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The VR Predictions Thread of 2018

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
There have been a plethora of predictions tossed around from 2016 thru 2017. Many of those predictions fall short, but we rarely get to take that in, which is a bit of a loss. The ratio is something like: 98% effort put towards making multiple predictions, 2% effort put towards fact-checking to see which predictions turned out true or false.

This thread will attempt to resolve that for all the 2018 predictions that are enroute thanks to:
  • The current ambiguity surrounding Facebook's Rift CV2 plans
  • The general implications of Facebook's stand-alone low-end headset, Oculus GO
  • The bigger implications of Facebooks stand-alone mid-range headset, Santa Cruz

Feel free to post your predictions here. If you catch someone else making a prediction, drop it here as well on their behalf.

I'll begin with predictions for 2018 of my own:

Zenbane's Predictions
  1. Oculus GO will sell over 2 million units by the end of 2018.
  2. Santa Cruz will win a “VR Unit of the Year” Award for 2018.
  3. The Rift CV2 will be announced at the 2018 Facebook Developer Conference with a predicted released date of 2020.
  4. The Pimax 8K HMD from Kickstarter will turn out to be a flop. Either it won’t ship to the general public in 2018 or it will ship but prove so faulty and defective that the industry will determine the product unfit for practical use.
203 REPLIES 203

flexy123
Superstar
Eye tracking, if at all, is still something for "in the future". Eye tracking by itself would just provide limited use. IMO, its main purpose would be in combo with foveated rendering. And then, THIS would be huge.

But: This only makes sense when the benefit of eyetracking/foveated rendering etc. *vastly* outweighs the overhead it itself has. And the question here is whether current hardware, GPUs etc. are ready for this? Don't forget that the purpose of foveated rendering is to speed up things..means to be able to run massive resolutions but with low/medium hardware. My knowledge there of course is limited, but it may well be that it only makes sense in hardware (aka: custom chips) and/or new GPUs who support it in h/w....and whether we will be at that point in 2019 when CV2 is supposed to come out..who knows. On the other hand, it might WELL BE that during 2019...we hear some announcement that Oculus/Nvidia etc. will come out with absolute badass new GPUs/VR..which does exactly this...in hardware! I am sure Oculus doesn't just sit there twiddling their thumbs, I am sure stuff is in development...question is when it will be ready.

nalex66
MVP
MVP
Both Nvidia and a couple third parties have demonstrated functioning foveated rendering and eye tracking in recent years. Another upstart, Tobii, showed a kit at CES this year.

Oculus bought up an eye-tracking company in 2016, so it’s fair to assume that they’ve been working on it. I don’t know how close they are to a complete product, but the pieces are all there—affordable small 4K screens, eye-tracking technology, and foveated rendering that can be done at the driver level, and has been shown to provide a significant performance benefit while being unnoticeable to the user. Given what a huge quality improvement it would allow, I would be surprised if it wasn’t being worked on for CV2, and I think it would be worth waiting for. 

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


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo

neocaleric
Protege
I just learned about Go's competition, the Daydream standalone. It will indeed be trying to do the same things. I can't find a price point for it though. That might be a deciding factor. Also comfort and available software at launch. In this area i think Go has the upper hand since most GearVr apps are going to be ported and Oculus has been supporting and developing many quality games for their headsets. Some people here seem to really like this Daydream though but i don't quite understand what's so good about it vs. Go. Would be nice to get more information 🙂

Zenbane
MVP
MVP

EliteSPA said:

Hello Rifters!

I haven't been in the forums for quite some time, due to the birth of my daughter and a lot of work, I see that this still the same with Zenbane and Atmos jajaja, missed reading those two.

My predictions for 2018:

1. Pimax 8k = a disaster and as they did with pimax 4k, the first thing is not 8k, all full of promises and nothing else, nor with a Titan V you will be unable to move frames with this resolution.

2. Vive Pro (Live 1.5) is just a small screen upgrade but nothing further from what samsung oddisey already offers, just like PS4 Pro, the prices of Vive 1.0 will drop considerably.

3. Wireless HMD, I personally prefer it to more resolution, because today maintaining 90 FPS is impossible with the hardware we have.

