Diorama-style VR works very well to reduce or even eliminate kinetosis (motion sickness) for games. I've seen this in Moss and Moss 2 and it works very well.
Too bad many blockbuster games nowadays have a camera-over-the-shoulder approach rather and focus on aiming on stuff rather than fixed camera (understandable since so many of them are open world); this would have given a nice accessibility option for fan-made mods. That said, for character action game with melee combat (the likes of Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, etc), maybe a god-game view centered on the character with a limited field of view could work ?
Not fully relevant to the comment, but I've noticed that most motion sickness issues derive from an FOV which is too low.Big companies set it lower for performance reasons I guess, but on PC I always loved to crank it. And it's not about sitting closer or about the distance in itself, it's about the ratio of the size of the screen to the vision field it occupies
Since getting my Frame I think I've spent more time playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 in 3D than I have doing anything else. 3D in a window is much easier to deal with then full VR from a motion sickness perspective.
I think the VR space made an unforced error by focusing a bit too much on VR and not enough on just plain 3D. VR is cool and it has a lot of interesting applications. But I've enjoyed my time with SMG2 in a 3D window quite a bit. I've enjoyed Triangle Strategy on my Quest 3S, which is a tactics game played on a diorama. There are some other applications based on the idea like shared dungeon crawlers modeled on table-top layouts rather than first person perspective. There's a lot of games that need only minimal tweaking or fiddling that could add a bit more visual interest by being displayed in full, true 3D. The space of games that could be improved by just being playable in 3D is much larger than the space of games that can be improved by VR specifically, since the former is a superset of the latter.
Subconsciously it may feel like if you're developing for a "VR" headset, it ought to be "VR", but that's not the case. It's a well-known trap in gaming in general that when some new tech comes out there's a rush of things that feel obligated to "exploit" the tech so as not to be perceived as being behind the times, but it always becomes clear that is not necessarily. Most famously, the numerous Wii games that had to integrate "motion controls" and turned a nice, easy, concrete button press into a vague, nondeterministic "waggle" until just saying "motion controls" with a certain inflection has become a meme. There's no problem using the VR headset to enhance a game... or indeed any application... without it having to be "VR".
My Steam Frame was cheaper than this 57" curved "gaming" monitor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQM55C9 If gamers are willing to drop that on nice monitors just to play games, it would make sense to drop that much on a VR headset to play them in 3D too... if there was anything to do with that.
Oh man, the memories that music brings back. N64 was magical when it first came out. We used to rent it from Blockbuster Video for parties with friends.
Mario 64 is probably the game I have spent the most amount of time playing.
I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge.
As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay).
Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.
Goldeneye for me. My friends and I spent HOURS every Friday night into dawn playing that, shit-talking each other. The licence to kill setting (where one hit no matter what killed you) with no-Oddjob slap fights. I often nostalgically wish I was young and immature again thinking about it.
I was excited to hear it was being rereleased on the Switch's online service. I tried to play it and couldn't get past the first level. Console FPSs have since developed pretty unified controls (with axis inversion really being the main option) that don't cleanly map onto the port. I couldn't get a familiar control scheme in GoldenEye and gave up after about 20 minutes of trying.
It is cool. And I admit I am getting into decompiling and rebuilding for funzies ( just this weekend: few old 3.1 educational games, ff11( one zone only ) and vf4( ps2, mostly failure on first attempt ). But as a side note, I was under impression apple is not big on letting emulators run on its hardware? I am mildly worried that a big hammer is gonna come down on it all pretty soon.
That is outdated now. You can run emulators on iOS and you’ll find plenty in the App Store. The only limitation right now is no JIT, which is a problem for more modern console emulation.
Well, that’s the first thing I’ve ever seen that made me want a Vision Pro (or VR/AR in general), so hats off for that. (Edit: Mario 64 pun not intended)
It varies for each person. Would need to know what you prefer in a device.
Valve's Steam Frame runs Linux that you own, but is not generally available yet if you didn't reserve one already. It suffers from LCD, low pixel density, and awful passthrough, but the software is some of the best and only getting better. In a few years Valve may offer an OLED upgrade (or a new model, but fuck that)
I've been pissed that using up the expansion port for passthrough means you don't have an expansion port anymore. It's such a missed opportunity.
Seems nobody has realized this or nobody cares. I haven't seen anyone else notice or mention it.
> The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device
It's technically also supposed to be a Linux PC, and there are some (not many) productivity features.
