune of $2.4 million. In Jan. 2014 Valve announced that it would collaborate with Oculus on tracking to "drive PC VR forward." It also said it had no plans to release its own VR hardware, although it noted that "this could change" in the future.
It's clear that at some point Oculus and Valve's cooperative spirit fell apart. It could be that Oculus and Valve disagreed on what VR should be: The Rift and Vive certainly offer different experiences. But it's also been suggested that communication from Oculus ground to a halt in the months after the Facebook acquisition, which forced Valve to explore other paths. It's unlikely that anyone will go on the record to confirm that for years. All we know is that in early January, Luckey was reportedly calling Valve's tech "the best virtual reality demo in the world," and by late spring, HTC and Valve were meeting to hammer out a deal."
Nope. The Rift is definitely more comfortable for most people and looks more like a finished product, but that's about all the good I can say about it. I used a Rift demo station about a week before my Vive arrived and it immediately made me happy about my choices. Roomscale is huge and while Oculus technically can be used that way the official support is still largely based around forward facing.