4. Artificial Intelligence in VR.

That's it, guys! 

Happy New Year!





Glad to see you back! You and Jakeman both returned in 2018, a good start to the New Year for Rifters.

Great prediction list. I want to give a +1 to the AI in VR, it's highly needed! I will add that this merging of bleeding edge technology will help push VR in to the business sector 100-fold (moreso than any of the current attempts to have commercial VR).

Zenbane
MVP
MVP

Atmos73 said:
Don't forget too, GO has no front camera so can't do AR or any cool stuff that most Mobiles can do now. I'd be hard pushed to know what to do with it if I had one.



GO owners will do what the 5 million+ GearVR owners are doing: Playing the best app's available on the VR Market as provided by the Oculus Platform. Only now those with unsupported VR compatible phones can partake, and everyone else tired of wasting their phone battery in VR can remove the needless dependency.

More than 5 million Gear VR headsets sold worldwide:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-01-05-5m-gear-vr-headsets-sold-worldwide

Oculus gets a cut from each App purchase via Oculus Home. This will extend to Oculus GO, a Facebook product, and more than 1 billion people use Facebook:
  • 1.37 billion daily active users on average for September 2017
  • 2.07 billion monthly active users as of September 30, 2017
https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/


Subtract 5 million from 2.07 billion to determine the potential of Oculus GO.

Star-lizard
Rising Star
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/13/tobii-vr-eye-tracking/

Doesn't sound like eye tracking is that far out 
Part of the article
I also played through a scenario similar to Star Trek Bridge Crew, which involved manipulating a daunting number of buttons and dials on a spaceship. If you've played that Star Trek VR game, you'd know that one tough part of it is making sure you hit the right button at the right time. With eye tracking in Tobii's scenario, I only had to look at a button to select it. The company's tracking technology did a solid job of choosing the right button most of the time, even though the demo had plenty of other things to select nearby.
In addition to simply making VR interaction more fluid, Tobii claims that eye tracking will also allow for more efficient foveated rendering. That's a technique that makes your computer devote most of its graphics power to what you're seeing, while keeping offscreen content at a lower quality. Typically, foveated rendering works across the entire screen, no matter where you're technically looking. But with eye tracking, it can focus the best quality to what your eyes are actually pointed at, while slightly downgrading what's around it. Tobii quietly enabled the feature during my last demo, and I was surprised that I didn't even notice it in action. The big benefit? It could make it easier to run VR on slower systems.

Iriodus
Explorer
My predictions for 2018 are as follows:

1) We'll see a progress update for the CV2 sometime in Q3 of 2018, no release date will be given, the most that we'll be told is that it will be done sometime between Q3 of 2018 and Q4 of 2020, or just simply "It'll be done when it's done."

2) The Vive Pro will see a less than stellar adoption rate by existing Vivers, those otherwise not getting an Oculus headset, or those that have been waiting to get one. HTC will continue to hemorrhage money while other SteamVR-centered headsets will be released that are a much better choice.

3) Henceforth, Zenbane will not have any more bans in 2018, and Atmos will stop making the same arguments all the time /s

Iriodus
Explorer
@Atmos73
While I fully expect Razor to take a crack at making their own headset, as they have their own smartphone now, I can't say I'd care for it myself, as Razor has always been overpriced for what they are offering (To me), but if their smartphone is any indication it will be high quality (Assuming I'm remembering their phone correctly).

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
I updated my prediction list by one:
  • In 2018, Onward will still be the game that Vive owners will default to for nearly all discussions.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP

Atmos73 said:


Zenbane said:

I updated my prediction list by one:
  • In 2018, Onward will still be the game that Vive owners will default to for nearly all discussions.


Well it’s sold over 100,000 copies. It carries a lot of weight for both Vivers and Rifters. 



I'm sure it carries weight, but as you said: Rifters own it as well. Many Rifters on this forum have talked about it and play it actively. However, the main difference is that Rifters can actually have an in-depth conversation about VR while referencing "multiple quality games."

In contrast, Vivers seem to have Onward, only Onward, and nothing but the Onward. Hence my prediction.