and now look at you
The extra ummershun would be pretty cool…if the Oculus Rift weren’t coming out. Why have half-assed VR in your living room when you can the real thing strapped to your head?
well, I see this as more augmented reality than virtual reality. It’s pretty interesting, because that means those old rumors were pretty much 100% true. Now all we have to do is wait for their magical head tracking glasses.
I’m perfectly okay with this so long as there are still cheaper options. I don’t need an entire vitrual reality suite just to play Dwarf Fortress.
For NFS games I’d say my setup is close to perfect (minus the steering wheel). I really really want the RIFT, but at the same time I want to keep my trend of ghetto setups at a fraction of the cost going, so I’m still looking for ideas.
The Occulus Rift won’t be coming out with a movement system, so you still have to use a controller or keyboard which totally breaks the immersion IMO.
Instead of that I could use a Leap Motion for head tracking to achieve a similar effect and be able to control the game with hand gestures at the same time, which should be pretty interesting…
Not sure if I’m understanding you mean by “movement system” correctly, so sorry if I mischaracterize you here.
The anecdotes I’ve heard suggest that immersion actually doesn’t have much to do with a simulated movement system, and it’s even been suggested that having one would make games less immersive, because you wouldn’t be able to feel objects that should be there. Having a controller, on the other hand, allows you to express your movements into the world without the expectation of feedback that would come from moving your arms and legs directly.
Walking around will be done with a mind reading device(when they are released to the public) that can tell which way you want to go, weapon controls could work like on the wii, but more like air guitar, you shoot an invisible gun or swing an invisible crowbar.
You could pick up objects using your actual hands, it’s too bad for sensory input, still more realistic than pressing E and hovering the object in front of you.
Yeah, straight-into-the-brain VR will probably happen in the next decade or two-- assuming it’s safe and that governments don’t outlaw it.
But in the more immediate future, realistic as it might be to use your actual hands to interact with the world, it wouldn’t be immersive, which is the key to VR. The expectation of feedback coupled with the lack of said feeback is immersion breaking because it presents the player with a huge inconsistency. Consistency is key to immersion.
A consistent set of movement rules (like using a controller or keyboard) becomes totally immersive in a very short period of time. You’ll just cease to notice that you don’t actually walk by pushing a joystick forward in real life and go with it. The brain’s funny like that.
I’d think the Occulus Rift/controller setup would be rather enjoyable. The only way we’d get full immersion anyway is if we had a room like this and I don’t think that’s exactly in everyone’s budget. Even then it’s not perfect, although it is getting closer.
Anyway, I look forward to IllumiRoom as long as Microsoft doesn’t fuck the whole thing like they did the Kinect, which was only ever fun if you were either a kid or utilizing it for something other than its intended purpose.
I see this as the exact opposite of the Rift.
The Rift focuses on putting you in the game, while this focuses on bringing the game out into reality.
I speak of combining the two, as in using the Rift as your TV/display of choice.
Isn’t that kind of a distinction without a difference though? It seems to me that the point of both is to further immerse the player in the world. Although there are probably other applications for the Illumiroom as well that we just haven’t seen yet.
Well, a start would be that it scans the room and projects its image onto itself. It uses this to alter the actual room when prompted like warping in explosions. There’s a lot of applications for integrating the room into the game.