Friday 5 December 2014

Virtual Reality: Oculus Rift /vs/ Sony Morpheus

Hello everyone :)

I'm just going to point out some information I read in a Games Extra magazine about VR that might be of interest for our project.


First of all, the magazine makes a definition of what VR is: "Anything which completely immerses you in visuals, sending them directly to your eyes rather than mediating through a TV screen". Therefore, other devices like Google Glass which "projects some visuals to your eyes but lets you see the outside world" are not VR but augmented reality.

It also talks about the story of Oculus Rift, which began in 2012 and has produced three prototype versions since then (DK1, DK2 and Crescent Bay) encouraging a big number of developers to make Oculus Rift versions of their games. No consumer version has been released yet, but it seems that this will happen in 2015.

On the other side, Sony announced in March this year they were working on a VR headset designed to be used with the PlayStation 4, called Project Morpheus. This will cover the consoles games (Oculus will do PC games) and will probably be released towards the end of 2015.

However, there are still some technical issues to overcome such as the latency, which the magazine defines as "a time-gap between any action you make and the reaction you see in your VR headset". This is particularly important for the succes of the VR headsets, as latency could cause motion-sickness to players. Oculus Rift lastest versions have largerly reduced latency whereas Sony's Morpheus early prototypes were laking in it. Another issue to have in mind is the maximum length of time you should spend using VR headsets (the magazine doesn't go any further in this, and I haven't found anything in the internet, but we should look out for more as this is quite important for our project since it could determine the maximum number of mini games to be played in one go - we don't want students to be sick and run away from University, do we? haha :D).

Finally, the article shows a box comparing both Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus:


There are a few more things in the article I didn't mention because I think they are not relevant for the project, but if any of you guys (especially those doing the research) want to have a look just let me know and I will bring it with me next week to Uni.

I've tried to open this link Rob posted in our Facebook group page http://www.gamesindustry.biz/…/2014-11-27-frances-health-an… because I thought it may have some relation with all this, but I haven't been able to open it. So feel free to have a look and maybe add something else to this post??

Hope you find this post useful :)

See you soon,
Begoña

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for looking into this Begoña, I've read through all your posts including the NASA game links one :D I've not downloaded any but this should be very useful!

    With regards to the motion sickness, lag (or latency) is really noticeable on the Oculus Rift from what I've read. I spoke to somebody earlier this week who used one and his feedback was that playing anything on it that required quick movement did not feel natural. But I think we should be fine as our mini games may by quick, but the actual movement in-game will be pretty slow and deliberate. His feedback was that sitting down and looking at something (like a planet infront of him) would probably be fine motion sickness-wise.

    Just thought I'd mention it as a side note :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I think it is a very valuable feedback, as it is probably the only one we have about the use of the Oculus. I guess it is something we have to mention in the final report as we have to think about the advantages and disadvantages of this technology so we can in the future try to adapt our project to have better results (and users a better experience).
      Thanks :)

      Delete