Rumor: Microsoft Revealing Oculus Rift Rival At E3 2015

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videobear

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"More competition?" "Better product?" We have yet to see ANY of these products available for the mass market. Time for the hype to stop.
 
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I don't see and problem with these statements, more competition does almost always lead to better products as companies want to have the biggest market share and to get that they generally need to have the best product. That being said it doesn't mean they will be amazing it just means that the products will better than they currently are.
 

alidan

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I don't see and problem with these statements, more competition does almost always lead to better products as companies want to have the biggest market share and to get that they generally need to have the best product. That being said it doesn't mean they will be amazing it just means that the products will better than they currently are.

take a look at the rockband like games, those games weren't bad, but because of a saturation it killed the market
take a look at 3d movies, because many movies convert to 3d, most people associate crappy 3d with what 3d is, instead of knowing what good 3d is... it killed a tech i was waiting for for years already.

more competition could kill vr if the first to release sucks and its just a cash grab.
 

Zhyr

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May 19, 2013
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Assuming that the APIs for each product work perfectly, there shouldn't be any issue with deadline>quality, though going by the most recent releases, the idea of perfect APIs is obviously a fantasy.
 

Dixres

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Correction to the article; the three companies mentioned do not compete with each other at this point of time.
Sonys Morpheus is focused on the PlayStation franchise. Microsoft will, obviously, go mainly for the Xbox market. Rifts primary concern is PC users while they do aim for a product that works on all platforms.

Out of the three mentioned products Rift has the most potential. As they are not affiliated with any single brand of consoles they have free hands, so to speak. If you're building a product for an existing platform you always have limits for how far you can go; such as machine specs. For example if Sony wants to build an HMD that works as well as the Rift, they'll have to invest approximately three times as much money into it. Quite obviously this will be visible in the retail price of the final product.

That's not to say I'm biased towards the Rift. To be honest I would much rather have something made by Sony if it were up to par but currently I wouldn't touch a Morpheus even with a stick if I had an Oculus Rift on hands - purely for the difference in quality.

I could go on and on about this topic but in the end what matters is that Microsoft will be out of the competition before long. Quite honestly they shouldn't get into the hardware side of business if they know what's good for them.

And for some predictions on the VR market some 10-ish years from now: Sony will likely hold a marketshare of 30-40% in the VR business while Rift will get around 50-65%. The final 10-15% will be shared between several smaller makers - some of which will grow to be bigger than either Sony or Oculus in a few years time. None of the smaller companies exist yet in 2014 as established companies although some are probably being brainstormed on already.
 

alidan

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from what i know, the sony one is also geared for pc's unless something changed, microsoft is an unknown one right now, and the rift is working with everyone who will work with them with consoles as a possibility.

if you want my bets, the rift is going to split off and become 2 different things, one being the head mount and the second being the sensor hardware, because lets be honest, a display could easily be upgraded over time, hell, cellphones are probably going to try to push the resolution to a absolutely retarded degree, and most of us will probably have our first 4k and 8k device in the form of a phone... but the sensor hardware... they are trying to make that as good a possible right now, so future upgrades will be a bit harder...
after the first rift with it all built in, the second will be a kit, and the third will be just the display.
the sony side... they have a hard time competing with anyone quality for cost wise outside of their consoles, and they arent doing to good, so if the rift is successful, i can see them abandoning the hmd race entirely

now microsoft is in an interesting area, because they hate the pc side of their business so much, and want to be a console or tablet company, there is a good chance they will never adopt the rift and instead try their own and keep making new incarnations of it, if its good... if its bad they will declare it a failure and because really only a few games not made specifically for the rift would be better with it outside of niche "i made a roller coaster and want to ride it" type things, just not allow it at all until they are forced to.

i mean thinking of it, really all the rift is is a display with some sensors, anything could read them and display... its only a matter of a simple driver... hell if the consoles don't do it the people who hack them probably will figure out how.
 

Evarin

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There is still an issue of processing power. Where is this thing drawing its power? It certainly isn't a tablet, and if it is doing its own on board processing, expect SIGNIFICANT latency. The only alternative is that MS developed an entirely new way of powering devices, which seems highly unlikely, though not impossible.
 

alidan

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ok, first, power wise... i believe usb2 has enough power to run small monitors, and the most demanding thing from a monitor is light, and with a smaller size, is a lower requirement. now... all of the sensors depending on implementation could easily pull at 1000hz, looking up or down left or right, and if set up right the act of peaking around a corner could be fairly responsive...

as for the video, plug it into a hdmi in the back, each eye would be about half the current game resolution, so between 720p and 1080p total.

but because of how useless it is in games that don't specifically give you an advantage (think of a 3rd person action game... vs a racing game) the use of it outside of games built for it is... limited in the best cases. so if its not externally processed and just small data sets on position are fed, processing power overhead on consoles could be used.
 

IQ11110002

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I'll be more excited once they sort out the crap resolution,It's still not good enough for total immersion, Need at least 1440p per eye but preferably 4k. So still think it's going to be another year or two before we get proper VR.
Latency issues are pretty much sorted now, No more motion sickness that some experience.
Just need better resolution and maybe incorporate a 7.1 surround headset into the goggles and it should be sweet.
 

alidan

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no on the headphones, if i was forced to use the crap that they would bundle in it i am not willing to sacrifice audio being good for vr...

as far as resolution... this is something that you have to wear to really have an opinion on... last time i had vr, on my head i think the screens were 240p or 320p if not less, and the game was sin multiplayer... if i could have just THAT right now, i would be happy, the ui would need to be compensated for in games, but resolution is less of an issue than you think it is.

this isn't augmented reality,
 
Simulation sickness is still very much an issue even with sdk 2. As I've mentioned elsewhere I had 3 people try the sdk 2 and all three got sick at 30 seconds, 5 minutes and around 10 minutes respectively. OR forum has plenty of sdk 2 nausea posts. This stuff is absolutely not ready for prime time and the sdk 2 resolution is terrible that close to the eyes; VR the watercolor.
 

Steveymoo

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I'm waiting for the day when tech can produce a pair of glasses with a built in, transparent, flexible OLED screen that seemlessly covers the whole glass. Google glass but less distracting.
 

hixbot

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There's few console games that do even 3DTV well. Black Ops 2 is the only one I've played that does it right. The new consoles have been out for over a year and there hasn't been a single 3DTV game. If the devs can't do a good job with 3DTVs, something that is going unused in many people's homes, then I don't have much hope for multiple VR products that don't even share a common API.
 
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