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The Rift now represents about 47 percent of all VR headset users on Steam, according to the survey, sneaking just past the Vive at about 45 percent. Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality initiative, launched late last year, accounts for just over 5 percent of the VR users on the platform.
[...] The Valve hardware survey is a self-selected voluntary sample of all Steam users and only detects VR headsets that are actively plugged in to the computer when the survey tool is run. Still, the rough parity between the two headsets is noteworthy given the Vive's use of the SteamVR standard, which Valve continues to update.
While the Rift is relatively easy to set up and use through Steam, the HTC Vive isn't officially supported on the competing Oculus Home platform.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 07 2018, @02:26PM (1 child)
I was looking up wireless info on the fly, so it's quite possible I got 10us from marketing literature - I do also remember a line about wired-comparable lag. Perhaps there's a way to tune it for less error-resistance at the price of less lag?
7ms would be extremely disappointing - I believe the consensus is that lag has to be below ~15ms for a pleasant sustained experience. As high as 20 may be tolerable for most, and further improvements are likely be apparent down to at least 7.
Taking 7 out of that right off the top just for for transmission leaves only ~8ms for all game logic and rendering if we still want to hit that magic 15. Which translates to requiring twice as much performance on the remote PC to deliver the same experience, and makes 7ms completely unattainable. And it would make it absolutely essential to use a different, "lagless" technology for communicating with the sensors - an additional 7ms of lag to get head position data would be crushing.
Lag is the real killer here - to the point that a much lower bandwidth would potentially be an acceptable price to pay. It might be possible to offload the final stage of rendering to the headset itself by feeding it heavily optimized rendering data rather than the final image.
As for foveated rendering - it does seem like a decent way to squeeze acceptable performance out of limited hardware, but I would want to see it in action.
I have a sinking feeling that the "optimum compromise" may for the immediate future be in leaving the PC out of it entirely, and simply accepting lower-quality rendering. Wireless Vive-class tracking with Wii-grade graphics (rendered at 2-4k of course) might actually be quite acceptable - immersion is likely a much more "killer feature" than realism. Leave realism to the folks willing to deal with either a tether or a backpack PC for a while.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 07 2018, @02:38PM
Hmm - perhaps such a headset could draw on the R&D done for modular cellphones. It'd be really nice to be easily able to upgrade just the processor on such a potentially expensive piece of kit. Plug in the properly optimized hardware and it could possibly even do decent final-stage rendering for a PC.