Oculs Rift for PA?

Most of the various "3d glasses" over the last 2 decades have been along the lines of being sold as "like a 150" screen at 15 feet!" (taken from the Sony HMZ-T2 specs page). Sounds amazing, right?

That's also the size of a 15" monitor at 1.5 feet away, about how far I'm currently sitting from my 24" monitor at home... it sounds a little less impressive now doesn't it. Basically means my home monitor has better resolution and viewing angle (though granted doesn't do 3d) than the "top of the line" consumer HMD.

The other problem with VR via personal display devices is it means everyone has to have one to experience the effect. It's great for personal experiences like video games, but for a presentation (where you might be looking at 3d bar graphs) it's worthless. I'd put far more stock in the various autostereoscopic technologies like voxel pixels, interference based holographic or even the more simplistic parallax barrier / lenticular style 3d display technologies becoming common place for work environments due to the simple fact they don't require strapping something to your head. Ironically all of those technologies are held back by the same issue that plagues the current Oculus Rift, pixel density. As high resolution displays and high bandwidth display connections become more common place (and thus cheaper to make) all of those technologies will similarly be more viable.

Omg PA holograms, minority report hand waving style.

Hi Ben,

Sorry, I didn't make very clear in my msg that I saw those sony viewing distances as a bad thing vs the more immersive 180 degree jobs we're heading towards.

Those techs you mention will indeed be interesting. Some of the lenticular style offerings won't get very far, but having a 'microsoft surface' type experience (terrible as it is now) but with everything looking to sit as 3d objects on top of the screen would be great. I remember a teaser vid for 'Ruse' that showed two guys sitting at either end of a desk sending units out with a flourish of the hand. That would be difficult when dealing with multiple planets though

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts Ben, and really love the involvement you guys have with the backers. Alpha ahoy!

Yeah, weasel tech descriptions like that are a sure fire "this product is rubbish" indicator for me. The rift guys haven't been doing that though, they've been very open about the specifications, because they were hobbyists at one point. I'm looking forward to it.

Ii just leave this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48QJN3PMgwk

I personally don't believe the devs should waste their Metal and Energy to provide Occulus Rift support. First of all it wouldn't provide too much for an RTS game. Second of all the technology is super new and only a very small number of people actually own one, so the vast majority would probably find the feature completely useless.

We need to understand that the developer's are already working with an extremely small budget, and unnecessary features would draw time away from developing and perfecting the core game.

I would even give up the live streams if it meant the game would be better and be released sooner (And it would probably mean that).

Funny.
Well currently there only is the developers version of the rift out.
Afaik that will already be shipped over 10.000 times. Though not much, still only dev kit.

On the other side, if so less people own one, and despite the fact that folks just start to develop software for it. I am curious how you explain the uselessness of the OR in RTS? At least you are not able to do it statistic wise.
In the same way i am not able to prove that its usefull.
Thats why i would at least try it once, so we would know.

Also neutrino already state he would like to add support for OR later, if the circumstances do allow it.

I don't think it would take much to keep the game stereoscopic 3d ready.

The biggest issues will be with the implementation of the UI/hud and cursor/icons. The cursor and icons need to be rendered at proper depth, instead of at screen depth. (From the last video it appears the strategic icons are already rendered like this, but the cursor is not, and would need a design overhaul)

The hud should be at a mid level depth, or a max object height depth. It would appear to be just above mountains/large units. (so you dont have to drastically shift your focus to look at it.) Then if you zoom out, you would raise the height of the hud respective to the zoom of the planet. (A technique like this would probably work with the cursor as well.)

The main issue, would be if the HUD is even able to be rendered in 3d space due to the web interface.

If these changes are possible, you would also gain support for Nvidia 3d vision. (more than just Oculus Rift future proofing)

Received my rift today. The head tracking and field of view is amazing, but (as they acknowledge) the resolution is really shocking. Reading any kind of smallish in-game text isn't on the cards at all. So I'd say it'd be about 2nd-3rd gen of the consumer (not devkit) version before it could be even vaguely useful for something like PA. It'll happen - the first 3d cards were only 640x480 I recall - but it won't happen for some time.

Damn!

Waste of money if you ask me, real holograms are coming soon lads, Korea (south) has been working on them for a while, this isn't a lie and I wish I had some proof, but I heard from a solid source, two tutors from a company that trains game designers, developers etc..

The guy with the wii remote on his head has no chance against this.


http://taylorinkorea.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/holographic-entertainment-way-better.html

You realise the complexity of the problem of minimaps for this game right? How the hell are we supposed to do mouse/keyboard input when selection boxes have to be contained to the viewing area. sounds like a huge pain in the *** to me and a waste of resources.

