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HTC has hit back against claims of declining VR sales figures:
The blog post in particular references a report from Digital Trends which talks about VR sales figures from Amazon, and proceeds to point out a number of ways which the data presented could be misleading.
Several points made by HTC Vive are ones that have also been addressed by VRFocus, as seen in an article about the modern VR cycle, and some comments in the weekly VR vs. article. HTC Vive were not pulling punches right from the very start, evening saying in the introduction: "Analyst reports are in and apparently, it's curtains for Virtual Reality (VR). Pardon us if we're not heeding the alarms. News of the so-called death of VR comes once a year and is greatly exaggerated."
From there, the blog post proceeds in a point-by-point fashion, discussing how early consumer VR was largely driven by smartphone-based devices such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. Not only have these devices been superseded by standalone units like the Oculus Go, which offer a better visual experience, but the promotional offers which were available for phone launches have now long since passed. HTC Vive also point out that PC-based VR companies are yet to release any solid sales figures, and that much of the growth of premium VR has been centered around location-based VR centres, something which the Digital Trends report did not address.
Related: HTC's Vive Pro to Launch on April 5
Facebook Launches Oculus Go, a $200 Standalone VR Headset
VirtualLink Consortium Announces USB Type-C Specification for VR Headsets
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @09:09PM (5 children)
Standalone headsets avoid the Windows environment entirely, using Android instead. So I don't think we will be stuck there.
Ultimately, we want the VR headset to be as dumb as possible... just an input device + display(s). Getting big games supported on Linux might be harder.
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Hopefully it is close to over, or new launches will drive down prices.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @09:56PM (4 children)
thanks for reply.
android is also very spy-i methinks.
also, i have doubts about ARM being big/good with I/O chip wise.
so far they didn't have to deal much with I/O on mobile phones.
true, there are much sensors on a smart phone but then the bandwidth requirements of these sensors is miniscule.
on x86 there are intel chips in the XEON range that go to 40 PCIe lanes and on the AMD side, in the same "server"
CPU segment they have even more bandwidth.
methinks, looking to far ahead, that with better graphics, motion tracking and haptics (suit, glove),
quick local storage access and interaction via internet more and more low latency I/O will be required.
i have tried the samsung gear VR and the VIVE and much prefer the vive experience.
also "peripherals" and "geek upgradability" favors the x86 platform for future VR.
however, i admit that the idea of just halving the screen on a smart phone and adding lenses is pretty smart ... but will probably
never win to a dedicated HMD?
also to be clear about the windows danger:
it is called "microsoft-windows-mixed-reality" and like DirectX12 is a window 10 only thing.
response time / latency is key in VR and we all know that all windows versions "age" and become slower and more sluggish.
it's like there's special code routine inside windows that makes the silicon it runs on grow binary mould or something ...
not to be too paranoid but a closed source OS does lend itself to easily implement the "planned obsolesce" paradigm.
all in all i was TOTALLY surprised at the VIVE box i bought. Everything was included. i didn't have to spend a sleepless night to
wait for the computer shop to open to go buy a "not included bluetooth adapter" or to a hardware store to try and find "mounting hocks" or such.
i opened the box, connected everything to the computer. i had a drill and the right sized drill-bit, did some measuring and go the motion boxes up and running in about 3 hours.
went to steam download steam VR and *boom* i was inside VR.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
Potentially, Android-based standalone headsets (no smartphone) could be less locked down than some smartphones. Oculus Go for instance has no cellular connection and therefore no interaction with phone carriers. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
Qualcomm is trying to take its Snapdragon ARM SoCs a little further than smartphones. Q showed off a standalone VR headset [theverge.com] with the Snapdragon 845 in it (Oculus Go uses Snapdragon 821, and Lenovo Mirage Solo [wikipedia.org] uses Snapdragon 835). They have Snapdragon 850 specifically for Windows on ARM PCs, and are rumored to be putting out a more powerful Snapdragon 1000 [soylentnews.org]. So I could see them making a SoC specifically for VR headsets that has better emphasis on I/O and latency.
