Did you notice bad news for PC VR gaming in OC3? I did.

[RonsonPL]

It's almost morning, so I'll surely forget some things. I'll add them later.

Here's what I found so far, after watching just one video on VIDEOS tab on Oculus' Twitch account:





- first of all - as expected - no talks about CV2.

- notice Abrash talking about Oculus PC VR in 2021- he's saying "4K by 4K 90Hz". So today I've learned another very bad news: Oculus has no plans to ever go to 120 or 180-240Hz. And this really stung.

- Talks about optics. "No current technology works over 100°". That's sad. I expected the new lense types to be in research. Those mentioned by Carmack on his Twitter some time ago, when someone asked him about it, cause it popped up in the news around internet. 

- Only 140° planned in 5 years. So no drastic and immediate shift towards curved OLED displays. I really hoped for 180° in 5 years.

- Poisoning the well by going even worse than PSVR. Their reprojection has 60fps + 60fps. Now we have 45fps + 45fps. This will surely hurt high quality PC VR gaming (if we can even talk about such thing, cause I don't know if it even will exist or not). I get it - 500$ PC meeting minimum specs is great for VR popularization, but at the same time, it LOWERS the adoption rate where it matters the most - among core gamers. Those people who are loyal, who bring free advertising (many youtubers, for example), those people who are ready to pay more for proper quality. 45fps is bad and shouldn't be allowed. Oculus has good intentions. It surely can help with those rare fps hickups. But I'm afraid many people will think this is what PC VR can bring. People using cheap PCs will have this 45fps more often than 90fps. Devs might develop for this target as well. If they see majority playing with this bad performance, they won't utilize what true stable 90fps can offer. And the costs will be significant. Latency or at least motion blur. And low persistence is such a great opportunity to teach the gaming world once again what motion blur free gaming can add to the experience. Even in non-VR gaming.

- Touch. So full room scale, without issues with occlusion = 280$. That's more like 300-350$ in Europe ($->€ and then tax). Camera price is just absurd. Oculus should stick to what Palmer promised - and go for no profit from hardware sales, in the first few generations of the Rift, to create a huge lead in the future with profits hugely outweighting ininial loss of profits.

- I might've missed something, I hope I did. But if I didn't - seems like Oculus didn't announce CV1+Touch bundles, and no CV1 price drop.


- no current technology is good for wireless VR even at CV1 display specs. That's what Abrash said. This is bad. We all were excited about recent news about two companies announcing their plans to release the technology to market very soon. They were talking about having working prototypes for CV1 specs, and they are certain they will have 4K 90Hz solution in the next 1-2 years. Abrash should know about this. That means something isn't as rosy as we'd like it to be. There are serious issues, I hope only in terms of cost which Facebook simply estimate as not reasonable.

- Another hints towards Oculus not caring about PC VR.
1. I couldn't believe when I heard this: "Noone will buy a good PC just for VR, so we're going for laptops". This is wrong on so many levels. PC VR gaming should be what Oculus put faith in. What Oculus should've focused on. What they should've really help developing and improving. For the benefit of whole VR, for all VR applications, even for casual gaming and non-gaming.
 Oculus should treat PC VR much more seriously. They should talk with AMD and Nvidia and push them a little towards the idea that fast GPUs shouldn't cost as much as they do now, so PC VR gaming will develop quickly.
Instead Oculus says the laptops are the way - it's the opposite.
Laptops are very overpriced. Just look at the prices of laptops for gaming. Even those cheaper ones. We can often see the same laptop with +100$ GPU costing +500$. Why? The same reason why 1080 was named Titan X Pascal and costs 1200$. The same reason why all PC gaming hardware has such insane prices. No big corporation sees PC gaming as worthy of fighting for. "We won't sell more than a few of those 1440p 144Hz monitors, so let's price them 2x higher, enthusiasts will buy anyway". 
Oculus was supposed to change that, not "join the enemy" 😞
2. They had such a headstart, so much funds, so much community support, and yet, what do we see in PSVR reviews? That it already has better game offer than whole PC VR. Touch lineup is a tragedy. It's the very thing that should've been avoided at all costs. Nothing interesting for core gamers, and a strong message "look at our Touch, it's great for casual mini-games, it's like a Wii all over again, but better!". Lots of core gamers have no idea about VR and they fear it's another gimmick like motion controllers like Move, Kinect or Wii. This will further hurt VR adoption in PC VR gaming.
I could understand if it was Sony. Their tracking leaves a lot to be desired, limiting it mostly to such casual gaming. But Touch has better precission. Better latency. Better software. Another huge missed opportunity here. 

-a big "f..k you" towards all Windows 7 users. See the slide: "Windows 8 or newer". I predicted properly that nothing good can ever come out from Oculus-Microsoft deal.

