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My Oculus Rift Experience

MarkM
Honored Guest
Greetings all,

I had the opportunity due to a kind soul to try out the Rift last night. I have mine on order and I am pleased to say that I received an email yesterday as well from Oculus VR saying that my order (70xxx) was going to move to processing!

The first demo was Tuscany and I tried at first with the B Cup but moved to the A Cup quickly. I actually have pretty bad vision that is neither far sided nor short sighted and my glasses only help a little bit. I decided that the A cup was the best experience as I see about the same with glasses or without. Anyway--I definitely liked the A cup even though they were pretty close to my eyes.

I moved around in Tuscany and it felt natural. I was using keyboard and touch pad on a Macbook Pro running OS X. I was most amazed when I encountered the blue butterfly it truly felt like it was there in front of me. I ran around the space for a while and was ready to try another demo as I had a limited amount of time and wanted to get the broadest of experiences in the time remaining.

Next I tried the chicken game.. and that was fun and also felt pretty natural (well as natural as anything can be when you are playing the role of a chicken!). I played this for a while and was thrilled.

I had pretty low expectations on the quality of the rift based on all of the discussion I have read for months about the low resolution display and the screen door effect(tm). Truthfully it was a lot better than I expected! In a way I am glad that I was worried about this aspect because in worrying about it I was pleasantly surprised unlike probably the most of you who experienced it for the first time. I was okay with the display.

My new friend suggested I power up my Mac and try some of the demos I had downloaded. I had already repartitioned my killer 15" retina Macbook Pro (i7 w/16GB RAM and 512GB SSD) and installed Windows 7. Windows 7 fired up nearly instantly and I plugged in the rift and started the demo I had been looking forward to the most--Blue Marble.

I started the demo and set the screen to 1280 x 720 and was hoping to be amazed. What I saw instead was something that was very blurry all of a sudden. I am not clear what the issue was - I tried increasing the resolution that I was sending to the rift and it helped a little but truthfully it was just super blurry. Windows was set to mirror the display--the frame rate was great so that wasn't the issue it just looked super muddy. Having already had my experience with Tuscany on the other Mac under OS X I knew what it should look like. It just didn't. I have no idea why.

I left Blue Marble and then tried Oceans Rift and it was fun--still blurry but good enough to keep going. I swam around and played in the water for a while. Now I have run this demo without the rift and I know what happens when you get into the deeper end still when it happened to me I nearly jumped out of my chair. I couldn't believe the impact it had on me.

My last demo was virtual cinema and for whatever reason that demo looked really good. I didn't see any blurry issues at all. Truly the blurry thing is a mystery to me. I think Virtual Cinema and Tuscany was my favorites, though I did also play one demo where I was falling and trying to hit targets and that was great (that was on the other Macbook Pro and was not blurry).

Anyway--after the Oceans experience and the fun I had with the VR Cinema I had to quit. Truth be told the experience with the Oceans demo had given me a slight headache (maybe it wasn't that but the fact I didn't re-adjust the straps and maybe the rift was a bit too tight on my head). The other thing was I was extremely hungry--like crazy hungry. So we went ahead and shut down and talked for a bit.

You see as I have posted here before--I am starting my own VR meet up in Colorado. It looks like I now have a meeting place! If you are interested in joining here is the site: http://www.meetup.com/Boulder-VIrtual-Reality-Meetup/

My first impressions were great. The time passed quickly and the quality of the video and the rift itself was good enough for me (blurry issue aside as I assume that is a Windows / video thing). I had watched many videos of people using the rift jumping out of their skin when things happened and I just thought that was a bit of BS. Now I don't think so. When I was attacked it was much more personal. When I walked int he virtual cinema and looked at the screen playing the Star Trek trailer i just couldn't believe the scale. The 3D I saw in the tuscany demo was natural and not like I have seen it on 3D televisions. In short we are in for an exciting ride!

Here is my bottom line--I can't wait for my rift to show up. I am amazed and can't wait to get my VR legs!

Any idea on the blur issue guys/gals?
14 REPLIES 14

kaptain
Honored Guest
i didn´t read anything
is there some kind of first steps to noobs to windows/mac/linux/whatever in this fórum?

edit: nevermind - https://developer.oculus.com/wiki/Main_Page

MarkM
Honored Guest
I did read many faqs including the link you provided - did not cover my issue.

bidji
Honored Guest
interesting read, MarkM. thanks for sharing.

genetransfer
Explorer
yeah, great feedback MarkM, I myself have the lowest standard I can imagine for the rift...basically 90's vr +1 so I'm not disappointed lol (I havn't even tried it yet). based on peoples video's I was sold, if anyone saw my reaction to 90's vr I would have been the posterchild for vr sucks. so I am hopeful and think it's so great that the immersion is there and worth the clams to find out.

not sure what the blurriness is, was it just low resolution feel or an eye separation blur you saw? I suppose I'll find out myself soon enough, I'm on win 7 native.

great to know what demo's to avoid, but like you said might have been an os thing. I've seen a few people who had bad experiences with horror games on the rift and they all said I'm not playing that again. I think that will rule out any PTSD as if your not enjoying the experience you most likely won't play again.

I myself heart a good fps, thanks to bioshock, but I'm not interested in them when it comes vr so I'm actually excited to try these demos that are more experience prone than shoot em up. but I suppose if an fps is paced right and that's not all I'm doing I'm sure I would enjoy it. Dev's that are planning to just port existing games to this kind of thing have already lost me, I'm not sitting through 12 hours of pulling triggers I don't care how much I love the company. I've been looking for more for a while and hopeing vr will at least meet 50% of the hype but it's looking like it might go beyond that.

Jrockin
Honored Guest
I remember reading that someone else posted that they were having trouble with graphics while using the rift with their macbook, apparently it was defaulting to the crappy onboard graphics card and they fixed the issue by disabling the onboard card during startup.

I think they were saying it was mainly affecting the framerate, not too sure about the blurring you are having though.

I have a windows so I can't talk from experience, just throwing a possible solution out there. 😄

Other than that, it could just be that you were out of the focus spots of the lens if the position of the rift was inconsistent

Anonymous
Not applicable
Blurring during motion would be due to the slow pixel response time of the LCD. Hardware side of things, not software.

Blurring while static would imply out of focus?

kaptain
Honored Guest
"MarkM" wrote:
I did read many faqs including the link you provided - did not cover my issue.

Sorry Mark, i should not post this message. Thanks for your review but i´m afraid i could not help on your issue since i ain´t got mine yet. Probably i will have a lot of issues like your. Hope someone help.

360FOV
Honored Guest
Run things at a higher resolution than 1280x800 and the Rift will smooth and clear things up a bit.
“My ally is the Force. Life creates it, makes it grow. It’s energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we…not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock…everywhere!"

Someguitarist
Explorer
Did you run the IDP calibration software? He may have had it set up and calibrated on his...

Did you disable 'Audio over HDMI'? Were you running in 'High Performance' mode in the Windows Power Settings? What type of video card is in that thing? Did you try the Tuscany demo on your own PC to see how it compared?

Wait! Re-reading it you said you set it to 1280 x 720!! THAT might be why it looked weird! The resolution is 1280 x 800!!