Meant to be Seen

Starting to see threads with titles like this:

If you have a kit. TRY THIS! Also works on monitor!

Got a rift? Check out the-museum-of-the-microstar


It is only week one of RiftMania and so now it is just a trickle, but pretty soon there will be a flood of great VR experiences out there, from little tech-demos, to older games that work fantastically with 3rd party drivers (such as Vireo), 360 videos, virtual tours of historical sites, small indie games, and apps like music visualizers.

People will want to share these great experiences with other 'Rifters', but pretty soon (and perhaps already) it will not be practical to have a thread for each cool thing we find.

For this reason I propose a Rift Recommendations Thread where you can post a link and a little info about what you have found and why it is so good.

Its a great kind of thread to check after you come home from work every day, I have enjoyed 'Youtube recommendations' type threads before and they can be a great thing to keep coming back to and nice source of discussion and shared enjoyment.

For example (although I do not have my rift yet!):

MUSEUM OF THE MICROSTAR

Museum of the Microstar (from Rust) seems to be getting some really positive feedback - one thing which I have seen more than once is that it is a better general Rift demo than 'Tuscany'!

To quote the immortal Geekmaster:

geekmaster wrote:Totally awesome. MUCH more expansive environment than the Tuscany demo! And futuristic too!

...

A better demo for the Rift, to show off what it can do.

...

I like this "demo"!

and the just as immortal rmcclelland:

rmcclelland wrote:Yeah, its a fun little demo. Much more to it then the Oculus Unity demo.

...

Try walking out on one of the beams supporting the museum platforms. I couldn't bring myself to jump off!

And the download link is Museum of the Microstar

Post away

A thread for each cool thing is great! But it should be in the rift software section, not the general Rift forum.


http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=143

I did consider putting it there but felt that the subforum was more for threads started by creators; If I was developing a calendar app, for example, I would post the thread in there and give regular updates.

I made this thread because I wanted somewhere to consolidate in one place all recommendations for cool Rift experiences of any kind, even non-games such as 360-videos and old Unreal3 maps that happen to look great in VR. Especially I think it's important to have somewhere to post things found elsewhere, say on Reddit, rather than projects by MTBS people.

If a mod thinks the other forum is the best place though, please feel free to move the thread!

Fair enough. I actually meant the demo content was misplaced, not your post.

bobv5 wrote:Fair enough. I actually meant the demo content was misplaced, not your post.

Forgive my potential density here, doesn't his post and idea suggestion primarily consist of the demo content in link/description form? I'm sure you're not saying that content listed in this thread would be misplaced in that demo titles could be listed here but content in the form of their associated links or descriptions for each them should NOT be... correct?

I don't have a Rift yet, but want to check this demo out. How can I get it to run in a 2D mode?

I very much appreciate your intentions here, Diorama, and I agree that this is a minor annoyance on the verge of becoming a huge problem, but I'm not sure herding all such discussions into a single thread is the solution. I've been here long enough to see how topics can diverge wildly from their original focus, often for pages at a time; the quality of discourse around here being fairly high, this is often a good thing, but it only works inside the confines of a thread that hasn't completely lost its focus. Palmertech's original Rift thread is a prime example of what happens when that focus is lost - there's a ton of great info in there, but good luck extracting any of it. One monolithic thread about any and all VR demos would be impossible to follow - people would be attempting to discuss a demo posted three days ago while ten other people had come along to post ten other links that spun off into ten other discussions, and once the whole thing stretched past maybe five pages all the various conversations would become practically untraceable.

The fundamental issue here is that traditional forum software such as PHPBB just isn't ideal for certain modes of discussion among certain crowds. Dedicating a separate thread to each individual demo would be the perfect approach if MTBS3D were a self-contained website just for showcasing VR demos, but because so many subgroups of members only want to view content catering to their individual tastes, it's easy for them to get annoyed when the channels they historically relied on get clogged up with stuff they don't care about. Further subdivisions or subforums might be one approach to manage this growing problem, but nothing short of shattering MTBS into multiple websites will ever solve it to some people's satisfaction.

