Quick thoughts from my first day before I forget:
Background info: I normally play games on my 50" plasma TV, sitting a few feet away. Normally 2D, but occasionally in 3D.
I predownloaded a ton of demos. The main things I wanted to try were the Unity Tuscany demo, and Half Life 2.
I'm near sighted (about -2.5 prescription in both eyes; wear glasses).
I'm occasionally prone to motion sickness, so I was ready with ginger root pills, and Dramamine.
0. Unboxing: Everything was packaged well, and super simple to set up. No dead pixels as far as I can tell. Kept the A eyecups on initially - it was actually a little tricky to put the headset on - my head is pretty big, and my glasses kept bumping into the foam on the sides of the unit. Set up desktop mirroring, with Rift + monitor / TV at 1920x1080.
1. Ran the OculusConfigUtil that comes packaged with the latest SDK downloads. Calculated my IPD as 68mm (I think it's 69mm so that's close), but I pretty quickly decided I would want to play without glasses, and tried to find the best eyecups for me.
Without glasses, A cups: Pretty blurry
Without glasses, B cups: Slightly blurry, but I can read most text. Screen door effect is somewhat minimized from the blur. This is what I ended up using for the rest of the day.
Without glasses, C cups: Clearest, but the screen door effect is super visible. I decided the slight blur of the B cups was preferable to these due to the screen door effect.
2. Unity Tuscany Demo: Definitely a good starting point. My IPD was automatically picked up from the config util. Good 3D effects, good atmosphere. A lot of the UI touches added in the latest revision were cool. Especially the sunflowers - walking up to them I got a very strong sense of depth, and it was fun to peer around from one side of the flower to the other.
3. VR Cinema 3D: Really feels like you're in a movie theater. The movie I was using for testing was a 3D SBS copy of Avatar. The sense of depth I got from the film was actually less than I was expecting.
4. VR Player: Again, testing with Avatar 3D. I feel like the sense of depth I got was better in VR Player (vs VR Cinema 3D). Have to reset the Oculus tracking a fair amount, so I got used to hitting F1 every 10 seconds or so while watching the movie.
5. Blue Marble: Another great starting experience for the Rift. No complicated controls to worry about, just peacefully drifting through space to music, with the ability to look around.
6. Sixense Tuscany demo: A bit underwhelming. Getting the Hydra calibrated to arm positions I expected from in the Rift was very challenging, so bouncing the basketball / etc didn't really work out well for me. I'll probably revisit this one when I can experiment with it a little more.
7. Rift Coaster: First applied the settings here:
https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/v ... 255#p29172 . But I went with 1920x1080 for the res.
Lots of fun. My stomach did start to feel a little strange after doing this twice, so I took a break at this point.
8. Titans of Space: Another good starting demo. Very impressive sense of scale. Tried out the positional (Hydra) tracking in it; didn't feel like it changed a whole lot.
9. Team Fortress 2: Had no intention of playing this multiplayer, but I wanted to do calibration and get everything set up for HL2.
Added the -vr flag to launch options, and started offline practice mode (no coaching). The picture / 3D/ depth was already good without any setup, but I went through calibration anyway (vr_calibration in the dev console. NOTE: You should do calibration with desktop res = TF2 res = 1280x800, or the IPD measurements will be incorrect).
Enjoyed running around briefly. Tried some of the different moveaim modes, but stuck with vr_moveaim_mode=3 which is the default (aim with mouse, turn and look with the Rift).
10. Half-Life 2: Spent a while getting this setup, but the game experience is very very good. The sequence when you're escaping to the rooftop at the beginning (before you meet Alyx) was super impressive. While walking on the wooden planks, I looked down and almost felt vertigo. Fell off the boards once, all the way down to the ground, which was a very strange sensation. Just barely got to the part of the game where you get your crowbar, but I feel like I could easily replay the entire game of HL2 like this.
Started the game sitting down, but discovered that immersion shot up quickly when you stand up to play.
HL2 Setup:
- Opened 'config.cfg' in [steamdir]\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\cfg. Copied all the vr_ lines into another file.
- Created 'autoexec.cfg' in [steamdir]\steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2\cfg, pasted in all the vr_ lines from the TF2 cfg. Most important is vr_separation_user_inches. Also, add 'vr_separation_toein_pixels 0'.
- If you want to use the Hydra, set up a profile in Motion Creator 2. I've uploaded mine if anyone wants to try it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/903 ... 20Rift.mce
Left joystick is move, right joystick left-right will turn you. The right controller is set up with Mouselook, so just aim with it to aim your gun in the game.
- Add -vr to HL2 launch options, and start the game.
Still need to try: Museum of the Microstar, Iceland, Heli-Hell, First Law, Parrot Coaster, Hydra Deck, Alone in the Rift, Anteworld / Outerra, Ocean Rift, Delta Draconis, ORPlayer, and plenty of other things I'm sure
Overall I had a lot of fun experimenting with all the different apps and trying things out.
No lasting effects of motion sickness, after testing from 3:30p-1a with breaks - did take 3 ginger pills throughout the day, and 1 Dramamine Less-Drowsy (just in case).