In any case, I'd prefer to be able to at least read notifications instead of having to take the headset off every time I get a message or an e-mail or whatever.
The expansion port docs seem to imply you can have two passthrough cameras and a pcie gen4 lane at the same time, so a designer could probably allow a passthrough
I made something similar for the NES and Hololens, though much less functional as the Hololens didn't support the Xbox controller at the time, and the FOV was very narrow. Some MS employees added controller support during a hackathon, which was cool to see.
I've been thinking about how to port and remaster retro games for a decade now and AI RE/decomp has blown all of my ideas out of the water. Exciting times for gamers (or anyone else who has used published binaries ie Photoshop), despite my other misgivings about generative AI.
Not a failure to me. It is the most exciting piece of computer hardware to program apps for that I've purchased in the last decade. I understand why others consider it a failure though, and wonder how it would have performed if it weren't so expensive.
My hope was that it was going to pave the way for apple to release a pair of glasses that had some of the functionality of the Vision Pro. I'm guessing this is still one of their goals, however Meta and even SnapChat beat them to it.
A while ago I checked the 2nd hand market where I live but this headset is barely listed. The few ones are expensive-enough that I'd rather purchase a new one.
Too bad many blockbuster games nowadays have a camera-over-the-shoulder approach rather and focus on aiming on stuff rather than fixed camera (understandable since so many of them are open world); this would have given a nice accessibility option for fan-made mods. That said, for character action game with melee combat (the likes of Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, etc), maybe a god-game view centered on the character with a limited field of view could work ?
I think the VR space made an unforced error by focusing a bit too much on VR and not enough on just plain 3D. VR is cool and it has a lot of interesting applications. But I've enjoyed my time with SMG2 in a 3D window quite a bit. I've enjoyed Triangle Strategy on my Quest 3S, which is a tactics game played on a diorama. There are some other applications based on the idea like shared dungeon crawlers modeled on table-top layouts rather than first person perspective. There's a lot of games that need only minimal tweaking or fiddling that could add a bit more visual interest by being displayed in full, true 3D. The space of games that could be improved by just being playable in 3D is much larger than the space of games that can be improved by VR specifically, since the former is a superset of the latter.
Subconsciously it may feel like if you're developing for a "VR" headset, it ought to be "VR", but that's not the case. It's a well-known trap in gaming in general that when some new tech comes out there's a rush of things that feel obligated to "exploit" the tech so as not to be perceived as being behind the times, but it always becomes clear that is not necessarily. Most famously, the numerous Wii games that had to integrate "motion controls" and turned a nice, easy, concrete button press into a vague, nondeterministic "waggle" until just saying "motion controls" with a certain inflection has become a meme. There's no problem using the VR headset to enhance a game... or indeed any application... without it having to be "VR".
My Steam Frame was cheaper than this 57" curved "gaming" monitor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQM55C9 If gamers are willing to drop that on nice monitors just to play games, it would make sense to drop that much on a VR headset to play them in 3D too... if there was anything to do with that.
"I wonder what it would look like from the perspective of the figures"
People when playing game consoles:
"I wonder what it would look like from a distance"
I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge.
As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay).
Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.
Valve's Steam Frame runs Linux that you own, but is not generally available yet if you didn't reserve one already. It suffers from LCD, low pixel density, and awful passthrough, but the software is some of the best and only getting better. In a few years Valve may offer an OLED upgrade (or a new model, but fuck that)
The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device where passthrough is less important.
Seems nobody has realized this or nobody cares. I haven't seen anyone else notice or mention it.
> The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device
It's technically also supposed to be a Linux PC, and there are some (not many) productivity features.
In any case, I'd prefer to be able to at least read notifications instead of having to take the headset off every time I get a message or an e-mail or whatever.
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamFrame/-/blob... (page 9, "supported configurations")
https://github.com/bangfireball/Phonecast_VR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEWcc-cF3g0
I've been thinking about how to port and remaster retro games for a decade now and AI RE/decomp has blown all of my ideas out of the water. Exciting times for gamers (or anyone else who has used published binaries ie Photoshop), despite my other misgivings about generative AI.
Although it’s possible that the original M2 processor variant isn’t something to invest in.
My hope was that it was going to pave the way for apple to release a pair of glasses that had some of the functionality of the Vision Pro. I'm guessing this is still one of their goals, however Meta and even SnapChat beat them to it.
I knew this was going to be another case of HN title filtering!