– Another look at the Dorculus Drift DonkeyKong2 –

So i gave the rift another try, i looked into how users of the device cope with motion sickness and nausea, turns out some people slowly adapt to it over time, others never adapt and just have a barf bucket prepared, there are some who dont feel the motion sickness at all due to some pathology in their vestibular system. Theres also pills and Ginger supplements that you can take to minimize these effects. But most people just willingly sit there and torture themselves for up to 30 minutes a day till they either build up a tolerance or just simply get used to being nauseated as a part of their gameplay experience.

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FUCKING RETARDED

Anyway! I found this really nice game that doesnt make me sick after a minute of playing it, its called vanguard V, its about this mecha girl flying through space, blasting stuff and dodging the debris. This game takes an out of the box approach to gameplay using the oculus motion tracker and is a very good example on how to make games for the device that feel fresh, innovative and dont make you sick. It has really awesome music too, i wish the OST was on youtube or something.

In a stark contrast, i found a game that i literally cannot take more than 3 seconds off without removing the dork helmet and throwing it to the side in agony. It is called helix, it is the ultimate rolercoster ride simulator, it has lots of forward motion that instantly gets you nauseated.

So here’s what causes motion sickness and how to make games that dont make you wanna vomit.

The Oculus Rift motion sickness is mainly caused by unnatural motion that goes against what your vestibular system is saying, motion that you cannot feel with your body. Basically its camera position movement through space, like for example walking/driving/flying forward or looking around with a controller/mouse/keyboard instead of using the motion tracker and your own head. This type of motion is not cause by you and it cannot be detected by your vestibular system because your real body is stationary.

Games that dont cause motion sickness and nausea.

Games that only use real motion, such as you looking around by rotating your real head or moving it side to side, up and down, these kind of motions are felt by your body and your vestibular system and go hand in hand with what your eyes see, these motions do not cause dizziness or make you sick. Vanguard V is a very good example, you see your character in third person and, most of the movement in that game is natural and(done with your actual head), with the exception that you slowly fly forward, but you fly forward so slow that it doesnt effect you. Another perfect example is the desk demo from the oculus rift settings menu, you get zero dizzyness or motion sickness in that demo because in order to move through space, you have to physicaly stand up from your chair and walk around your physical room to move through space in the desk demo.
So basicaly, its games where you only rotate and move your head, real motions that go hand in hand with your vestibular system.

The most ideal use to the oculus rift system that i see would be if the helmet was made wireless and you were in a big room with motion trackers on the walls, in this room you would move around freely, moving yourself through the virtual space. Also one big boner killer to me was that i couldnt see my hands or my body in the desk demo, i couldnt try to poke through the house of cards with my finger and stuff like that, so it would be a huge plus if in addition to the VR helmet, you also had a motion capture suit on that was also constantly tracked by the motion trackers in the room, that way you would also see your body in game, making you even more immersed in the experience.

Now for games that you move through space unnaturally, maybe they could make a chair that moves and tilts and shakes in sync with the motions you are experiencing in the game, to fool your vestibular system into thinking that you are actually moving, i think this would eliminate the majority of the motion sickness.

 

The judder problem in DK2

So yeah, now that i found my game, i still cannot enjoy it because of a big judder problem with the DK2. I did some research and it turns out that this is mostly happening to games and demos made with the unity engine. There also seems to be different casuses and different solutions from person to person, some solve it by setting the rift to extend mode and running things direct to oculus and otehrs fix it by changing their primary monitor’s refresh rates and disconnecting all aditional monitors. The way i “solved” my problem was using clone display mode and disconnecting all my other monitors, just leaving my main monitor and the rift connected. But the problem now is that the rift needs my desktop to be in portrait mode and it looks like this, so basicaly every time i want to play a game i have to disconnect everything and do this to my display.

In its current state the dk2 is a broken piece of shit, only the desk demo and a handful of other demos that were not made using unity works right, i really hope that ts just an issue with the drivers that will be fixed with later updates and not the units themselves.