Sure it would be cool, but would it be worth the 1000s of $ putting it in? i doubt it. Perhaps if they were putting native support into their game engine for it which would allow other games to support it incredibly easily then yeah, sure, do it.

Well, anything sounds better in theory. The rift, on the other hand, is alive and in the wild. Call me when I can try out those holograms. The links you posted, that's where VR was 20 years ago, just academic projects in university basements, proof of concepts. Cool, yes, exciting, not really.

Also, they're rather different in terms of applications. A hologram is a virtual 3D object, the Rift is a 3D VR viewport. I know which one I'd get more use out of.

I can imagine a holographic RTS would be neat (Chess in the original star wars springs to mind), like TA units fighting on your desk, but the technology is miles away.

The rift is 90% finished, merely waiting till christmas 2014 for a better screen, which is trivial. Consider how fast mobile/tablet screens improved in the last 2-3 years. Also, deciding specifically how to integrate positional tracking, which is not a big problem. There have already been several Rift head tracking implementations done by hobbyists.

So to call it a waste of money would be to misunderstand the two fields.

As for difficulty implementing it into PA, all it is is head-tracking movement + binocular camera. Admittedly, very little utility apart from wow factor, but once PA is out and if someone at Uber has a rift, it could be quite easily done as a one-man passion project on the side and added in a small patch.

Ohhhhhhhhh myyyyyy goshhhhhh.

In that case, here's a question I've asked on every livestream And that I haven't dared to make a thread for until now :

The leap motion ships in 4 days; it is much cheaper than the oculus rift and does not require more GPU power. It, also, in my opinion, has a lot more to bring to PA than the oculus rift does.

Will there be leap motion support? If yes you are a god!

(in advance, to those who are going to answer "it's mac only!", it's not, they just like to show macs in their ads more because of the esthetics. It's for Mac, Linux and Windows.)

People have to look at their keyboards? Weird. If I ever look at the keyboard I screw up, my fingers know what to do and my eyes just end up causing problems and slow my typing/keyboard use.

And by the time it's screen matches any form of hardcore gaming resolution, I'll be playing with my holograms

I'm all for new technology, but some are just money spinners.

Would you mind explaining what the LeapMotion would bring to PA? I haven't read up on it much, but my understanding of it is that it's a finger/hand spatial tracker with really neat resolution, basically making a "3D touchscreen field" where it's placed.

Given that PA is designed with the classic mouse (single pointer) and keyboard interface in mind, I don't see how the leap motion would add much without a lot of complicated gesture recognition stuff. Grabbing the globe as you would an orange and spinning it, selecting units by lassooing them with a finger, yeah, that would be neat, but it's a lot of work. And there doesn't seem to be any kind of instant "order giving" thingy like the satisfying digital click of a mouse.

Comham, it's far beyond that, you place a finger above it and it knows which of your ten fingers it is, it not only tells millimetrically (yes fukin millimetrically) where your finger is pointing but what up and down, right and left tilt is has and if it is folded or not.

So you can have different controls for each of your ten fingers given all at once.

All I can tell you is go watch the youtube videos, you'll have a great idea of how awesome this could make PA, and how vastly superior to mouse and keyboard input it would be.


This is by far my favorite video because he shows that the full navigation of 3-D space can be done entirely with a single finger... that leaves a lot of overhead room for much more input. focus on 1:32

It's definitely an impressive technology, but it would take a hell of a lot of work to make PA utilise its potential.

It seems like the kind of thing you design a game around from the start, rather than adapt to it. I would like to see that game, though.

nah

didn't you see how it naturally replaces the mouse for windows desktop?

It recognises clicks in a really human/intelligent way
http://youtu.be/iERrs-Lf3CQ?t=3m9s

it can tell appart gestures that look exactly the same to the human eye but are very different when you perform them, a jab, a swipe, a drag, a tilt.

I think there's not tons of work left to do. apart from deciding how "shift", "right click", "alt", "control" + some other hotkeys are done but

left-click and left-click and drag, scroll button, wasd and scroll is already done.

I guess the obvious would be that instead of having move&attack be right-click it would be left-click and deselect would be clicking the ground with right-click instead of left-click.


This way you could point at a unit, point at a destination or target, bam! done! for all right clicks I suggest the same gestures but with two fingers glued together. (not specifically the index and the major but maybe also major and ring finger or ring finger with pinkie, it could vary both because fingers can get tired and because preferences differ)