I was thinking of some kerazy head tracking in a world without more suitable sensors.

I know there's always news about this but here's some Gamescom video.

http://www.polygon.com/#ooid=pjdXN4ZDoWcbNDhg-waTzfd6lMuLFxMR

EDIT: Well that didn't work, just go to the video section on the home page.

Excite.

Even though I know what you're talking about Beanzie, I still almost took that the wrong way.

Anyways, here's a pic



bad pic sorry but, intereting thing you'll note is it has differnt eyecup extender things for nearsighted people, which was a nice thing, longsighted people might have to wear contacts

i put it on, its quite bulky but not at all heavy, i cant imagine being fatigued by it

Even comes with its own occulus branded lens cleaning cloth, classy as fuck

Few thoughts, good and some thinsg to be improved

Its obviously a prototype and there for developers to learn and get the hang of, so you have to get used to swapping arounf lenses till you get those that fit your eyes (i had to use the severely short sighted ones). and the lens has to be very close to your eyes to fill most of your peripheral vision, which means the straps have to be quite tight and a lot of shuffling it about to get it working right

Existing games have not been designed for it and current 3rd party drivers have to make concessions to get headtracking done, specifically with it following mouse movement - if youre too quick with the mouse and dont move accordingly with your head, you can start getting serious motion sickness, and if you combine that with the eye convegence not being set up right then yeah, icky feelings. This i dont thik is wrong with the idea though, you just got to take it slowly and learn how to use it

The screen is obviously too low res to be used in a commercial model can obscure much of the detail in a game, and you can 'see the pixels' which can cause above stated convergence problems, and because o the way the screen is projected, games like skyrim you just cant play sensibly atm cause the menus are all off to the sides

The good is, as it goes its pretty great when you adapt to it, and with improvements could improve an amazing experience - its not so much the being able to look around inside soething but the stereo effect giving everything such depth, it really does feel like somethings there, the first dragon attack in skyrim was actually scary in a very tangible way, i like it loads and will be fooling with it a lot in future

Unless youre a dev wh wants to get cracking learning the technology, or a tinkerer with a lot of time, i wouldnt bother with it, for me its great and  i'm going to continue to try and figure out the best way to use it and make things for it for some time id wager

I just got my partner to have a go with Dear Esther, and despite her general dislike of stuff like this she was really impressed, obviously saw the shortfalls be could fully understand why this was exciting technology

There is no, or next to no big games that support this so buying it just for gaming is absurd, even the third party drivers dont support that broad a degree of games and its only through various hacks you'll get proper head tracking with these games at all. When the games DO support this fully, it will be ace and i cannot wait though haha

For those who do get one, make sure you have a controller too, mouse and keyboard is practically impossible and the way the mouse moves seems to induce confusion quickly anyways

Now for the main event, Dishonored

OR must elevate non games like Dear Esther immeasurably.

Agreed.

It's not just photos but a plugin for google street-view (and yes it has the option for depth perception on by default) so you can visit almost anywhere in the world from the comfort of your PC!

That google thing is brill, although i now cant get my partner off it, and i thought it would be me being the fool wearing the giant goggles all night

For anyone hoping to oculus existing games, i can recommend tridef ignition for the job, it even has a great feature for lowering the fov so if you need to read a part of the screen you usually cant see you can do iut on a keypress, skyrim will start being playable again. Does need a lot of tinkering though

All this retrofitting isn't ideal but i'd also be ridiculous to expect it to be ideal, all it takes is a bit of fiddling though. The oculus is currently at a stage suitable for devs and tinkerers, i think everyone should be aware of that, but its clear where its heading for a consumer release and thats very promising.

It's realy not that hard to consider the oculus into the design for a game, if your game really has to have a lot of non-player related head movement you can put that in your game but i think you'd lose more than you gain.

The significant difference between opinions about the oculus is very chiefly decided between 3 camps, those who have used it as intended and understand whats involved for it to be implemented properly, gamers who have only tried to use it for existing, unsuitable games that they couldnt even be bothered to, say, tweak a bit and make a profile in tridef so it worked better (these are the people banging on about motion sickness being so terrible and innate, which is really an easy issue to address), and those who havent used it at all talking about what its like.

I'd expect better of people on this forum to fall into the middle camp, but until you use it its hard to tell you why it's so remarkable, almost everyone i've seen who has used it appropriately is very impressed. The effect of 3D tv's is so laughable in comparison in terms on significant impact on immersion within a game that it hardly bears that much thought - you get the idea, roughly, from tvs, like thats steroscopic vision, but yeah, its nothing like the oculus

All i can say is try it and see! I didn't know what to expect, i certainly didn't expect what it did. My mind boggled

Okay well after a few minutes of that i've concluded i no longer want to play games that aren't OR-considered ever again

fuck me