Increased use of the MTBS wiki is one thing that could help in all this; a listing of all the known VR demos would fit quite comfortably there, but while that would be a valuable resource we'd eventually come back around to the problem of where to chat about all of it. Rethinking the very nature of forum software might not be a terrible thing in this case - if we're suddenly living in a world with too much information relevant to the overarching theme of this website, and users are bothered by their niche interests getting crowded out, how have other Internet communities dealt with such things? Is urging everyone to subscribe to certain subforums of interest enough to quell rebellion, or will we need to urge administrators to explore more drastic measures in the form of PHPBB mods, or more besides? I don't have any clear answers, but it probably merits further discussion - perhaps we should make a thread about it?

Okay, okay, just so I can pretend I'm not completely off-topic here:

Unassisted Flight Oculus Rift Prototype - Unity flight experience by mitDebo, currently pondering how to proceed with no plans for commercialization and no Unity Pro license.

Rift Rush - head-tracking game that met its $1000 Kickstarter goal in eight short hours; it won't be a demo for long!

Diorama wrote:Museum of the Microstar (from Rust) seems to be getting some really positive feedback - one thing which I have seen more than once is that it is a better general Rift demo than 'Tuscany'!

It's very cool, but don't even think about running it if you don't have a beefy rig. Uuugh, my laptop was running with about a 1 second tracking lag and I felt like I was going to barf all over the place after about a minute of that.

i dont understand why anyone would get a rift dev kit

without running a 680 at least.....if your gonna blow money like that ...make sure its well rounded

I'm running a gtx 560, and this demo run pretty slow at 1920x1080 but is playable at 1280x800. It's not a consistent 60fps though, but close. I don't have my Rift yet to try it out, but seems like it would be an ok experience running the way it is

The Museum demo was awesome. This may be a good thing to queue up first, or to demo for friends.

I just ran demo for a short time it is cool. I am running a i5 3470 and 5850 amd @ 1280x800 worked good did not have fps counter on. I will defiantly be upgrading my gfx card just to get more fps for the Rift and whatever else Oculus makes.

I saw this mentioned in a different thread on this demo, so I figured I would repeat it here.

TIP you need to launch it in windowed mode to click start button in demo and then you can press alt + enter return to fullscreen.

Does anyone know how to activate fly mode in this demo?

I kept jumping off the edge, it funny lines they say each time it varies, at one point it let me through and I fell like 40 or 50 feet was crazy. One line the guy said if you want to fly try our fly mode, but it is not mentioned in the pdf. I didn't see much info on their site.

drgroove101 wrote:I'm running a gtx 560, and this demo run pretty slow at 1920x1080 but is playable at 1280x800. It's not a consistent 60fps though, but close. I don't have my Rift yet to try it out, but seems like it would be an ok experience running the way it is

Interesting. I have a GTX 560Ti, so it's good seeing some hard figures from people with a similar card. How did you obtain the fps figures? Thanks

I had trouble starting MUSEUM OF THE MICROSTAR in fullscreen mode (windowed unchecked as per the 'readme'), the mouse wouldn't click the buttons, but when I started in windowed mode and used alt-enter to switch to fullscreen the mouse would work.

It was a little bit laggy for me, I have an HD 5870 and an i7 930, and at first I was fine with it but then I started to feel dizzy or my eyes were straining or something, or maybe I was messing around to much, but I also instinctively leaned forward to try to look closer at an exhibit and that definitely made me dizzy

I too have a GTX 560 ti (with a 3.2ghz i5). But I don't have a Rift. It runs at a smooth frame rate for me, but man is there lag! I'm just using a LCD monitor, and I've never seen latency that bad. It's very noticeable from when I move my mouse or press movement keys, to when I see something happen on screen. This has to be the ultimate pukeanator ride for any Rift user.

