5 ms·

Zero Latency, the Future of Immersive Gaming

37 points by prawn 11y ago

charlieflowers 11y ago
I'd love to hear from an individual (not a magazine or a writer who reps a magazine) who has tried all 3 vr headsets coming out soon (the Rift, the Sony and the HTC). Is there a clear and obvious winner? Do you think any of them truly live up to the hype?
- vrnut 11y ago
  No clear and obvious winner. They should all have pretty similar capabilities. I haven't tried any of the motion input systems of the headsets besides the HTC Vive, but I've heard they're comparable (Rift's will probably be slightly better than Vive's, and Morpheus's slightly worse)
- alexqgb 11y ago
  Content dev. here, with no connection to any particular platform. Haven't demo'd PSVR, but based on its wand-style controller I'm comfortable saying that the Rift + Touch is the best, and for reasons that the other platforms may have a very difficult time competing against. As far as resolution, tracking, field of view, and general comfort go, the Rift CV1 and the Vive are closely matched, incredibly good, and - if you can believe this - underhyped. Though PSVR is said to be not quite as good, the technical bar is so high that Sony can come in slightly under and still deliver an awesomely good experience, and probably a more popular one once you factor in value for money. That said, I still think Oculus has a fundamental advantage due to the approach they've taken with Touch. Unlike the wand-style controllers used by HTC and Sony, Touch allows you to point and grab, which turns out to have a major effect on the sense of Presence, as well as level of dexterity you can bring to your interactions with the environment. It also reflects what your hands are actually doing in social apps, which has value that becomes immediately clear once you're in one. Indeed, the combination of social + the manipulation of near-field objects is (at least to my mind) the very core of VR. This wasn't something I'd anticipated, but having experienced it, I cannot imagine developing content that didn't put their combination at the center of the experience, since doing so would put you at a serious competitive disadvantage to people who did see them as fundamental, and had worked from there. I should say that I've seen some very clever interaction strategies in the Vive that do a good job in working around this limit, but there's no denying that they're making virtues of necessity. Ultimately, the Touch gives developers far more to work with, and I think that's going to be the decisive feature, especially now that the Rift also supports Vive-style room-scale tracking. Once devs. start to really understand and master the potential of Touch + social, I suspect the most engaging content ideas will gravitate to the Rift. As hardware fades into the background and content comes to the foreground, I suspect this advantage will pull the entire Oculus platform ahead. Of course, it may be possible for Sony, HTC, and any other entrants to abandon wands and mimic the Touch's design in much the same way that traditional game controllers have all converged on the same basic form. If this happens, all bets are off. But until it does, I'd put my money on Oculus.
- csimpson 11y ago
  I'm not the guy you want to hear from, because I'm the guy from Gizmodo that wrote the story, but I've tried pretty much every mainstream VR headset. Out of the three you mentioned, I like the Vive the most. But I think by April, when it's shipping, the consumer version of the Rift will be out or nearly out as well and those two are really close in quality; my money will be going to Vive personally. I actually really like the latest Samsung Gear VR, though. No wires, no setup bull; just connect your phone to the headset and you're off. I genuinely think an all-in-one solution like this is the future.
sciguy77 11y ago
Guys, please don't go to Zero Latency. When I was in Melbourne I coughed up the 80 bucks and went, and it was truly a horrendous experience. They had the worst tracking I've ever seen in VR. The gun's rotation was off by 40 degrees, even after switching it out and resetting it. There was constant stuttering, and severe frame drops were the norm, not the exception. And to top it off the game itself had crap graphics, embarrassingly bad AI, and glitched like crazy. At a VR meetup I talked to several people who had went, and not a single person had a good experience. I am amazed and baffled by all the good press they're getting. And for context I've tried the Rift DK2, the Gear VR IE, and the HTC Vive.
- exodust 11y ago
  There's good press and then there's good advertorials.
  - csimpson 11y ago
    This ain't an advertorial, man. I even paid for my own flight down to Melbourne and back to Sydney to meet the guys from Zero Latency and try it out. They're literally five or six guys in a warehouse, they wouldn't have the kind of money that our ad sales team deals with daily :)
    - exodust 11y ago
      Fair enough. I can't get past their brand name. Low latency is one of the biggest challenges in VR, to get below 20ms, and a lot of discussion around latency dominates VR engineering. Reading your article annoyed me that they come along and declare "zero latency", which is the first thing I scanned the article for - as in, how the hell did they achieve that. Then to discover it's only their brand name and nothing to do with actual performance metrics, which I think could have deserved a mention in your article given the whole buzz and significance around latency in VR discussion. A poor choice of brand name because it deserves a footnote* whenever it's mentioned! No harm done. Not an advertorial. Got it.
- Thaxll 11y ago
exodust 11y ago
Advertisement? Apparently it's okay to call low latency "Zero Latency", just use title case and fire at will. Zero Latency is mentioned only 35 times in the article. Tickets on sale now for 88 MPH.
- sp332 11y ago
  And it's "Powered by Alienware", which isn't even made of real aliens! Yes, of course you can call anything any name, unless it infringes trademark because someone else in your field thought of it first. Instead of being an ad for ZL, I think the repetition is more likely to increase Gizmodo's page rank for this article.
  - mrob 11y ago
    "Alienware" isn't misleading, because nobody sane would think it was genuine alien technology. When I saw "Zero Latency" I was briefly very excited because I thought it actually meant "zero latency". Maybe they had tapped directly into the brain to get access to eye/muscle movement signals before normal sensors could, early enough to compensate for the unavoidable latency of rendering and simulation. This would be a real breakthrough in man-machine interfaces, and it could be fairly described as "zero latency" because it really could be zero as measured with respect to conventional sensors. But no, it's just typical marketing lies.
  - uremog 11y ago
    So if I call my company Chicken Burger and serve people burgers made from beef and pork with no chicken meat, I'm good right?
- csimpson 11y ago
  It's a brand name. How was I supposed to write about the company without mentioning its name? About the repetition -- Wordpress tells me there's 3011 words of text and image code in the article, I think a 1% hit rate for the actual company name is pretty reasonable...
  - 11y ago
ShakataGaNai 11y ago
Please please please have something like this come to San Francisco. It's like Qzar...but... better.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  Qzar... I just have bad memories of everyone being an expert that would contort their bodies in strange ways to block all the sensors.
prawn 11y ago
Saw this tried on Good Game, a gaming show on Australian TV so looked it up. It looked a bit tame, but I wanted to submit the story and see if people thought there was potential/future in this approach to gaming, even if these guys aren't there yet. Also, if anyone else around the world is trying something similar?
z3t4 11y ago
In our city fiber network we have less then 1ms (ping) latency ...