– The Oculus rift DK2 review –

So i got the overhyped dork helmet the other day and i feel like sharing my Oculus rift experience with you guys.

While it looks a lot better, its still a huge ugly plastic brick strapped to your head, it still has a bazillion wires that you have to connect and it still has hard abrasive parts pressing against your face(its like some sort of a face torture device) Now i understand that this is just an early wrok in progress but these things have to be addressed, the unit has to be made more compact, lightweight and comfortable to wear, it needs to not have a bunch of wires and be more simple and easy to set up and go, if they want this to really be a viable product that the average non sci-fi geek person would actually be interested in.

Aesthetics and comfort arent the only and arent the main problems with the Oculus right now though, The improvements they made over DK1 are just not enough. Mainly the screen, its still a cheep terrible low resolution rgb dot matrix LCD screen. While you can now sorta read texts in game menus and stuff, the slight increase in dot matrix resolution is not enough.

I mean, just fucking look at it, you might not notice this at your very first moments using it but the longer you use it the more it becomes painfully apparent.

The only real improvement so far is the ability to now track head position too, not just rotation. This gives you the full immersion and you can look around an object from sides an stuff, like in reality.

But enough about the terrible hardware, lets talk about the performance.

Now while my very first impressions of were HOLY FUCKING SHIT ABC YOU SHOULD SEE THIS, THIS IS SO REAL, HOLY SHIT MIND BLOWN when i looked around my virtual desk with my virtual pencil and my virtual plant and house of cards. But a few minutes after i have acclimated myself to it, and started noticing the terrible display resolution and blurred edges and my head started getting dizzy and some weird head tracking lag kicked. The edges of the screen are blurred and you have this weird color shift thing going on. Its impossible to read texts in menus that arent in the center, the black grid of gaps between the RGB dots starts to really strain your eyes and the more you move around, the more nauseated you get form all the motions. Theres also some issue where the head tracking stops being smooth and becomes all choppy, after a while you just wanna take it off and throw it somewhere and run to the bathroom to hug your toilet.

Overall while impressive at first, the whole Oculus rift experience is very unpleasant.
Its a cool toy for a few minutes but i do not see how anyone could seriously use this to play videogames, its impossible to understand whats going on the screen most of the time because of all the blur, color shift and low resolution, you cant aim and shoot at things that are at a distance because they are smaller than the size of the RGB dots, you cant read texts that arent in the center of your screen, such as game chats and small HUD texts, and it just makes you wanna vomit all over the place after just 10 minutes of playing.

Even if they give it a proper display, i think motion sickness will probably still remain the biggest issue with the device, its a real showstopper and you cant really fight basic human biology, your visual sense of motion has to be accompanied by the vestibular or your brain will freak out, meaning only those few lucky people who manage to cope with it or do not experience motion sickness, will be able to actually use it.

I do not see a very bright future for the Oculus rift, (now even more so since fagbook privatized it) It has been in development for so long and it still in its baby stages and it doesnt seem like its going anywhere fast. Im not really even sure if this is a real Development Kit or just a clever cash grab since, how are people supposed to actually develop anything for it when the development kit itself is in early stages of development and is subject to constant revisions.

Read more about why the Oculus rift future looks bleak here. http://annoyedadmin.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/oculus-and-the-rift-are-probably-dead/ Its a pretty good read.

– New APB video –

If anyone is interested, i made a new APB gameplay video

– Updates and stuff-

I finaly got around making those extra boob sizes for the half top and some other stuff. The reason why the half top didnt get the boob size update along with the tanktop is because i was thinking how to solve the alpha glitch bikini problem and wanted to take it back and work on it some more. I have merged the bikini and the halftop together so this will permanently fix the alpha glitching problem. I have also made a set of new textures for it too.

Anyway heres the new stuff.

For items that dont have update cards, the story is as before, the item you have was not updated itself, only additional versions were created that you did not buy, so you are not entitled to a free update. If you dont feel like buying the same thing again, you dont have to.