Other than that, it was interesting. First time I've ever tried playing a game cross-eyed since honing the ability to do so with stereo images. After a couple minutes it was the most clear I've ever viewed anything like that. Checking out the star with the 3d effect from it was cool. I can only imagine it in the Rift!

Time to go rest my eyes...

I expect a lot of people are going to have trouble viewing this demo. It's really nicely done, but it highlights how developers need to be very conscious of latency and scaling their content. Developers should start to plan more "economically" to give themselves some headroom, because the Rift market is small enough as it is. So if you cut that already small market in half by producing nausea inducing content you really are going to make your margins thin.

brantlew wrote:I expect a lot of people are going to have trouble viewing this demo. It's really nicely done, but it highlights how developers need to be very conscious of latency and scaling their content. Developers should start to plan more "economically" to give themselves some headroom, because the Rift market is small enough as it is. So if you cut that already small market in half by producing nausea inducing content you really are going to make your margins thin.

It seems to me a good rig gets you a ticket to the show. When the original Doom came out and people saw how cool it was, it was immediately a game changer. Word of mouth spread and people were talking about how cool this game was. Not a lot of people could get it running on their computer though, and if they did it ran pretty slow. It didn't stop people from wanting to play the game though, people would spend hours trying to edit their config.sys file to get that extra few KB's of memory to get the game to launch, install it on faster school computers, or go to their friends house who had a better computer or do whatever just to play that game. I think we will know we have the Killer VR App when the same can be said of it as Doom. It doesn't matter what the specs you need to run the game are or what controller you need to use. If the game is simply fun, amazing, and a WOW experience you can't get anywhere else, people will do what they need to do to play it, and that will sell a lot of Rifts, or Hydra's or graphic's cards or whatever.

Obviously I don't think Museum of the Microstar is this Killer App, but i'll be ecstatic to see a game that doesn't sacrifice it's creative vision so it can run on a laptop or tablet computer.

@brantlew: I totally understand where you're coming from with this. Museum of the Microstar was our group's entry in the Unity DX11 competition back in December. It is designed to be utterly hardware-crushing, and due to being designed and built in only 4 weeks, it was not built around quality-setting scalability in any way, hence why there is only one quality setting. With my rift just having arrived, it was a good canditate for conversion over, as that only took about 3 days of solid work. If there was an easy way to peel things back in terms of perf, I would do so, but this demo is likely to remain where it is in terms of demand.

GOOD NEWS THOUGH - I'm currently making another demo, smaller in scope, but designed to be a Rift testing platform for myself. I'll be gearing it more towards the mid-range DX11 GPUs from a perf standpoint, and there'll be quality settings in there so (hopefully) people will be able to get some better framerates.

I'm sorry the demo wasn't able to run well on your equipment. I'm painfully aware that doing certain things with tech spectacle cuts away part of the audience. If you don't mind, I'd love to get a PM from you with your laptop's full specs. I'm trying to draw up a good hardware-spec range for the involved community on this forum.

I am sorry but can we keep this thread clean off any discussions ABOUT the demos please ?
In many threads in this forum there's always too many chit chat and off-topic posts IMO.

I would like to check this thread and watch for new demos and don't want to read through several pages to find it.
It was the same in "First impressions From Rift Owners". I would like to read those impressions and not anything else in these special threads!

Thank you.

OutatimeTV wrote:I would like to check this thread and watch for new demos and don't want to read through several pages to find it.

Thats the problem. The only way this works is if the autor of the OP updates it continuously with new demos.
In time it would be more practical to have a new Demos subforum.

An i5 760 @ 3.66Ghz and a 27% OC 1GB 460 can't even begin to run it smoothly. I'm not versed enough in the Rift yet to eye ball frame rates, but it's way below 60 and I suspect below 30 in some locations. It's still a cool demo though.

brantlew wrote:I expect a lot of people are going to have trouble viewing this demo. It's really nicely done, but it highlights how developers need to be very conscious of latency and scaling their content. Developers should start to plan more "economically" to give themselves some headroom, because the Rift market is small enough as it is. So if you cut that already small market in half by producing nausea inducing content you really are going to make your margins thin.

