This video describes the popular VR headsets on the market as of three years ago. The Sony Gear VR is basically a cheap version of the Oculus Rift they make for the PS4 in particular. Of all these headsets, the HTC Vive is the most coveted by gamers because it has superior resolution that eliminates the worst of the "screen door" effect, and is compatible with a large number of Steam games, but it is also much more expensive at around $800.oo compared to the $200.oo Sony, while the Samsung headset outsells them all by a good margin. The Oculus Rift uses a superior OLED display that can be turned on and off, theoretically, a million times a second, but flashing it on and off at specific frequencies allows the display to compensate for lower frame rates that can stutter and make people dizzy on a normal display. All of these VR headsets really require the higher resolution display screens approaching 4k just to avoid the screen door effect. Since this video was shot, all of these headsets have begun to incorporate eye tracking and foviated vision, gesture recognition, and expressions, often as hardware you can buy separately. Notably, the micro mirrors they discuss used in the Avegant theater headset could, theoretically, be replaced with a metamaterial to achieve similar results in an even smaller set of glasses. Metamaterials are associated with invisibility cloaking technology and military applications, but they are essentially wave-guides that can be used to steer light directly into your eyes at high resolutions and even focus it however you want. Avegant is also working on light-field technology that captures all the information from a photon that would also benefit enormously from the ability to use flat lenses, and could provide photo-realistic VR that, unlike ray tracing, actually is indistinguishable from the real thing even by experts who know what to look for. The medical applications for this technology are astounding, empowering quadriplegics to interact with the world as never before, with even simple household devices like Siri and Alexa opening up entirely new worlds for the blind at a very affordable price. There are still quite a few other VR headsets that have yet to come on the market, and the ones in this video can be considered among the first commercial pioneers in the field. I expect the field to become more crowded and competitive with the release of the next generation Xbox and PS5. Honorable mention goes to the Star VR headset, with an enormous 210 degree field of view but, without flat lenses, the headset itself is also enormous and its first uses will be in theaters and other applications, replacing the current IMAX films which have been losing popularity in recent years.
Hardware wise, Nvidia's new Ampere graphics cards are rumored to contain tensor cores capable of supporting foveated rendering for VR applications and ray tracing. Although only the sweet spot of the retina sees a lot of details, we sweep our eyes around a scene to pick up the details, which our brain fills in for us. Foveated rendering capitalizes on this by using eye tracking to inform the computer where to fill in more details, so it only has to render greater detail where it is needed. Using various algorithms they can theoretically even compensate for a lot of noise and cut down dramatically on the graphics power required to render higher resolution images. I'd say this technology will be about ripe to mature into something much bigger, perhaps around 2022, a couple of years after the next generation consoles come out and they've had a good long while to sort out the basics with a lot of first generation adopters.
This is a sample of VR ready games coming out on Steam this year, with Valve offering 50 free games for VR to encourage people to buy their headsets. If you notice, a lot of these games have incredibly low resolution textures, because they are specifically designed to run at higher frame rates on weaker computers and consoles. These developers are helping to pioneer movement controls in VR, which have turned out to be tricker than anyone imagined. Which is one reason why racing, flying, and arcade style games are among the first to become really popular, but we can expect to see manufacturers eventually develop radically different controls for VR that don't cost nearly as much as those that are popularly used today that might be sold with the next generation consoles.
These are some of the more gorgeous looking VR games coming out on the PS4 this year. Likely the textures may not be as detailed when viewed with their headset on the PS4, but it is obvious these games have all been designed to be upscaled and will still look all the better for it. Dinosaurs, horror, and survival are also popular genres in VR, where you can walk under a brontosaur or believe a zombie has just jumped out of the closet in your face. Often being slower paced, these help to make up for lower frame rates and make it easier for people to move around. Exactly what will be the major issues with the next generation consoles, which will be significantly more powerful, could easily define the future popularity of VR headsets.
These will be among the next PS4 games coming on the market. Of all the headsets out there, Sony is the one to pay attention to, because they offer the cheapest headsets and controls on the market and sell an enormous number of consoles, and even develop many of their own video games. Size does matter, and Sony is huge, but being big doesn't mean you can't miss something obvious, and controls for VR and moving around in VR are proving to be challenging. This is also what Microsoft specializes in, interfaces, but the release of the next generation consoles dedicated to VR is the earliest that I expect anyone to tip their hand as to what might be the cheapest and easiest controls to use in VR and the best ways to move around in VR. As new and underdeveloped as VR technology is at present, it has also received an enormous amount of support within the industry and even from Hollywood studios, where virtual reality and ray tracing have both been the Holy Grails for almost half a century. While watching these demos its humbling to keep in mind that these are running on the current PS4 in VR, while the next generation consoles coming out in 2020 could be roughly 6x as powerful. Currently, the Magic Leap headset has 2 billion dollars in funding, with everyone agreeing it is the best headset they've seen, yet the market for most of the headsets in development remains rather small at this time, awaiting the next generation of consoles again, when it might be worthwhile to finally expose the secrets behind how such headsets work, by actually selling production models.
I have it came free with my android phone.. Its been sitting on the shelf for two years unused. Tried it once, didnt get into it.
That's a common response, with many not really getting the hang of VR without a little bit of practice. Another common response, is people eventually get bored with it, in part, because there is only so much that can be done in virtual reality at this time. I think we won't see VR become really popular until after the next generation consoles have been on the market for awhile and they've started to seriously explore the possibilities. At this point, it is more of a novelty, but video games are easily the best bang-for-your-buck as entertainment goes, and the entire industry is still pouring money into researching it, despite the fact, hardly anyone is actually making any money selling headsets. There exists headsets that cost $100,000.oo and are guaranteed to produce a flawless experience, but I'm more interested in the cheap stuff myself, and we should get a better idea of just how good a bang-for-your-buck you can get using the next generation consoles. That's when I assume more of the competing headsets will be coming on the market, along with a lot more AAA video games that don't just dabble with making their games VR ready.
