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I never got to use Crescent Bay, but I've got a DK2 at home. Resolution for me will be a non-issue once I can read smallish text on virtual signs/displays. I'

I never got to use Crescent Bay, but I've got a DK2 at home. Resolution for me will be a non-issue once I can read smallish text on virtual signs/displays. I'm thinking mostly for games like Elite Dangerous and other simulators like that, where a cockpit display is part of the game. Do you think the crescent bay prototype is at that point? (this might be a naive question as it's been awhile since I've looked up anything on the newest prototypes) Otherwise I'm with you. Positional tracking was the thing that really made it awesome for me. There are so many tiny head movements that you make when you're looking around; if positional tracking isn't pretty much 100%, then it just feels wrong.

dangerlibrary 11y ago
Elite Dangerous could do a bit to make their text easier to read even on the DK2 - I think they expect players to rely on other visual signals and so they shrink their text too much. That said, I think Crescent Bay would help to solve the problem.
- doikor 11y ago
  Changing the colours (have to manually edit some config files) in elite dangerous made the text easier to read. green text on black background is a lot easier to read then red on black (black being the space in the background for the most part)
  - Tepix 11y ago
    Yes, it's due to the pentile subpixel layout. It has twice as many green subpixels as red and blue.
    - DiThi 11y ago
      It's more related to the chromatic aberration, where the correction is not perfect (esp when not correctly configured) and using only one color avoid the issue. Of course the best choice is green, in resolution and brightness.
soylentcola 11y ago
I agree about the smaller text but at the same time, it's been more of an issue for me when the content wasn't created primarily with DK2-class hardware as the target. Elite is great and I feel like Frontier owes Oculus money because myself and just about everyone I know who got a DK2 also ended up buying Elite but it's still primarily designed for a monitor. If you're targeting a game or other application for VR (and assuming generally similar hardware to DK2 or whatever), there are a lot of design decisions you can make to improve the experience. Something as simple as using larger text goes a long way. Color choices help, as does less focus on lists and menus in favor of gaze-based control. Then there's the general stuff like "not trying to shoehorn that awesome first-person-shooter style that was so great on 2D screens into VR". Yeah, it's neat to look around in a FPS-style game but whereas seated or less frenetic experiences are gorgeous and immersive, asking someone to run around in first person while actually sitting in a chair is nauseating. I've seen all the omni-treadmills and other workarounds and I appreciate the way people are trying to engineer solutions but I feel like it misses the point. Some things just work well in VR while other things require a lot of tradeoffs or addons.
- doorhammer 11y ago
  I think Minecraft is a good accidental example of what you're talking about, especially on the DK2. It's natural pixel style makes you not notice the resolution at all, and all of the text is large, and easy to read. The cube nature also really makes me aware of the 3D, which is nice. It doesn't do anything to deal with the FPS/nausea problem, though I don't react very poorly to playing an FPS in the rift as long as it uses a keyhole style control with the mouse (half-life 2 is a prime example of that). One other thing I like about minecraft on the rift is that it really shows off the true blacks you can get with the OLED display. It smears a bit, but it's still really rad to look into a mine shaft and have it fade to actual darkness (not sure if the consumer version is planning for OLED off hand). I definitely agree that it'll be cool when game shops start really thinking about building their games for VR, and that they can work around VR weaknesses. Weird scaling is another issue, when something was scaled to look right from 2D on a screen, but drops the ball in VR. I played Skyrim using Vireo and the mountains ended up looking like glorified hills, heh. Another funny issue I had was playing Alien Isolation. VR made it super obvious that looking out through a spaceship window into "space" was actually looking at a black wall about twenty ft away. Looking forward to wherever VR goes, either way.

dangerlibrary 11y ago

Elite Dangerous could do a bit to make their text easier to read even on the DK2 - I think they expect players to rely on other visual signals and so they shrink their text too much. That said, I think Crescent Bay would help to solve the problem.

doikor 11y ago
Changing the colours (have to manually edit some config files) in elite dangerous made the text easier to read. green text on black background is a lot easier to read then red on black (black being the space in the background for the most part)
- Tepix 11y ago
  Yes, it's due to the pentile subpixel layout. It has twice as many green subpixels as red and blue.
  - DiThi 11y ago
    It's more related to the chromatic aberration, where the correction is not perfect (esp when not correctly configured) and using only one color avoid the issue. Of course the best choice is green, in resolution and brightness.

soylentcola 11y ago

I agree about the smaller text but at the same time, it's been more of an issue for me when the content wasn't created primarily with DK2-class hardware as the target. Elite is great and I feel like Frontier owes Oculus money because myself and just about everyone I know who got a DK2 also ended up buying Elite but it's still primarily designed for a monitor. If you're targeting a game or other application for VR (and assuming generally similar hardware to DK2 or whatever), there are a lot of design decisions you can make to improve the experience. Something as simple as using larger text goes a long way. Color choices help, as does less focus on lists and menus in favor of gaze-based control. Then there's the general stuff like "not trying to shoehorn that awesome first-person-shooter style that was so great on 2D screens into VR". Yeah, it's neat to look around in a FPS-style game but whereas seated or less frenetic experiences are gorgeous and immersive, asking someone to run around in first person while actually sitting in a chair is nauseating. I've seen all the omni-treadmills and other workarounds and I appreciate the way people are trying to engineer solutions but I feel like it misses the point. Some things just work well in VR while other things require a lot of tradeoffs or addons.

doorhammer 11y ago
I think Minecraft is a good accidental example of what you're talking about, especially on the DK2. It's natural pixel style makes you not notice the resolution at all, and all of the text is large, and easy to read. The cube nature also really makes me aware of the 3D, which is nice. It doesn't do anything to deal with the FPS/nausea problem, though I don't react very poorly to playing an FPS in the rift as long as it uses a keyhole style control with the mouse (half-life 2 is a prime example of that). One other thing I like about minecraft on the rift is that it really shows off the true blacks you can get with the OLED display. It smears a bit, but it's still really rad to look into a mine shaft and have it fade to actual darkness (not sure if the consumer version is planning for OLED off hand). I definitely agree that it'll be cool when game shops start really thinking about building their games for VR, and that they can work around VR weaknesses. Weird scaling is another issue, when something was scaled to look right from 2D on a screen, but drops the ball in VR. I played Skyrim using Vireo and the mountains ended up looking like glorified hills, heh. Another funny issue I had was playing Alien Isolation. VR made it super obvious that looking out through a spaceship window into "space" was actually looking at a black wall about twenty ft away. Looking forward to wherever VR goes, either way.