My initial impression and thoughts on the Rift..

[MSat]

So far I've tried the Oculus and the Unity Tuscany demos. I REALLY need to upgrade my GPU which is currently an integrated ATI 3000 series (since I rarely play games). That said, without the warp shader, I get around 30-40fps, and with it on it drops to 10fps or less Also, it wont output DVI and VGA at the same time, so I had to remove the optics from the Rift to try to navigate the desktop. ANYWAY....

Initial thoughts:
FoV - better than expected (actually, WOW!). I can't really see the border of the optics except to the far left and right, using the A cups as close to my eyes as they'll go.

Resolution - better than expected. Yeah, screendoor. Yeah, you'll never get a super crisp image. But I imagine AA would help a LOT. For many types of games even the current resolution should be adequate. The text in the demos is easily readable, so it should work ok with non-persistent HUDs. Still, bring on the full-HD panel

Weight - it's actually a bit heavier than I expected, at least after everyone talking about how light it was. It's also not the most comfortable thing, but luckily I forgot all about it after several minutes.

Motion blur - there had been a lot of talk about this, so I was expecting severe smearing. Weird thing is, I didn't experience any at all, or at least not any more than I experience in real life. This is particularly surprising because I only get 10-40fps. Sure, it's not smooth, but no smearing or even doubling! Maybe it would be more apparent if there were moving objects to track? It's interesting how much this varies from person to person.

Queasiness - This should have automatically been an issue given my low frame rate, in conjunction with using the mouse to turn a lot, but I was alright for the most part. Oddly enough, I found that when I disabled pre-warp to increase my frame rate, the smoothness was more uncomfortable than the jerky motion @ 10fps (except for the jerky head tracking). This could have simply been because of how weird everything moves and looks without the pre-warp, but I think trying out a "pulsating" movement implementation might be something to look into. The lack of positional tracking didn't bother me either, but being able to lean would certainly be cool. I accidentally paused the game once, which felt really weird when I tried moving my head. Yeah, head tracking is important When I finally stopped after ~30 non-continuous minutes of total use, I did feel a little strange. Moving my head caused quite a bit of blurring that took some time to get over, which is weird because it didn't take any time to get used to the Rift.

So far it's awesome and exceeded my expectation in almost every way. Just want to give a shout out to the Oculus crew, and say "thanks" for shipping such a bad ass piece of gear

[boone188]

A forum nazi might tell you that there's already a thread for first impressions. I'm not that kinda guy though.

[geekmaster]

A forum nazi might tell you that there's already a thread for first impressions. I'm not that kinda guy though.

Godwin's law sure kicked in early on this thread!

[MSat]

Oh, hey! Look, there it is!

[Evenios]

i dont mind this post. some of the topics in the big forum thread gets off topic a bit. i wish you could just filter "only" the impressions and not so much the cross talk. thanks for sharing.

[MSat]

Meh. Since I already made this thread, I might as well continue.

I was able to eek out a bit more performance by disabling MSAA in the Oculus world demo. I then immediately noticed the blurring everyone has been talking about (which I don't notice with pre-warp off.. why is that?). Not only that, but directional movements - particularly strafing made me feel a bit queasy - something I didn't get when it was chugging at 10fps.

So, low framerate = less queasiness due to movement, no blurring/doubling, but total crap for immersion (not to mention making actual games unplayable)

That makes it seem that we're currently in some uncanny valley (er, uncanny rift?) in part due to the refresh rate. Now I'm wondering if overdriving the pixels and strobing the backlight actually is a viable option if it's used in conjunction with robust motion prediction and a relatively deterministic rendering pipeline.

[geekmaster]

... I then immediately noticed the blurring everyone has been talking about (which I don't notice with pre-warp off.. why is that?).

Because, as I have stated elsewhere, pre-warp is done too late in the rendering pipeline and is responsible for the blurring. There are threads at OculusVR where I have been pushing people to use in-game fisheye lens modelling (as proposed and demonstrated by Paul Bourke in 2004), instead of doing it later and causing blur. There is a real-time Rift ray-tracing project over there, that uses this method very effectively. No blur whatsoever in the final pre-warped images.

[Drewbdoo]

A forum nazi might tell you that there's already a thread for first impressions. I'm not that kinda guy though.

Godwin's law sure kicked in early on this thread!

That doesn't count because boone didn't call Msat a nazi or compare him to hiter.

Hey boone, stop being such a forum hitler.

See? Now this thread has hit Godwin's law

[MSat]

... I then immediately noticed the blurring everyone has been talking about (which I don't notice with pre-warp off.. why is that?).

Because, as I have stated elsewhere, pre-warp is done too late in the rendering pipeline and is responsible for the blurring. There are threads at OculusVR where I have been pushing people to use in-game fisheye lens modelling (as proposed and demonstrated by Paul Bourke in 2004), instead of doing it later and causing blur. There is a real-time Rift ray-tracing project over there, that uses this method very effectively. No blur whatsoever in the final pre-warped images.

Sorry GM, I've had a hard time keeping up on all the various threads as of late.

As you say, if warping is done too late, that would imply a substantial delay between rendering and the post-process warping. If that's the case, then people with really beefy rigs capable of running the some of the content well above 100fps (but still locked to vsync) would experience less blurring than a machine that just pulls off 60 fps. Right? I'm not sure if that's what's happening though. Can anyone else confirm? Either way, that still means movement prediction along with strobing the backlight to achieve 0 persistence should eliminate blurring, correct?

[geekmaster]

If that's the case, then people with really beefy rigs capable of running the some of the content well above 100fps (but still locked to vsync) would experience less blurring than a machine that just pulls off 60 fps. Right? I'm not sure if that's what's happening though. Can anyone else confirm? Either way, that still means movement prediction along with strobing the backlight to achieve 0 persistence should eliminate blurring, correct?

Are you talking motion blur? I thought this was about pre-warp blur. You can see stair-step aliasing on the inner curved black border of the warped images. That means additional blur distortion during radial correction AFTER downsampling (which should have anti-aliased those black border curves). But even better, people are beginning to model in-game fisheye lenses on the in-game cameras, just like Paul Bourke recommended back in 2004. Check out the real-time Rift ray-tracing thread at the OculusVR developers forum. No warp blur there, whatsoever!

Beefy rigs will just render those pre-warp blurred pixels much faster. Still blurred though...

But motion blur? There are reports that the Unity Tuscany demo may have motion blur that goes away when you turn off pre-warp, which pretty much confirms what I said above. Or it could be some other software problem. But it should be correctable. Do you see this blur in other demos, like the OculusWorldDemo Tuscan version?

[MSat]

I was strictly talking about motion blur, but I recant what I said earlier about not noticing it with pre-warp off, which I realized was still present. I haven't had a sufficient, or at least proper experience yet because my gpu is crap, so motion is choppy rather than blurry. Most of my testing has only been with the OWD rather than Unity because I can get it to run substantially better.

I should probably hold off from commenting further until I get a new gpu and try some of the other demos.