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Oculus is buying time until the future is here.

inovator
Consultant
This is only my opinion. Way back I said PC VR isn't the future. I also said if the quest was successful oculus would focus more on standalone vr. The rift s is a bandaid and the quest link to pc is a bandaid as well until 5 g and the cloud give the high end vr experience it surely will give in the future. It will allow headsets to get smaller and cheaper, that will attract the mass market. That is why the coming oculus generations will be all in one headset with no more next generation rift's. Eventually the oculus goal is to make stand alone the only headset necessary for a high end experience. PC vr will go away. Oculus knows this is coming and choose to invest on what will eventually be high end stand alone vr. Other companies will fill the pc high end need in the meantime. But they will die off if they don't have their research and development teams also work on the future. Analogy :  I always loved cable tv but hated the cable companies and now only stream shows. The cable companies that don't adapt to streaming will die.  Oculus is going in the right direction. 
11 REPLIES 11

kevinw729
Honored Visionary
An interesting opinion @inovator - and one shared by a number of observers on the reality of the situation. Obviously this is not a popular view from the high-end PC VR community, and those loyal to the Oculus previous Half Dome presentation promises. It is difficult to consider the CV1 being as perceived as a dead-end by some management. The hope - that the CV2 is "always on the horizon", waiting for the right moment, or the right tech - is one that seems to be running its course, especially in the face of the new Quest 2.0 update rumors. But especially with the new HP release, and the XR Viewer reveals - there is a consideration that waiting "too long" can mean you miss the bus!

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

wuzp
Rising Star
IMHO, here is my vision of "the future" of VR:
  • I should be able to carry my headset around in a backpack and put it on at any time; i.e. treat it like a VR Walkman.
  • There should be a form of "guardian intrusion" detection; that would alert me if someone intrudes on my "space."
  • Noise cancelling headset audio.
  • There should be some way to gradually transition from VR back to reality.  Just ripping off the headset, especially if you are really immersed into something, can sometimes be a startling transition.
  • "It's the VR environment stupid."  Facebook realizes the Oculus HW is only a means (band-aid?) of getting us to a "Ready Player One" type world; in which the product is the VR environment; and they can get to the business of what they do best; bombarding us with (VR) ads.  At some point, they will get out of the HW business, in much the same way Google did; and only produce "flagship headsets."

inovator
Consultant

kevinw729 said:

An interesting opinion @inovator - and one shared by a number of observers on the reality of the situation. Obviously this is not a popular view from the high-end PC VR community, and those loyal to the Oculus previous Half Dome presentation promises. It is difficult to consider the CV1 being as perceived as a dead-end by some management. The hope - that the CV2 is "always on the horizon", waiting for the right moment, or the right tech - is one that seems to be running its course, especially in the face of the new Quest 2.0 update rumors. But especially with the new HP release, and the XR Viewer reveals - there is a consideration that waiting "too long" can mean you miss the bus!



The pc community really blasted me since I was one of the 1st with those opinions. At that time I dont think there was much said about 5g and the cloud taking the place of hardware. 

nalex66
MVP
MVP
I think people are pinning too much hope on 5G being a magical fix-all. It's a slightly faster version of current mobile data technology. It barely even exists yet, and there is a hell of a lot of infrastructure still needed before it can provide the level of performance that is expected.

I do agree that stand-alone is the future of VR, whether it's running on SoC internal hardware, streamed from a PC, or streamed from a more remote cloud solution. I'm looking forward to the eventual reveal of Del Mar/Quest 2. With the aggressive development of mobile chipsets like the new Qualcomm stuff, I think we can expect rapid leaps in performance and capability for both stand-alone use and wireless PCVR streaming.

DK2, CV1, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3.


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo

McNutts
Adventurer
I agree that stand alone headsets are the future.


My Wish List for New Headsets:
  1. Wireless PCVR with no downgrade of the image quality with low latency
  2. Foveated rendering with eye tracking so what you're looking at looks great
  3. Have an option to use external sensors to increase the tracking accuracy
  4. Better fitting on the head
  5. Better stock audio
  6. A RGB subpixel OLED display option
  7. Better battery life


Once I played Half Life: Alyx for 3 hours on my Quest using VirtualDesktop it was pretty obvious to me. Being able to move around, peak around corners for bad guys, turn around quickly when I thought I heard a head crab behind me are all things I don't do with my Rift S because of the cable. I would gladly pay an extra $300-$400 right now to have the picture quality I get in my Rift S wirelessly in my Quest. The picture quality is the only reason why I haven't sold my Rift S and just use my Quest for PCVR.

I will be buying a Del Mar (Quest 2.0) the first day I can get my hands on one. I already have $600 set aside in my savings account ready for that very day. My hope is that they will have a viable wireless PCVR solution that uses HVEC, or something better, so the picture quality is great. It's not that hard to have a fast hardware solution for the decoding in the headset. If they couple that with a way to minimize the latency it will be a game changer .

Foveated rendering would be awesome too since that would dramatically increase the graphical fidelity. If they can integrate eye tracking so the headset knows where to increase the graphical fidelity that would be great too. 

I would love to have an OLED display in my headset of the future that matches what I have with my 65" LG OLED. The screen on that TV is amazing. Watching normal TV is great but the first time I watched Ready Player One on 4K Blu Ray my mouth hit the floor. I didn't know a display was capable of creating a picture that looked that good. The displays in the Quest are beautiful and I love playing darker games with it because I can get true blacks instead of grays. I just hate that I can't get crisp edges on the display because of the sub pixel design. This is another area where I would gladly pay for an upgraded display.



Ryzen 7 5800X | 3090FE | 32GB@3600MHz | Rift S | 128GB Quest1 | 256GB Quest2 | 64GB Go | PSVR | Index

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

nalex66 said:

I think people are pinning too much hope on 5G being a magical fix-all. It's a slightly faster version of current mobile data technology. It barely even exists yet, and there is a hell of a lot of infrastructure still needed before it can provide the level of performance that is expected.
.....

Its best not to include my speculation with the general hubbub about 5G.

I agree its just the latest progression (generation) of the network capability. But from my perspective, the 5G revolution has received investment towards superseding backpack PC limitations. While the XR Viewer series may be using 5G to tether to smartphones for their headsets, I am much more interested in the 5G systems tethered to powerful base-stations for multi-player experiences. 

I will gladly embrace 6G and 7G when they come alone, but in the medium time, rather than the false pipeline that was Link, the 5G transfer to a higher performance (future proofed) headset looks to be something that will drive interest in Q4 and beyond. 
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

Anonymous
Not applicable
The death of PC gaming was predicted around the turn of the century.
Lot of companies are making lots of money off of it here in 2020.
PC-VR will not go away at least for foreseeable future, only companies that move away from it.

inovator
Consultant
The pc wont die it just will be needed less with certain things like gaming that requires powerful pcs. That will no doubt in my opinion be history.

nalex66
MVP
MVP

kevinw729 said:

...
I will gladly embrace 6G and 7G when they come alone, but in the medium time, rather than the false pipeline that was Link, the 5G transfer to a higher performance (future proofed) headset looks to be something that will drive interest in Q4 and beyond. 


"False pipeline that was Link"? Even with 5G and its grandiose promises about bandwidth and latency, I expect that the work they've done on Link will be very relevant to VR streaming for future headsets. With high-res screens and high refresh rates, a good efficient compression and streaming process will still be valuable.

DK2, CV1, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3.


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo