DK2 8 hours in...talk me off the ledge.

[dvs2nite]

Honesty policy - Dk2 shipped with a dead pixel in center of screen and the right rail shifts and wiggles all out of the box. Great way to make someone feel good about your product is have quality control and Oculus has zero QC on their products. I was hoping I was would be lucky and avoid the many poor product complaints on here but alas that was not to be. Lenses scratched in the first hour but its easy to ignore.

So let me give the background very quickly. I had no trouble setting up the rift to run any of the demos and games I tried to run.
Virtual Desktop
The chair: Sightline
Live for speed
Elite: Dangerous

Maybe an hour unboxing and fiddling with the software, Bliago's manager, IPD measurements and the demo scene.

So I get everything fired up and start trying the different stuff out. I figure I must be doing it wrong because everything looks pretty crappy in pretty much every sense.

Another hour of fiddling with IPD, forced vsync and physical adjustments.

Still no dice and it's at this point I realize that there isn't anything wrong.

Live for Speed is the first demo I try because I am told it doesn't have a huge problem with the sdk. Sure enough It looks just like its supposed to and runs very very smooth. however the only part that does look good is in a very small cone in the center of the rift. If I look at any of the edges I get blurry out of focus and unreadable screen. Move eyes back to center and its ok again. In driving sims this is a best case scenario for the rift. You dont really have time to be looking around a ton and your narrow focus is usually on the area directly in front of you. I just really dont want to spend my time in a racing game from 1998. Presence is pretty good here.

Elite: Dangerous is next up. Same as Live for Speed, a small cone in the center of the screen looks ok and blurry everywhere else. Text is garbage in the game unless you lean in then it just looks slightly better. The sense of presence is amazing and you really get a sense of what it would be like to live in a sci-fi space trucking adventure with unbelievably poor vision.

The Chair: Sightline This is the best demo I tried. It suffers from the least amount of poor graphics because they are really really low quality already. The narrow cone of good resolution is least apparent in this demo as well. Presence in this game is almost immediate and it is amazing. This is the experience I have seen described and the potential this device has. This was probably the only plus experience over a 40" monitor and it wasn't really worth the effort.

I am already going to cancel the other rift's I ordered. What I am looking for is a reason to care about CV1. DK2 is pretty much awful. I have no idea what people saw in DK1 that could have gave them even a shot at DK2.

The hype train has never been so unbelievably delusional. When Google was putting out a cardboard box with a phone taped in I thought it was a joke...the DK2 is a marginally better experience. I guess for some people that margin is worth a lot of money. I bought a 280$ Samsung 39" TV and hooked it up to my computer...it looks a few orders of magnitude better than the 350$ Samsung phone I hooked up to my computer.

[Hiro_Protag0nist]

I honestly can not understand how anybody interested in technology fails to be utterly impressed by trying Sightline: The Chair or Elite Dangerous on the Oculus Rift DK2.

That's all i'll say.

[bilago]

"andyring" wrote:
I honestly can not understand how anybody interested in technology fails to be utterly impressed by trying Sightline: The Chair or Elite Dangerous on the Oculus Rift DK2.

That's all i'll say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otm4RusESNU

[henleyb]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
My earlier post is perhaps a bit too negative. No one is telling me this is going to be better though. Pretty much I need to lower my bar is what I am being told.

Is that really the message Oculus wants to tailor?


edit: I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything personal.

It's a development kit, it says it on the front of it. I just don't see what there is to complain about, it does the job for developing on. It's new technology cutting a path for the future of VR which will be polished and complete but until that point we all have to push forwards with what this tech is and does/can do. If you want to join in then start building content.

I get the impression you bought the kit expecting to use it like it's a finished product that you can slap on and be wowed by, this just isn't the case right now. It's for the dreamers and enthusiasts to build content and ideas that will raise new questions and be fed back in to the development cycle for future hardware.

Personally, I've been blown away by it and hugely excited for the future of VR so personally I can't relate to your experiences but I think it's just not for you.

[Lagahan]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
Pretty much I need to lower my bar is what I am being told.

Its not so much that you need to lower the bar, I take it from your experience there you just want the thing to be plug 'n play?

This is why these dev kits exist, all the configuration and tweaking is just stuff to get preliminary versions of software built for this running. Anything built with the near final version of the SDK, near CV1 release will just be a matter of having the SDK, Oculus runtime installed, putting your IPD in and booting up an Oculus ready game.

Til then we will have to configure and tweak for nearly everything.

[Sparky83]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
Pretty much I need to lower my bar is what I am being told.

Is that really the message Oculus wants to tailor?

This sounds like you demand it to be better, but it doesn't work this way. This is the future of gaming, I am very sure. We are so desperate for it to arrive that we follow each single step of it with great enthusiasm and anticipation. We know that it still is not here, the gap between reality and our dreams of virtual reality are still too big to satisfy us. But we are much closer to having consumer VR than ever.

So, if you think this is not worth any money or anyones precious time, then this might just be something you are not too passionate about and you should wait until it gets better, until it's ready. But I think you will not be able to spoil the party. I have my DK2 and I love it! If it didn't work correctly I would try to get a replacement.

Excuse me now, I will have to get into Elite: Dangerous for a while.

[ThreeEyes]

What Lagahan said. Things will definitely get better. Just since last week Live For Speed has made huge strides in chromatic aberration, lag, tracking, etc. From the patch that came out yesterday to the original patch that enabled DK2 at all it is like night and day. Others are also whipping their apps/games/sims into shape.

It's like what everyone was saying well before DK2 ever even shipped - anyone not actually developing (or at least willing to help out the devs with troubleshooting) should wait.

Not much of anything is really polished and in its final form yet and it will be a while before more apps get rid of judder, fix their displays and menus, and move over to direct rendering.

Besides, there is a thread over on Reddit where OVR tweeted they fixed a major performance issue in the runtime (pretty sure it was in the runtime but maybe in the SDK) that fixes a number of bottlenecks.

Things are still changing really fast and anyone not willing or able to help out or at least understand that there is a lot of work to be done still might be better off selling their DK2 to someone else who can put it to good use.

[RirtualVeality]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
...talk me off the ledge.

No.

[museumsteve]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
My earlier post is perhaps a bit too negative. No one is telling me this is going to be better though. Pretty much I need to lower my bar is what I am being told.

Is that really the message Oculus wants to tailor?


edit: I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything personal.

You obviously did not do your homework before ordering it.

Why would you have more ordered? (that you are now cancelling)

Your opening post was bordering on rude. You may have a bad unit but does not mean there's no QC. Suggesting the hype is delusional is suggesting the thousands upon thousands that are more than happy with theirs have something wrong with them.

'No one is telling me it's going to get better' ???
Where have you been? Of course it will get better, that has never been in question. It is a devkit and for the reasons you have shared is precisely the reason consumers have been advised to stay away from it.

[Hiro_Protag0nist]

"bilago" wrote:

"andyring" wrote:
I honestly can not understand how anybody interested in technology fails to be utterly impressed by trying Sightline: The Chair or Elite Dangerous on the Oculus Rift DK2.

That's all i'll say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otm4RusESNU

lol

[unmeaty]

So hey, completely off topic -

When you're setting up the IPD and the config tells you to move the lenses away from you as far as possible, are you supposed to move the lenses to the notch shown in the config window after the IPD test is over? Because it had changed.

Also OP, sorry about your experience. I guess I had a good idea of what to expect, and I'm pretty happy with it. A lot of what's wrong is on the software end and WILL get better. In fact there was an announcement of Reddit just a while ago about a breakthrough with the drivers.

I would imagine OVR will RMA that thing if it's really broken. Take heart.