I highly doubt I'm going to say anything new with this, but here goes. I enjoy writing, so this will be looong; if you aren't starving for some fairly detailed scrutiny of the Rift, for once I won't be even slightly offended if you jump down to the TL;DR.
For reference, I'm 33, 6'4", ~165 lbs., no history of motion sickness (though I can't say I've ever even been
on a boat), I've been a faster-the-better FPS player since such things existed, ~64mm IPD (self measurement said 65, TF2 app said 63; I may have to take another crack at it), and I'm nearsighted with a prescription of -3.0 diopters in both eyes (which makes me unable to read normal text at farther than a foot or so uncorrected, but my optometrist tells me I have nigh-superhuman "potential vision", and with the right lenses I really can see better than most eagles). Not counting the
Battletech: Firestorm pods (which
do count as a form of VR in my book, but definitely aren't in the HMD category), my only previous experience with VR was a
Sony Glasstron PLM-A55, which got used a grand total of maybe two times and has been collecting dust for ~5 years (you want to see a screen door,
oi). I've had my Rift for about a week now but have only had time to spend maybe three or four total hours with it, running through some demos the first two days and mostly playing TF2 and a little Minecraft yesterday.
My overall first impression of the Oculus Rift:
This is definitely the start of something huge, but only the start.
Weight: Between bouts of squeeing, the first words out of my mouth when I first picked up the headset were, "Oh my God, it's a featherweight!" It looks like something that should weigh twice as much as it does, and the fact that they got the overall weight of the device down this low is really a testament to the Oculus engineering team. I haven't gone for any marathon sessions yet, but I don't expect to experience much neck strain even with prolonged use - my
Rocketfish SRS headset weighs about as much as the Rift, and even with both on I forget I'm wearing them pretty quickly.
Smell: Why are people talking about this? There's a slight petrochemical odor as with all new electronics; when I bought a mic stand a month or two ago and had to leave it in the garage for a week to air out I was worried I had acquired a sensitivity to weird product smells, but the Rift isn't offputting at all. It's not exactly pleasant, but it's not anything like nauseating - I actually found myself deliberately enjoying "New Rift Smell" at one point, and if the Oculus Store sells an air freshener like this I'd be in for $5.
Initial setup: For reference, my primary gaming/development box is a
Dell XPS 720 upgraded with an
nVidia 660 Ti (great card for the money, IMO), 6GB of
Corsair DDR2 XMS RAM (would be 8GB, but I had a stick go bad on me), and an SSD just barely big enough to hold Vista Home Premium x64 SP2 (yeah yeah, I'm trying to track down a cheap Win7 COA) with my games loading from a mechanical drive. It's a little pokey in the CPU department, but considering my friend essentially rescued it from the trash pile a year ago, it's handily exceeded all my expectations of what a desktop can be (the four monitors definitely help with that). Adding the Rift would've been a zero-installer, no-drivers-required cakewalk, except for the fact that I use a
Levetron Mech4 keyboard, and its system tray app that enables the macro features
totally conflicts with the Rift's head tracker. After 20 minutes of anguished searching, I found a
cybereality post saying that some Logitech middleware can cause similar conflicts, and things work perfectly once I kill the keyboard app process. Most users will plug the thing in and it will work with zero fiddling - I'm just lucky I bought this keyboard more for the Cherry Blacks than the macro stuff!
Screen door / Resolution: I went for the Tuscany Hydra demo first, and upon getting the headtracking working, I definitely felt like I'd gotten a screen door wacked into my eyeballs. It's perhaps not as horrible as my Glasstron, but that's not saying much - you can easily discern every individual pixel you see, and it's clear that you aren't even seeing all that much of the screen. I started with contacts in, the A cups, and the housing as close to my face as possible for maximum FOV, and later switched to the C cups with the housing halfway out and no corrective lenses. The former was extremely clear, the latter slightly blurry but probably better than adding glasses to the mix, and in both cases the resolution of the Rift is its most glaring weakness. That said, it's just as easy to ignore as it is to focus on. Minecraft may be particularly susceptible to this problem because it's all hard edges and 16x16 textures, but anything more than a couple dozen meters away resolves to a jarring blob of pixels and knocks me out of the moment. Many of the demos and TF2 with lots of AA were better suited to the low resolution, but it's still something you can't think about or you're suddenly seeing pixels instead of images. I had a few moments in TF2 where I was somehow reminded of playing Diablo 1 on a tiny laptop screen - the art and style come through, the animation is fluid, and the cartooniness makes it very easy to see what the developers intended and be completely in the moment, but if anyone wants to nitpick, they might never see anything
but the pixels. At this resolution, navigating an extremely familiar environment like 2fort or an old Minecraft world feels great, but when placed in a totally alien environment I'd spend a lot of time wondering what exactly the hell I was looking at. Put a 1080p panel in here and actually
use a large majority of the screen's real estate and it really might fly as a consumer device that very few people will complain about; ~720p and the "wrong" size panel make this something hard to recommend even to serious VR enthusiasts, but it's entirely adequate for early game development.
