Oculus Pre Orders

[Dojo]

For the interested, pre orders will be available on Jan 6th at 1600Z.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/oc...open-on-jan-6/

[Eddie]

Certainly won't be preordering, but has any price been given yet?

[Dojo]

No, details will be announced during the preorder. However, the CEO has said at least $300, and the speculation is between 3-$600.

I'm firmly committed, and will of course provide as much feedback as I can once I have it. I imagine I'll have it before March.

[Snoopy]

I'm very interested but will be waiting patiently for community feedback before I purchase anything.

[Eddie]

Yeah likewise. I still have some doubts over resolution, but the big one is real world performance given the high FPS needed for a good experience.

[Trigger]

I'm very interested but will be waiting patiently for community feedback before I purchase anything.

I'm counting on Howie being game to buy this and give us all some feedback

[Snoopy]

I'm very interested but will be waiting patiently for community feedback before I purchase anything.

[Yassy]

I was fortunate to be able to use the DK2 at a friend's house. Granted, I didn't experience DCS on it, but I did play the Moon Lander game. That was enough to convince me that I really am not suited for VR.
It made me sick and dizzy and I can imagine this will get even more so with the increased resolution of the release version.

I am keeping my TrackIR setup and perhaps invest in a bigger / wider monitor setup. No VR for me.
Although I do find the technical parts awesome and am convinced this is a new era for gaming for sure!

[Ragtop]

I think the sickness part of VR varies heavily on the content and the manner in which you play.

I get horrendously motion sick from most things; Flight, Cars, Boats, Spinning round like a child and so on.

However I used the Rift in two separate instances at a motor show last year.

One was a static display used to showcase the new Nissan cars, where you simply sit in the drivers seat (Just a chair in real life) and look around the cockpit. It was totally convincing that you were 'in' the car and I was blown away. As people said, the resolution was ropey but the effect was amazing. No sickness. That was, until I moved beyond the in game movement of the camera. What I mean by this is that when I moved my head forward towards the steering wheel, my view would of course move, and I would get closer to the steering wheel. After moving forward about a foot however (To the point the steering wheel would be in real life) the camera simply stops. My head and body kept moving forward, but my view did not. That feeling of disconnect immediately made my stomach drop. It was a very odd sensation, and one that would very quickly lead to motion sickness.

The takeaway from this, was that as soon as the game does not do what your head does, you will get problems. This simply comes down to the implementation of the 'camera movement' in game, by the developer. If done well, you should have no ill effect.

The interesting thing is of course that this 'disconnect' could be used to great effect to completely disorient people in horror games! (Look one way, camera moves the other!)


My second experience was a few hours later in the Audi driving experience. You sit in a motion platform seat, and get driven around a virtual track, as a passenger. There was an R8 doing a fast lap of Silverstone, and a Q7 doing the off road course. The camera was able to move as far as I was (Constrained by seatbelts and a tight bucket seat) Which meant I experienced no disconnect from the sim, therefore no ill effect.

[Dojo]

I had wrote a response to all of this, but then I was reminded why I stayed out of the recent CPU/GPU overclock discussion. For me the bottom line is this: There is no one in the DCS community who I trust to tell me if the Oculus is viable for how we play here. It has to be us. This isn't simply a question of performance, which frankly is a complex conversation not suited to this forum, chiefly due to the fact that we're discussing the performance of an unoptimized alpha.

Assuming resolution, which isn't the whole story, is suitable, there are a number of other considerations that will have to be evaluated to determine if it can be used with the 476th style of play. Nothing I read or watched on Youtube before owning the Oculus did justice in explaining the concerns we had. I committed long ago to this evaluation, and I've never referred to it than anything more than that.

Still, I am hopeful it's viable, because no technology I've purchased in the last 20 years shocked me more than the Oculus did the first time it loaded into the cockpit of the A10C. I was in the game!!!

Somewhat tragically, you can't be told that. You have to experience it for yourself.