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VR Headsets have issues with sales
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Virtual reality was supposed to be the next big thing, but headsets haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves. The question is, why?

    There were $1.48 billion in VR hardware sales in 2016, according to SuperData Research. That is far from the $12.65 billion the research firm is forecasting for 2020. That estimate has come down, and there is still reason to question whether VR will get there.

    In March, digital marketing research firm Thrive Analytics asked the question to internet users who weren’t interested in owning a VR headset. The survey, as summarized by eMarketer, showed many of the expected reasons: the headsets were too expensive, lack of virtual reality content and poor quality of what was out there, and fear of motion sickness.

    The biggest chunk, some 53%, said they were “just not interested.” Perhaps actual reality is difficult enough.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/vr-headsets-get-stuck-on-shelves-1495219104

  • 14 Replies sorted by
  • alcomposeralcomposer

    Also remember all smartphones are really good virtual reality devices. They all have gyroscopes and allow the user to share the experience of looking around with other people.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @alcomposer

    Not so good, as you have half of pixels per eye, also lenses usually not fully optimized, hence another drop.

    And all top Samsung's have full res only for green pixels. :-)

    For good VR you need minimum 4K per eye, this is why things stuck.

  • RambalacRambalac

    @alcomposer smartphones are very bad VR devices. Too high latency, too inaccurate sensors, too low per eye resolution , too bad performance for anything useful.

  • olli66olli66

    bought one Oculus Rift today. tried some VR porn and it looks...awful. tested 4 different players. am I doing something wrong or is this total bs? it is so unsharp, I can't stand it

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @olli66

    Well, now we need some advice how to make VR porn look good :-)

    Did you used 4K only and good source? I mean not streaming shit.

  • olli66olli66

    tried videos form different sites, most were 3840x1920 I really wonder if I am doing something wrong I tried supersampling, cranking up AA, Pixel Per Display Pixel Override, nothing improves the picture to a point where I can see it clearly

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    I think that smartphones are decent enough if viewing mono, and not using any headset. So it simply becomes a device that you can 'look around' the video.

    The benefit of this- is that no-one needs specialist hardware, as their mobile phone is all they need, and everyone has one of those.

    For high quality immersive experience of course you would need a 4k device with OLED etc etc. Mobile phones are 'bad' but also 'good' in the sense that they allow anyone to experience VR with minimal / no investment.

    And this is what YouTube is already doing, allowing a mono VR experience on Smartphones (as an option). Facebook already plays VR experiences in news feeds, so people can use their smartphones to look around.

    I don't know if we can judge the success of VR on headset sales, due to this reason.

  • DouglasHornDouglasHorn

    Gear VR with a Samsung S7 is just terrible resolution. You can see all of the pixels and the noise and compression are both hugely magnified. Also, there's terrible chromatic aberration on everything but the center of the image due to the cheap plastic lenses used.

    It's a bit disheartening. I've created a very high quality camera rig from 4 GH4s and the videos look great, but when you watch on a headset, all the sharpness disappears.

    But headsets really are a far better way to watch 360º videos than just using a loose smartphone. You do get the immersive quality that makes VR worthwhile, even with the soft images. I'm using spatial audio in my recordings now and it really helps the experience.

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    I think current problem is that even the HTC Vive isn't a 4k display. Once we get 4k OLED's in VR headsets then they will sharpen up. That really is the base level of resolution needed for VR.

  • olli66olli66

    I talked to a friend yesterday who has seen VR on the Playstation and he said it was sharp. I usually trust his judgement. So now I really ask myself if it is my eyes? I have no comparison. All I watched so far is porn on my Oculus. Did I mess up any settings? Is it my eyes? Is there a way to see which resolution the Oculus outputs?

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    @olli66 while I wont comment on what your watching, I can say that you may want to download some VR test footage from YouTube, there are some 4K examples there- even driftwood put up a test of his monster 12k GX85 rig!

  • olli66olli66

    will download some of driftwood's videos and comment soon. but filesize seems to be very low regarding the length and duration. will jdownloader download the videos in 360?

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    I use a download plugin for Firefox. I think it's called media downloader. It will show you all the available streams.

    Also some of the image stitching softwares have demo videos in VR, as do many lens manufactures.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    HTC VIVE Pro price cut to $599, sales still suck

    https://blog.vive.com/us/2020/01/10/htc-vive-pro-now-599/

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