Stereoscopic 3D effect: Sweet mercy, this is
awesome! My total life experience with 3D imagery is being great at resolving Magic Eye pictures and seeing
Avatar one time, and having a stereoscopic experience in the Rift almost entirely makes up for the low resolution. What was once an image on a screen becomes a
place inside the Rift. I laughed like a madman the first time I reached out to touch a candlestick in Tuscany - I hadn't plugged my Hydra in yet! With virtual hands inside a virtual space, totally new and thoroughly compelling experiences are possible. Even if the effect is sometimes subtle, nothing can prepare a person who has never experienced 3D gaming. Minecraft is perhaps the
best possible example on this one -
that is how big a cubic meter is,
that giant thing?! It feels like a completely different experience inside the Rift, and may even get me back into the game despite how stupefyingly boring it is to knock down a mountain with a shovel, even in glorious 3D.
Motion blur: The jury is still out on this one. In Tuscany Hydra (which AFAIK is based on Unity Tuscany, which others have similarly complained about), the blur associated with even slight head movements is
terrible, it smears everything I see completely out of focus. Holding perfectly still, even turning with a Hydra thumbstick, everything looks fine. I believe Doc Ok's friend when
he says there isn't blur being deliberately injected into this demo, but I'm hopeful that whatever is going on here is a software limitation (geekmaster's
suggestion about rethinking the rendering chain will hopefully be fruitful). The blur was a dealbreaker in Tuscany Hydra, but I never noticed anything so bad in any of the other demos I tried (and I worked may way through a good portion of the
Rift List). If blur like I experienced in Tuscany Hydra crops up in many more games and can't be excised, the Rift is probably dead as a consumer device, but considering I only even noticed it in that one instance, I'm hopeful this won't be a major stumbling block. The issue definitely deserves more scrutiny, though.
Headtracking and control: The Hydra is
great, maybe even "necessary", and Oculus's 1000Hz baby really is what VR was searching for all these years; maybe things would be different if I tried some headbanging, but I never really felt any lag in my view changing, it "just works". That said, something that may be drift did interfere with a couple games, primarily
Museum of the Microstar. I never experienced any of the horrendous lag some people have reported there (upgrade your computers!), but for much of my walk around the museum, W sent me almost 45º to my left. It was weird, possibly correctable, and probably contributed to my slight nausea, but it didn't stop me from clicking on all the signs. I wanted to dismiss this as an artifact of MotM, but in an hour or two of TF2 using mostly non-keyhole vr_moveaim_mode 5, I occasionally felt like "forward" wasn't quite forward, but everything was fine again upon respawn. Perhaps I'm just not used to all these additional layers of control and we can chalk this up as an instance of
PEBCAK, and even if it was tracking drift, I doubt any of the stuff I tried is yet correcting drift with the Rift's magnetometer. I played
Proton Pulse for ~20 minutes, loving every second despite needing to stretch off to the left more than was sometimes comfortable, and when I took the Rift off I was shocked I had swiveled almost 180º from where I started! I expect this will be a solved problem once developers integrate the recent SDK additions into their code. I found I missed translational tracking far less than I expected - I never once made a "forbidden" movement despite doing lots of looking around my environments - but it's clear the experience would be that much richer with it. There is clearly a ton of work yet to be done in the field of VR control, and while it may be annoying to some that we don't have ideal control schemes just yet, as a hobbyist hardware hacker it's kind of thrilling to be part of that search.