This might be a problem, I'm a big gamer and I have 300+ games, one thing I've noticed is that indie titles are nearly always much more demanding than AAA games, for example Bioshock Infinite runs much better than Sang Froid and looks about 100x better. Arma excepted, the only titles that really push my rig are all indie games. I'm guessing its lack of optimisation due to tight development budgets, or maybe the small indie studios just don't have the skills, whatever it is though it could be a problem if a lot of the original content for the rift is going to be Indie in the first few years.

J. h4t3d wrote:

OutatimeTV wrote:I would like to check this thread and watch for new demos and don't want to read through several pages to find it.

Thats the problem. The only way this works is if the autor of the OP updates it continuously with new demos.
In time it would be more practical to have a new Demos subforum.

I can update the OP every couple of days, but only if people post demos in the thread

Don't have my Rift yet so can't really add much in the way of recommendations myself!

Microstar runs great for me in windowed or full screen at both 1920x1080 and 1200x800.

Rig is i5@ 3.6GHz, gtx 660ti

It's strange because its more of a tracker latency than a pure frame-rate. It's hard to explain...I could turn my head and see all the animations running fine and the head turn would be smooth except that it would occur about a second delayed. Like an input queue was backing up and then bursting.

brantlew wrote:It's strange because its more of a tracker latency than a pure frame-rate. It's hard to explain...I could turn my head and see all the animations running fine and the head turn would be smooth except that it would occur about a second delayed. Like an input queue was backing up and then bursting.

Yes, I got that too. There was definitely some framerate choppiness at certain points, but the most noticeable thing to me was that the motion seemed to lag a bit.

Also, I found that MotM has some drift - I started out looking straight ahead and matching the torso direction but by the time I got through the museum my head had to be pointing 90 degrees to my left to be "straight ahead" in the game.

Wow, Unreal Citadel in the Rift is probably the coolest demo yet. It comes with the UDK.

nateight wrote:I very much appreciate your intentions here, Diorama, and I agree that this is a minor annoyance on the verge of becoming a huge problem, but I'm not sure herding all such discussions into a single thread is the solution. I've been here long enough to see how topics can diverge wildly from their original focus, often for pages at a time; the quality of discourse around here being fairly high, this is often a good thing, but it only works inside the confines of a thread that hasn't completely lost its focus. Palmertech's original Rift thread is a prime example of what happens when that focus is lost - there's a ton of great info in there, but good luck extracting any of it. One monolithic thread about any and all VR demos would be impossible to follow - people would be attempting to discuss a demo posted three days ago while ten other people had come along to post ten other links that spun off into ten other discussions, and once the whole thing stretched past maybe five pages all the various conversations would become practically untraceable.

The fundamental issue here is that traditional forum software such as PHPBB just isn't ideal for certain modes of discussion among certain crowds. Dedicating a separate thread to each individual demo would be the perfect approach if MTBS3D were a self-contained website just for showcasing VR demos, but because so many subgroups of members only want to view content catering to their individual tastes, it's easy for them to get annoyed when the channels they historically relied on get clogged up with stuff they don't care about. Further subdivisions or subforums might be one approach to manage this growing problem, but nothing short of shattering MTBS into multiple websites will ever solve it to some people's satisfaction.

Increased use of
Unassisted Flight Oculus Rift Prototype - Unity flight experience by mitDebo, currently pondering how to proceed with no plans for commercialization and no Unity Pro license.

Rift Rush - head-tracking game that met its $1000 Kickstarter goal in eight short hours; it won't be a demo for long!

FINALLY someone is talking some sense...I get quite disturbed when someone says.. "that already has been answered in a previous thread with 143 pages you just need to spend X amount of time to look for it..."....im like!! WTF I will not spend 23 hours reading through 8 threads and HOPE I find the answer....or try to million results that the search shows up...Until there are multiple sections I think people should just deal with the fact that there will be duplicate threads!

