Game idea for Oculus Rift - SparkCast

[rmcclelland]

Found this video, first description of a game I have seen from an developer.
http://vimeo.com/48195913
I like the idea of riding a mount (ie horse). Besides cars, horses, and planes, can anyone think of other ways to naturally simulate motion interfaces? Actually walking seems a ways away.

[cybereality]

Pretty cool. I wanted to do something like this with the Hydra (I still plan on doing it) but I got distracted with my 3D driver. Will probably get back on this at some point.

[bobv5]

Posted this in some other thread.

An idea I had is for a boat game, one of thoese little one seat kayak things. PLayer is sat down, so tracking is easier. No gagues or instruments to read, so low resolution HMD will work well. Could use a motion tracked controller for the paddle, something like the gametrak, with water resistance simulated by a brake that makes the cable harder to pull out, add a tactile transducer to represent water motion.

Even without motion simulation, if used with something like rift with big fov I think it will give some sense of motion, add gvs and it is going to be one of the most realistic simulations possible with relativly cheap hardware. Maybe a bit too specialised for home use, but could easily be done at the same cost as one of the big car game arcade cabs.

For home use, a cusion on the floor, and a hydra or wiimote on a stick will probably be almost as good.

[wuliheron]

These kinds of basic cinematography ideas are what I think is so exciting about the immediate future of the technology. Developers have to completely rethink the whole experience of gaming in the most minute of details including what will be the most easily exploited visual aspects of a wide field of vision and motion control. His video even hints at this with the prospect of more directly controlling a character's ability to pick things up or do something as simple as push a button. What I would personally love to see is something as simple as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron re-imagined for the Oculus Rift. Such a simple fly on the wall third person perspective might sound easy compared to more first person viewpoints, but the devil is always in the details.

Start out with simple basic perspectives like first person shooters and riding a mount or third person flying games and you create a foundation which others can then build on. I can easily imagine the next Half Life 3, for example, putting all these basics together into a unified whole that draws the audience in hook, line, and sinker without a lot of gpu demanding raw number crunching ability. See Gordon pick something up with his fingers, watch Gordon drive and go airborne, watch Gordon pilot a speedboat, fly an airplane, and throw things around with the gravity gun. All of these are simple enough to simulate in an engaging way on a flat screen, but the details required to make them more engaging for fully immersive VR have yet to be explored.

[rmcclelland]

The kayaking idea is interesting, and really opens up a whole genre of games that might be compelling, sports games. Cycling, horseback riding, sailing, baseball, etc are all potential experiences.

My father recent caught a huge white marlin (a sport fish). However, a unique experience like that can cost thousands of dollars. You could replicate it pretty well in VR.

I think the next five years are going to be VERY interesting.

[sparkcast]

Thanks for the link to my video! I was wondering why I was getting views then found this thread on Google.

Bob what's crazy is that I've also considered a kayak game! I think it could be really fun. There was a first-person one on Real networks game download service many years ago and it was awesome. I searched but couldn't find the name.

I only made that video to enter the "gift a rift" contest. I'll post a link to a better demo video when I finish my next milestone build

[android78]

Hi Lance, I was wondering how your tracking of the hydra is being done? Are you mounting the base of the hydra at a fixed point, on the body or on the head? I've tried to explain in another thread that the only way I see hand tracking working well is if the reference point (hydra base) is the head, since this will negate any issues of gyroscope/accelerometer drift causing your hands to be out of sync with your view.
What are your thoughts on this?

P.S. Good to see you on the boards.

[sparkcast]

Hi android. Thanks for the warm welcome

I'm not doing anything special with the Hydra. The base is just sitting on my desk. I have a calibration mode in my demo where I ask the player to hold the controls in a specific pose in order to determine the base's offset from the player's real-life "root bone". This in-effect places the hydra controllers in player/avatar space. (FYI - I also have a scale transformation happening to mesh hydra units with game-world units. This is a constant and not set in calibration mode.)

As far as mounting the base to the head I don't see a need for it in my use-case, which is a fixed seated player. I noticed the Holodeck team has a helmet with the base mounted to the head so this is obviously possible. In their case they want the player to move around so the base unit needs to be mounted somewhere but it seems to me it would complicate the conversion of hydra-space to avatar-space by throwing the head's rotation in the mix.

The hydra doesn't use accelerometers so isn't suspect to accelerometer position-tracking drift. It uses magnetic field detection to determine position and orientation. This might sound like an advert but... It is in my opinion the best motion-controller on the market. It has its faults (being wired is one of them), but the pros far out-weigh the cons. I mention in my video I worked with a similar device in the past. That was less than two years ago and that device cost around $5k. It was just a base and bare sensors. I'm sure it was superior in many ways but the Hydra is super affordable, plenty precise, and has low-latency.

[FingerFlinger]

Lance, in your demo you are using TrackIR, so head translation is accounted for in the system, but we don't know yet whether the Rift's stock tracker will have this capability. Even sitting at a desk, the player's head will still translate a small amount, and I think this is android's concern. Without having played with any of this tech yet, I am inclined to agree with him. I don't really have any good suggestions either, since you can't really expect all of your players to head-mount their Hydras.

[sparkcast]

Yeah. It sounds like the current Rift dev kit will use the Hillcrest Labs FSRK-USB-2. I haven't worked with it but it sounds like it will have translation drift. I don't think it would effect my game too bad to only have rotation. BUT I am planning that if a player has a TrackIR or FreeTrack setup the game will be able to use that in addition to the Oculus Rift. In that case I will probably use the Rift's orientation data and the optical tracker's position data.

[android78]

I think that any drift in the head tracking will be a problem when using fixed position hand tracking, since this will accumulate over time and need a reset. That's why I think the the reference point for the hand tracking must be the head. I haven't got a razer hydra myself (yet... it's on its way), but I would like to see how small and light a stripped down base unit could be, and if it's feasible to mount it in/on the HMD itself. I think this would be more practical then needing a third form of tracking (trackir, PS move, etc) to give absolute HMD position.

[eshan]

Unfortunately, if you mount the Hydra base to the HMD, it can't give you absolute head position anymore. It can only measure the relative difference in position and orientation between its base and the two wands. If the base is in a fixed position and orientation (which it normally is), only then can it tell you the absolute position and orientation of the wands.

[android78]

@eshan - you're right, but I question which is the most important for an immersive experience. Unless you're going to have full position tracking, i would argue that the head to hand relationship is more important. This could be different for something where you don't have body control like a flight simulator, but in terms of the relationships being less disorienting, the head to hands is the important one to track accurately over long periods of time. The center of the view (relative to your world or vehicle) can somewhat be averaged over time, but the hand position would be a lot harder to do this with.