- no "good news, everyone!". No breakthrough in any department. Especially Abrash saying Touch-like controllers are here to stay. I hoped their R/D team could come up with something.
It's over 5 years since first prototype. Over 2 years since Crescent Bay, which is basically CV1. I didn't expect products ready for production. But seeing Oculus still "in the dark" after 2 years just proves that 99% efforts are focused on mobile and non-core gaming VR.

-----------------------------------
Good things?
I didn't find anything even remotely positive. Maybe Abrash talking about displays. He talked about extrapolating future res from the fact that display res is improving. This at least means CV2, whenever it might show up, will have at least 100% more pixels.

[Funmotion]

I kinda like your post.  I had to upgrade to win 10 because devs were to lazy to support most OS.  Win 7 is not that old.

[RonsonPL]

Funmotion said:

I had to upgrade to win 10 because devs were to lazy to support most OS.  Win 7 is not that old.

Not only that. It even supports Vulkan.

[TwoHedWlf]

So, your overly high expectations not being met by the reasonable announcements is bad news?

[falken76]

I'm glad I don't care so much about this stuff or I'd be as disappointed as the OP.  I'm just happy to finally hear a price and release date for touch.  I didn't use my rift for the last week or so for no reason, just didn't feel like using it.  I just used it for the last 2 hours and my motion sickness is not nearly as bad as it has been and I just spent a lot of time in Big Screen.  I got Wowed again.  I am not worried about VR being doomed like the OP.  This stuff is expensive, but I'll more than get my $600 worth out of this thing before I'd consider buying a new one anyway.  Of course mobile is a main focus, it is by far the largest available user base. 

[jim1174]

it's
to bad oculus wont say when the cv2 is coming out. I am sure there are people
siting on the fence deciding if they should get cv1 or cv2. if we knew for
sure cv2 wont come out for at least 2 years people may get the cv1 now instead
of waiting  

[Hiro_Protag0nist]

Can i come and work for your VR company RonsonPL?  If you think that 4k @90Hz and 140 degree FOV for home VR in 5 years is rubbish i wanna be part of whatever you are doing - it must be amazing!

[Anonymous]

Woah you really are a glass half empty kinda guy, I'm pretty sure you're the guy Abrash mentioned who says 'it's not good enough' 😛 

Remember 5 years isn't that long away really and you need to look at how technology is currently processing, unless we have some unpredictable break through in computer vision.

You also have to remember all of what Abrash said were predictions based on our current technology.

I don't think you can comment on 45fps being bad unless you've actually tried it? Most people say they can't tell the difference when in VR, so whats the problem? I'm pretty sure people will still be getting 90fps on machines on a 970+ as before. Currently the 'spacewarp' is turned off by default. I don't see how you can see this as bad for PC gamers? It now gives PC gamers with lower budgets a better entry point into VR while the PC gamers with big money can still get 90fps.

[Anonymous]

@RonsonPL Blimey, I bet you're great fun at parties lol

As far as the 45 frames per second thing goes you won't notice that games are running at that speed because games will be running at 90 due to the way that ASW works.

Getting the entry price down for PC VR gaming is probably the best news that was given during their keynote, particularly after Sony have shit the bed with their broken positional tracking. More people using VR headsets means more support from developers and publishers. It isn't rocket surgery.

As for the games announced you must have been watching a different keynote to everyone else. The zombie burger one was a casual mini-game but Robo Recall, Lone Echo and Arktika are all certainly aimed at the core gamer market.

And then you have the Oculus deal with Epic to take into consideration which should bring even more core games to the Oculus Store.

How anyone can see bad news with Oculus dropping Megaton after Megaton yesterday beggars belief.

[nosys70]

i think they showed what they want (commercially speaking) and what it will give (from hardware point of view).
Pc linked headset sucks, you get an expensive device connnected to an expensive computer. no way to make money out of that. You cannot compete with gaming stuff (playsation4) , nor with mobile one (cardboard style).
You got lots of problem not linked to you product (drivers,OS, application).
so what they want is a self contained device they can launch and forget. (that's where game console and smartphone are)
Samsung Gear is very close but hey, that's samsung making money here, not oculus.
(and currently Samsung is in a deep shit with the S7)
Google is even closer with the Pixel, but again, it is phone in the box.
I would not suprised if FB will make some joint venture with Xiaomi (the phone company) to produce an headset with a belt pack, containing a small computer and battery.
We got a bunch of emerging device coming based on nano motherboard offering features not found on smartphone (like inputs/outputs) , but missing features found on smartphone (sensors).
So a cross between these two world would be exactly what is missing to VR, and VR could be exactly the good trigger for this happening (while it already slowly started with the robotic thing...)

just imagine what could be a nice screen for the headset, a nice portable computer as beltpack, a nice interface under the form of a wristwatch (they can even check your heartbeat to include this int he game).
currently who has all this and not in the race ?  apple.