J. h4t3d wrote:

OutatimeTV wrote:I would like to check this thread and watch for new demos and don't want to read through several pages to find it.

Thats the problem. The only way this works is if the autor of the OP updates it continuously with new demos.
In time it would be more practical to have a new Demos subforum.

Agree need a demos subforum. This thread is mostly about MUSEUM OF THE MICROSTAR demo. This should be renamed the MUSEUM OF THE MICROSTAR and on the demos sub forum jk.

Here is my comment on the MUSEUM OF THE MICROSTAR demo.

You guys probably already figured this out.

TIP You can fall or jump like 80 feet from the elevator by exhibit 7, and it will not teleport you so it is a free fall.

Another fun thing I think is taking that same elevator up and jumping on to one of two iron beam on the way back up.

Can't wait to play a skydiving VR game.

If you are having latency problems but still running at 60fps, try going into the Nvidia control panel and telling it to force pre-rendered frames to 1.

Did that, and it runs fine on my i7/680 rig.

@pizzy00 - Regarding the flythrough mode mentioned in the near-death joke text, the original build of Microstar also contained a narrated flythrough mode talking about the tech we used in the demo. We didn't convert it over to the rift, as my early tests found that the jump-cuts and fov changes were suuuuper jarring/headache inducing.

You can see a high-quality video of it here though: https://vimeo.com/57648939

Again, thanks for all the great response/support everyone. This has been a wonderful way to jump into this community!

xenius wrote:@pizzy00 - Regarding the flythrough mode mentioned in the near-death joke text, the original build of Microstar also contained a narrated flythrough mode talking about the tech we used in the demo. We didn't convert it over to the rift, as my early tests found that the jump-cuts and fov changes were suuuuper jarring/headache inducing.

You can see a high-quality video of it here though: https://vimeo.com/57648939

Again, thanks for all the great response/support everyone. This has been a wonderful way to jump into this community!

I completely understand. I remember reading that in the pdf. Scripted cutscenes edited scene to scene in VR would not make any sense. People have said this before. Why would you float a person from place to place taking control from them.

I would love to fly though, being controlled by me though.

Did you guys test a fly mode user controlled?

I forgot to mention this.

It is a little weird but VR is kinda weird right now so it should be ok. I spent some time if your GREAT demo yesterday. I was standing up I prefer to stand up while playing with the Rift, unless testing stuff easier to stay seated. Anyway as I was making my trek to the elevator to jump off some more I started bobbing my head slightly up and down, and at the same time tapping the back heel of my right foot. It really felt even more like I was walking in your demo, it helped trick my brain more, increasing immersion. I recommend trying it out. So slightly bob your head and tap your right heel or heels. I guess you could just try walking in place but I haven't really tried that yet.

Damn I love being transported.

Any chance on your guys adding different Graphics Quality settings in the future? So we can adjust them to see if some of your awesome exhibits will run smoother on not so current rigs?

I don't think the issue is tracker latency. It appears there is an aggressive filter on the camera movement, like a smoothing effect. At least that is what it seems like to me.

I concur with cyerreality, without using the rift, and using a mouse to look around, there was a great deal in latency leading me to believe that theres a massive smoothing filter on the camera motion

Palmers suggestion seemed to help at first. After changing that setting and loading the demo up, it was less laggy with the latency. But there was still some that was barely noticeable. Then I went out the door into the cavern area, and its back to just as it was before. So yea, it's probably as you say cyber. At least it doesn't seem to be what I thought, input latency from tracker, mouse, or keys.

+1 @cyberreality

OGRE Oculus demo (WIP):
http://www.mediafire.com/?ayr5h2316mhb64t

From this thread:
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 70#p486431

Here is a very basic space themed Unity demo to try with the Rift:

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=17026