Nausea: Going into Tuscany Hydra, I thought I'd be one of those "freaks" who never experiences any amount of discomfort, the prize at the end of a lifetime of "training" myself in FPS games (yes..."training"). I never reached for my vomit bucket, but I did feel a little "weird" those first couple of days. It's not quite like nausea for me, a minor knotting of the stomach but nothing bordering on barftown, not a headache, but a totally unfamiliar and ever-so-slight tickling going on in my brain. The talk of "rewiring" is apt, I think - I told my brain to expect some strange stuff going on, and after less than an hour of demos, it said, "Dude, what are you
doing to me? I think it's time for a break now." Going back for over an hour of TF2 days later was easier, though - perhaps it was the lack of contacts, proper IPD correction, or just some junk food I ate that first day, but I felt like I could do a full 3-hour session of TF2. I stopped only because I don't have time for gaming, only "testing"; I'm still hopeful I truly
am one of those vestibular freaks. If that's true, though, I still felt something, and that's not a great sign for mainstream adoption. We'll see what happens with the addition of positional tracking; I think we can reach a point where a majority of gamers don't have any problem adapting to VR, but I still think a sizable (and probably very loud) minority will be scared off by their initial experiences.
Ergonomics: I have a Roman nose ("it's roamin' all over my face!") and what is colloquially referred to as a "giant melon head", and while I may represent an outlier in these categories, from my (semi-gigantic) perspective, the Rift could use some improvements in the comfort department. The "max FOV" configuration of contacts in, A cups, housing in is effectively unusable for me - less than an hour of this left a series of marks on the bridge of my nose that didn't disappear until the next day, and the Rift pressed into my eyebrows in a fairly uncomfortable fashion. C cups, no contacts, housing slightly out, and headband adjusted to keep the Rift away from my nose left it mostly unmarked, but still hurt my eyebrows a little; a slightly larger strap would probably help me, because there's nothing I can do to keep the Rift from feeling too tight on my head. I also worry about all kinds of gunk building up all over the Rift - even when it's not digging into my nose, the Rift can still end up touching the end of it, the air vents perhaps curtail sweating (and without being very distracting in a well-lit room) but
that will probably change, and even with one of my bamboo-fabric Rift bandanas (on sale soon!), all kinds of junk gets on the lenses. Some of this is unavoidable, but a redesigned interior suitable for use with Neanderthal eyebrows and some kind of washable or disposable face gasket would be very welcome.
Integrating a Rift into a complex PC rig: Those able to operate the Rift in some kind of mirrored display mode have it easy; those of us who already use all our video outputs are in for some trouble. I added a cheapo unpowered DVI switch to my rig, but it only solves the cable juggling problem. I apparently have to reboot if I want to switch from using my 720p LCD TV "monitor" to using my Rift, and when I do, the nVidia control panel and Windows totally forget I ever had this stuff set up the way I like it. This is perhaps less Oculus's fault and more nVidia's, but I hope Oculus is leaning on them to provide a less annoying eventual solution than rejiggering everything three times a day. If the consumer Rift is a 1080p device and can be made to work with a DVI or HDMI splitter, that may be acceptable; splitting a 1280x800 signal is currently useless because they simply don't make non-tablet monitors of that resolution. I'd really like to see the control box turn
into a splitter/switch for later revisions, something you plug an out from a video card into along with the input for one of your monitors, and magical chips inside turn the control box into a pass-thru when you want to use that monitor, no rebooting and no resolution shuffling necessary.
TL;DR: The Rift, for all its individual parts shaped by slow evolution, really could be the start of this VR revolution we've been waiting for. It's got some significant technical problems, and while Oculus is keenly aware of all of them, some of those problems simply won't get fully fixed in the near term. For me, the biggest problem of all is one I didn't even mention yet: There's hardly anything to do with the Rift once you have one! Most demos I've seen are things I'm thrilled to have spent 10 minutes with but not anything I'd want to load up again;
Proton Pulse may be the one and only "game" available that was built for the Rift, and even that had its roots in a 2D monitor. Shoehorning things like Skyrim and even HL2 into VR sounds good on paper but ultimately presents a great many challenges for too few rewards. The hardware isn't perfect, but it is here, in our hands, doing exactly what it says on the tin. What the Rift needs most isn't minor hardware upgrades, what it needs most is software built for, around, and in VR.
The thing the Rift is most lacking is US.
), and convinced that this is the future. Looking forward to making and playing great games on it from now on.
