First night with the Rift - no TLDR summary (sorry)

[kzintzi]

I thought I'd document some thoughts on Rift usage since I just got it. mainly I think I want to do something on here other than just complain about delays 🙂

Basic Info

first of all my setup - it's a bit lopsided as I'm in the middle of upgrading (Video card is last)

i7-6700k
16GB DDR4 RAM
Asus 710Pro Motherboard
NVidia GTX660
lotsa spindles and no ssd's

unboxing and setting up was a breeze. the most time was spent clearing my desk and reconnecting my monitor to the DVI port instead of the HDMI so it was free for the rift. I'd already setup the software the other day so no download delays or anything like that.

My current Video Card is a NVidia GTX660 - other than the "does not meet the minimum spec" message on top of things in home it worked great (not entirely sure what the fuss is/was about this message TBO) - makes me wonder in positive anticipation how big an improvement there will be when I do get a new card.. I did notice some jitter but it wasn't massively impacting - I spent 4 hours in the Rift night and other than being a little spacey-eyed I didn't get VR sick in any way.

Oculus Home

looked nice - my family all want to live in that appartment - my wife especially liked the bar/kitchen and the kids now want a stream/reflection pool in our living room... lol. if this is going to be expanded on and made into a VR hub with rooms and other things it'll be awesome... some sort of random exterior for looking at would be cool too - my eldest REALLY liked the blimp/steampunkish demo in the VR experience in the beginning and now wants a world like that to look out upon. which would be cool.

Elite Dangerous

was awesome - spent 3 hours playing this and I must say that it made the entire effort worth while. it's difficult to describe how much a game changer being able to look over my right shoulder to check the position of the space station was when I was maneuvering to dock.. driving in to work this morning and doing the same thign when changing lanes was close but not entirely the same. As for being annoyed by the white sun and then flipping my fighter to occlude it when I was looking for the docking pad on an orbital factory was a bit of a "WOW" moment too.

Crystal Rift

This was pretty cool - I spent about an hour playing this. I had it installed in Steam and it showed me the starting menu but wouldn't load the level for me... I moved the gamekey over to Oculus home and reinstalled it, and it worked flawlessly. so much so that I am DL'ing Elite in Home to see if it's better (though it works fine from Steam).

I've been playing Grimrock2 again lately and it was a different experience to that - the feeling of "eep, that chasm is right there" I got when I was walking around was cool. I especially liked being able to look down the edge of a corridor and see a secret door button poking out.

The difference between SteamVR and Home was interesting too - the Steam version assumed I was standing and had the menu located as if I was standing up and I had to change to a seated view in the setup, whereas the Home version just had the menu in the right place. not sure what the gameplay comparison would be like as the Steam Version wouldn't load other than the menu.

The game play is a bit simplistic (compared to Grimrock 2 for example), but that's to be expected given they were designing for a new paradigm and weren't sure how best to make interaction work. I found using the game controller interesting - I've never properly owned a console primarily because I don't like the controllers compared to a PC, so losing the keyboard and mouse will take some getting used to. I think this might work better in my head with Touch so it's not quite so console like.

BigScreen Beta

Finally I spent about 20 minutes pfaffing with Bigscreen beta - it was cool. had my desktop up and in front of me - I could read everything and find stuff as long as I didn't move the screen too far away. I even played Skyrim in it for about 30 seconds but it was only a test and it was a bit jerky (given my Video card that's not unexpected I think) in places - possibly playable but VorpX is where I want to test Skyrim.

Things That Could Be Better:

a way to run the "experience intro" again.. I would like to show the family what I saw when I was setting it all up without rerunning the config

I need to wire in a HDMI and USB3 socket into my desk so I can pack away the Rift when I'm done - I'm not interested in climbing under my desk everytime I want to set it up.. luckily I was going to do this anyway, and I have a Jaycar around the corner :tongue:

the most annoying thing overall was my glasses - I put the headset on without them and the comfort factor difference was really noticable, so much so that even if I didn't already have this sorted (soon anyway, thankyou vrlens-lab), I'd be looking for some way of installing replacement lenses or getting custom ones ground somehow.

Final thought (for now): it's amazing how easy the day is when I can pretend I'm ACTUALLY a starship captain who plays this interactive VR game where I'm a mid-level manager :wink:

[Xaiadar]

Download Dreamdeck, all the intro stuff is in that.  Great read!

[Uberwolfe]

Whaat? A positive comment? lol jks thanks for the review.

Pretty sure you can get the intro experiences by downloading Dreamdeck on the Store. Seems a bit weird as they're obviously pre-installed but anyhow...

[blanes]

Good story :smile: There was a topic few weeks back re that intro and somebody posted a way to easily access it again. Pretty sure it was just a command line you can run via a batch file which ran the demos over again without the install stuff. Anyone else remember that ?

[RobHermans]

Thank you @kzintzi , for taking the time to post your first impressions, I enjoyed reading that. My Rift is due for delivery today...hopefully I'll have a similarly positive experience. This will be very busy week for me, so I will likely post my impressions after I've had a chance to spend some quality time. B)

[kzintzi]

Ok, so night two of the rift was interesting. I downloaded elite in Home and the difference was HUGE. The immersion factor was a lot larger than playing it via steamVR. I think the native tracking/placement of the rift direct instead of being wrapped in the steamVR Made a MASSIVE difference. I had a real "holy f#ck that's large" when entering a space station that I didn't get before. I did notice jitter more but I'm not sure if that was me or the difference made it more noticeable. 

This has sold it for me though. I'll recheck steamVR as time goes on but the immersion difference was so noticeable that I'll be running things from Home unless there is no other option. Tonight I might switch between the two and see if I can work out what made it different, or I may just shoot stuff. 

[Anonymous]

New Oculus owner as of this weekend my self.  Yah, I noticed a huge difference as well on the home version of Elite as well!  I'm using Virtual Desktop, sounds pretty much the same as Big Screen.  I've been playing overwatch this way on a 100 foot edge to edge screen and damn is that fun!