Slopey
Volunteer Moderator
Hi All,
I've just come back from OTC Houston where I had the Vive on our booth all week, running a Unity game I wrote just for something cool to have on the stand. (I originally wrote it for the Rift with an Xbox controller, but that was barf inducing, so I re-wrote it for the Vive the day before the conference started - much more visceral experience as it involved hitting pipes with a hammer).
Here's a few little observations for other Vive owners - especially if you plan doing Unity stuff with it.
The Vive performance is nowhere near as smooth as the CV1 (due to the timewarp), and if you have a large amount of terrain or assets in the view, you get quite a bit of judder. Particle systems can be problematic also depending on how many you have. On the CV1, my demo scene (which was an oil rig in a yard with pipes, surrounded by jungle) was butter smooth, but suffered from horrendous judder. The only way I could get acceptable performance on the Vive was to drop out the jungle style terrain surrounding it. I swapped it over to a moon environment (which was free on the asset store), and decent performance with that, so it would have been the grass/speed trees which was pulling down the Vive.
We had several hundred people play the game throughout the week - many wore glasses, so I had a chance to see how the Vive handled different types/users. Generally it wasn't a problem - the best way is to put the HMD on first, then pull the straps over the back of your head and adjust as necessary, but the Vive will accommodate glasses without issue if the eye relief is set to max. Be careful when you take it off though as it tends to take the glasses with it and they may fall.
The lighthouses can be very very temperamental. To ensure they sync, I've taken to turning them on before anything else, pointed squarely at each other and leave them for 5 mins or so before starting up the PC/Vive proper. If they don't talk, set one to "A", and the other to "c", and ideally power off the "c" unit for a while - more often than not, when it comes back on again, the A station will see it and steam VR will then recommend that A is swapped to channel b. I couldn't get them opposite each other on a diagonal, but (facing the PC), one at 11 o'clock and one at 3 o'clock worked pretty well.
What's interesting is that some people "get" VR, and some don't. There was a clear demographic split depending on the nationality of the user which I found very interesting - you could almost predict who would do well with it and who wouldn't based on the country they came from. We were in the international pavilion, so there was a very wide mix of people playing the game. But it ranged from people who "got it" straight away and moved effectively within the game, to those who simply walked off in a direction (the game uses a teleport system to move in the same way as vanishing realms) - and those people just charged off into a real world booth wall! They required a LOT of chaperoning! The final group just stood there dumbfounded, and couldn't process it - even when I was talking them through it i.e. "see that red pipe right in front of you?", "no?", "it's right there - you're looking at it", "I can't see it....." etc - very very strange.
The other thing which as interesting from a game design perspective is that when the 2 minute "game" was up, I put up a very very large, red "GAME OVER - You Scored XXXX" message right in the center of the view. I'd say at least 50% of people totally ignored it - they had to be told the game was over they were that immersed in it, at which point they processed the text on screen (it's almost impossible to miss you'd think!), and they realised it was there. So in VR, with people looking "past" the interface, they may simply filter it out!
Charger life on the controllers was excellent, and provided I charged them overnight, I could generally get from around 9am to 3pm without having to charge them again. The game only used a single controller, so I could simply swap them later in the day. That took a bit of on/off/on/off toggling to get SteamVR to recognise the "new" one, but it did work after 30-40 seconds or so once the other one was turned off.
The game has a couple of small bugs which can cause it to drop out if you leave it to sit too long, but once I've tidied those up a bit I'll make it available so people can get an idea of what you can whip up in about 6-8 hours with Unity.
Hope that's of use to someone
I've just come back from OTC Houston where I had the Vive on our booth all week, running a Unity game I wrote just for something cool to have on the stand. (I originally wrote it for the Rift with an Xbox controller, but that was barf inducing, so I re-wrote it for the Vive the day before the conference started - much more visceral experience as it involved hitting pipes with a hammer).
Here's a few little observations for other Vive owners - especially if you plan doing Unity stuff with it.
The Vive performance is nowhere near as smooth as the CV1 (due to the timewarp), and if you have a large amount of terrain or assets in the view, you get quite a bit of judder. Particle systems can be problematic also depending on how many you have. On the CV1, my demo scene (which was an oil rig in a yard with pipes, surrounded by jungle) was butter smooth, but suffered from horrendous judder. The only way I could get acceptable performance on the Vive was to drop out the jungle style terrain surrounding it. I swapped it over to a moon environment (which was free on the asset store), and decent performance with that, so it would have been the grass/speed trees which was pulling down the Vive.
We had several hundred people play the game throughout the week - many wore glasses, so I had a chance to see how the Vive handled different types/users. Generally it wasn't a problem - the best way is to put the HMD on first, then pull the straps over the back of your head and adjust as necessary, but the Vive will accommodate glasses without issue if the eye relief is set to max. Be careful when you take it off though as it tends to take the glasses with it and they may fall.
The lighthouses can be very very temperamental. To ensure they sync, I've taken to turning them on before anything else, pointed squarely at each other and leave them for 5 mins or so before starting up the PC/Vive proper. If they don't talk, set one to "A", and the other to "c", and ideally power off the "c" unit for a while - more often than not, when it comes back on again, the A station will see it and steam VR will then recommend that A is swapped to channel b. I couldn't get them opposite each other on a diagonal, but (facing the PC), one at 11 o'clock and one at 3 o'clock worked pretty well.
What's interesting is that some people "get" VR, and some don't. There was a clear demographic split depending on the nationality of the user which I found very interesting - you could almost predict who would do well with it and who wouldn't based on the country they came from. We were in the international pavilion, so there was a very wide mix of people playing the game. But it ranged from people who "got it" straight away and moved effectively within the game, to those who simply walked off in a direction (the game uses a teleport system to move in the same way as vanishing realms) - and those people just charged off into a real world booth wall! They required a LOT of chaperoning! The final group just stood there dumbfounded, and couldn't process it - even when I was talking them through it i.e. "see that red pipe right in front of you?", "no?", "it's right there - you're looking at it", "I can't see it....." etc - very very strange.
The other thing which as interesting from a game design perspective is that when the 2 minute "game" was up, I put up a very very large, red "GAME OVER - You Scored XXXX" message right in the center of the view. I'd say at least 50% of people totally ignored it - they had to be told the game was over they were that immersed in it, at which point they processed the text on screen (it's almost impossible to miss you'd think!), and they realised it was there. So in VR, with people looking "past" the interface, they may simply filter it out!
Charger life on the controllers was excellent, and provided I charged them overnight, I could generally get from around 9am to 3pm without having to charge them again. The game only used a single controller, so I could simply swap them later in the day. That took a bit of on/off/on/off toggling to get SteamVR to recognise the "new" one, but it did work after 30-40 seconds or so once the other one was turned off.
The game has a couple of small bugs which can cause it to drop out if you leave it to sit too long, but once I've tidied those up a bit I'll make it available so people can get an idea of what you can whip up in about 6-8 hours with Unity.
Hope that's of use to someone
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