37 points by prawn 11y ago

I'd love to hear from an individual (not a magazine or a writer who reps a magazine) who has tried all 3 vr headsets coming out soon (the Rift, the Sony and the HTC). Is there a clear and obvious winner? Do you think any of them truly live up to the hype?

vrnut 11y ago
No clear and obvious winner. They should all have pretty similar capabilities. I haven't tried any of the motion input systems of the headsets besides the HTC Vive, but I've heard they're comparable (Rift's will probably be slightly better than Vive's, and Morpheus's slightly worse)
alexqgb 11y ago
Content dev. here, with no connection to any particular platform. Haven't demo'd PSVR, but based on its wand-style controller I'm comfortable saying that the Rift + Touch is the best, and for reasons that the other platforms may have a very difficult time competing against. As far as resolution, tracking, field of view, and general comfort go, the Rift CV1 and the Vive are closely matched, incredibly good, and - if you can believe this - underhyped. Though PSVR is said to be not quite as good, the technical bar is so high that Sony can come in slightly under and still deliver an awesomely good experience, and probably a more popular one once you factor in value for money. That said, I still think Oculus has a fundamental advantage due to the approach they've taken with Touch. Unlike the wand-style controllers used by HTC and Sony, Touch allows you to point and grab, which turns out to have a major effect on the sense of Presence, as well as level of dexterity you can bring to your interactions with the environment. It also reflects what your hands are actually doing in social apps, which has value that becomes immediately clear once you're in one. Indeed, the combination of social + the manipulation of near-field objects is (at least to my mind) the very core of VR. This wasn't something I'd anticipated, but having experienced it, I cannot imagine developing content that didn't put their combination at the center of the experience, since doing so would put you at a serious competitive disadvantage to people who did see them as fundamental, and had worked from there. I should say that I've seen some very clever interaction strategies in the Vive that do a good job in working around this limit, but there's no denying that they're making virtues of necessity. Ultimately, the Touch gives developers far more to work with, and I think that's going to be the decisive feature, especially now that the Rift also supports Vive-style room-scale tracking. Once devs. start to really understand and master the potential of Touch + social, I suspect the most engaging content ideas will gravitate to the Rift. As hardware fades into the background and content comes to the foreground, I suspect this advantage will pull the entire Oculus platform ahead. Of course, it may be possible for Sony, HTC, and any other entrants to abandon wands and mimic the Touch's design in much the same way that traditional game controllers have all converged on the same basic form. If this happens, all bets are off. But until it does, I'd put my money on Oculus.
csimpson 11y ago
I'm not the guy you want to hear from, because I'm the guy from Gizmodo that wrote the story, but I've tried pretty much every mainstream VR headset. Out of the three you mentioned, I like the Vive the most. But I think by April, when it's shipping, the consumer version of the Rift will be out or nearly out as well and those two are really close in quality; my money will be going to Vive personally. I actually really like the latest Samsung Gear VR, though. No wires, no setup bull; just connect your phone to the headset and you're off. I genuinely think an all-in-one solution like this is the future.