As for phone-based headsets, on the YouTube VR story [soylentnews.org] I pointed to the Galaxy S9 (2960×1440, 18.5:9) and OnePlus 6 (2280×1080, 19:9). The crazy wide aspect ratios are a good thing because you want as much horizontal field-of-view as possible. The resolutions are bonkers for normal use, and there has already been a 2160p smartphone (Sony Xperia XZ2 Premium, and probably several others). So they are moving in the right direction to make Gear VR (or Cardboard) better. But AFAIK these are all limited to 60 Hz, when you want at least 90 Hz and preferably 120 Hz. The good thing about smartphone VR is that about 2 billion people have smartphones, and it's usually close by. They could carry a compact/folded phone headset with them. Although who is brave enough to be the mofo on the bus or train wearing a VR headset?
Personally, if I was going to get into PC beefy GPU + VR, I would want 6 degrees of freedom (no external sensor thingy) and no wires/tether on the headset. That means using a high speed wireless connection [soylentnews.org] such as 802.11ad (formerly known as WiGig). VESA Display Compression-M v1.1 has 5:1 "visually lossless" compression. So the maximum ~7 Gbps of WiGig becomes closer to an effective 35 Gbps, which could be enough for 4K @ 120 Hz. The AOMedia Video 1 codec [wikipedia.org] should lower bandwidth requirements compared to H.265/HEVC, and it seems to do best at high resolutions such as 2160p [bitmovin.com]. Some of these could introduce latency, but it just means that we need to improve the hardware.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @07:24PM
i think we're on the same page ... just this "no external sensor thingy".
it might sound silly to track real physical object in VR, afterall it's VR and you can create anything there ...
BUT it is awesome how you can put the VIVE hand controller on the (real) floor and in VR you see it at the correct distance,
thus if you reached for the controller in VR in real space you actually touch the controller too.
so maybe having more real physical object being tracked in VR ... is not such a bad thing.
my guess is, that you could just take a small "chip thingy" and glue it or tape it to some real object to have that
object then tracked in VR.... maybe a small device like those amazon click-to-order-one-thing devices?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
I am sort of confused about the whole "stand alone avoids... '*OS*' problems entirely"
Giving me the solution of using Android, what we can likely agree is/was the first commercially successful spyware OS built for the purpose of advertising and that they knew no one would buy that so they gave it away for free... instead of Windows 10, which decided that tactic would work except they couldn't give it away reliably and forced it on anyone that couldn't resist even if they said no, really doesn't inspire enthusiasm or the desire to give them my money. Christ, even the eye tracking stuff available is just going to track what I looked at to make sure I get ads for it later on something else.
I have different older VR glasses that still see use on occasion (RCA, VGA, and S-Video input is not modern, but it is backwards compatible..). Many older games can sometimes surprise you even if they don't support VR, and some older games that are still fun and were designed for it (Descent, Mechwarrior 2, Magic Carpet 2 [which admittedly was not as popular as it should have been]) still are very fun on occasion. Descent has more longevity in the same way the original Doom and clones of Doom have replayability.
And they work just fine with DVD player, tv out put, etc. Even VCRs, which don't seem to have any OS vendor lock-in requirements.
Games that weren't designed for the older glasses can still provide immersion,
Also, winamp visualizations still looks good on them!
no windows is required unless you want windows games. no specific console is required unless you want that console's games.
There's just no way I am going to get a facebook account to play games. There's no way I am going to get windows 10 just to play games. and even if the android OS that controls some new VR glasses is somehow secured, it's like saying it's alright when it phones home it's encrypted for your safety and no you can't look at what its transmitting because Cloud.
I can only hope that Valve comes out with a Steam OS (that doesn't suck like their new chat client--so I am probably screwed and have to decide on either to discover girls or keep trying to play other types of games know I will at least be screwed that way).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @07:28PM
i remember these from old VR v.1 times. there was also a sony "headset" that replaced a monitor.
but i was poor (a kid) in those times so never got to play around with it ...