sciguy77 11y ago

Guys, please don't go to Zero Latency. When I was in Melbourne I coughed up the 80 bucks and went, and it was truly a horrendous experience. They had the worst tracking I've ever seen in VR. The gun's rotation was off by 40 degrees, even after switching it out and resetting it. There was constant stuttering, and severe frame drops were the norm, not the exception. And to top it off the game itself had crap graphics, embarrassingly bad AI, and glitched like crazy. At a VR meetup I talked to several people who had went, and not a single person had a good experience. I am amazed and baffled by all the good press they're getting. And for context I've tried the Rift DK2, the Gear VR IE, and the HTC Vive.

exodust 11y ago
There's good press and then there's good advertorials.
- csimpson 11y ago
  This ain't an advertorial, man. I even paid for my own flight down to Melbourne and back to Sydney to meet the guys from Zero Latency and try it out. They're literally five or six guys in a warehouse, they wouldn't have the kind of money that our ad sales team deals with daily :)
  - exodust 11y ago
    Fair enough. I can't get past their brand name. Low latency is one of the biggest challenges in VR, to get below 20ms, and a lot of discussion around latency dominates VR engineering. Reading your article annoyed me that they come along and declare "zero latency", which is the first thing I scanned the article for - as in, how the hell did they achieve that. Then to discover it's only their brand name and nothing to do with actual performance metrics, which I think could have deserved a mention in your article given the whole buzz and significance around latency in VR discussion. A poor choice of brand name because it deserves a footnote* whenever it's mentioned! No harm done. Not an advertorial. Got it.
Thaxll 11y ago

exodust 11y ago

Advertisement? Apparently it's okay to call low latency "Zero Latency", just use title case and fire at will. Zero Latency is mentioned only 35 times in the article. Tickets on sale now for 88 MPH.

sp332 11y ago
And it's "Powered by Alienware", which isn't even made of real aliens! Yes, of course you can call anything any name, unless it infringes trademark because someone else in your field thought of it first. Instead of being an ad for ZL, I think the repetition is more likely to increase Gizmodo's page rank for this article.
- mrob 11y ago
  "Alienware" isn't misleading, because nobody sane would think it was genuine alien technology. When I saw "Zero Latency" I was briefly very excited because I thought it actually meant "zero latency". Maybe they had tapped directly into the brain to get access to eye/muscle movement signals before normal sensors could, early enough to compensate for the unavoidable latency of rendering and simulation. This would be a real breakthrough in man-machine interfaces, and it could be fairly described as "zero latency" because it really could be zero as measured with respect to conventional sensors. But no, it's just typical marketing lies.
- uremog 11y ago
  So if I call my company Chicken Burger and serve people burgers made from beef and pork with no chicken meat, I'm good right?
csimpson 11y ago
It's a brand name. How was I supposed to write about the company without mentioning its name? About the repetition -- Wordpress tells me there's 3011 words of text and image code in the article, I think a 1% hit rate for the actual company name is pretty reasonable...
- 11y ago

ShakataGaNai 11y ago

Please please please have something like this come to San Francisco. It's like Qzar...but... better.

nsxwolf 11y ago
Qzar... I just have bad memories of everyone being an expert that would contort their bodies in strange ways to block all the sensors.

prawn 11y ago

Saw this tried on Good Game, a gaming show on Australian TV so looked it up. It looked a bit tame, but I wanted to submit the story and see if people thought there was potential/future in this approach to gaming, even if these guys aren't there yet. Also, if anyone else around the world is trying something similar?

z3t4 11y ago

In our city fiber network we have less then 1ms (ping) latency ...