Been working on VR side projects for 3 years now, I've built against the DK1, DK2, CV1 and the Vive and I have to say there's zero question in my mind that Oculus is FAR behind the curve. The Vive was love at first sight, the Oculus was quite the opposite.
The Vive is stunning, not only because room-scale VR is fantastic. (I don't share the opinion that the future rests solely with room scale, there's plenty of stuff to do in VR sitting down) but also because Valve just seems to have it together more than Oculus. The Lighthouse system is brilliant, it's a much more elegant solution than what Oculus has. The Oculus platform is gross, I don't see any advantages to using it from the consumer side, as far as I can tell it only exists to lock people into a particular ecosystem.
I understand why they did it, similarly to Origin or the Epic Games Launcher, but seriously? Steam won. I find it incredibly frustrating having to futz around with other platforms. Do they seriously think that I'm going to add all my Steam friends on the Oculus platform? That's ridiculous. I'm very doubtful that the platforms will get a userbase outside of the people who are FORCED to use them because they want a particular exclusive.
To top it all off it takes 3 USB ports to run the Oculus (4 if you want the controllers) vs the Vive's one.
It's so satisfying watching them get their just desserts after betraying their Kickstarter backers by taking the Facebook money and then going back on all their words about keeping the platform free for everybody. Meanwhile that acquisition kicked off a race among the other big players which Valve appears to be winning while having the best features. I mean, Valve isn't perfect, but they're a lot better than Facebook. Things seem to have worked out for the best for once.
Valve's Lighthouse tracking system isn't particularly elegant from a usability standpoint. I see Oculus' and Valve's current systems as a temporary solution. The future likely is in inside out tracking (i.e. one or more cameras on the headset, looking out). Oculus is working on that. I'd be surprised if Valve isn't.
I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher walls for their garden.
I've used both and the differences between the platforms are so small compared to the huge technological breakthrough that I think which one people buy will be a toss up. I bought the oculus because I have a one bedroom apartment and have maybe a 2x2 foot space to use it in. Room scale isn't really an option for me. I like the Vive, but I really think that room scale is a liability nightmare waiting to happen. In two weeks of doing demos at work, we lost two computers from people ripping the cords out or kicking them and at least one person got clocked with a controller while I was watching people do demos for an hour. (and this was with a full time minder) Encouraging people to move around a swing controllers while wearing a blindfold is a terrible idea and someone's child or pet is going to be seriously hurt, no matter how many warnings you give people.
The CV1 that Oculus gave me, which I'm very grateful for, won't even turn on when I plug it in. I'm not installing Windows and a sub-Steam walled garden to use it. I should have kept the DK1. :-/
The worst part is Oculus sold customers on something more open than they delivered. Now if you buy from their store your purchases are locked to their headset, and if you ever buy anything else in the future.
Oculus/Palmer said they didn't care if you modded their games to work on third party headsets, just they weren't going to provide support themselves; instead they went out and broke it intentionally.
>If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware - if it was, why in the world would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers? The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke...
The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintains a virtual monopoly on PC games distribution. Sure they aren't as powerful as iOS app store or the Google Play store, but Valve wants the same thing as any other player - to be in a position where you can't avoid selling your content through their channel and to take a big cut of all the sales. Those who attack Oculus for trying to be the one who gets the cut are deluding themselves. Apple, Google, Valve, they all already do this. Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit?
The PC gaming community online can be extremely toxic and idealistic, entirely ignoring business realities.
Maybe I'm not as aware of all the details as others, but it seems to me that Valve has maintained their position by creating an incredible platform and collection of products (Steam itself, Steam Link, the Steam Controller, etc.), not by engaging in anti-consumer practices. For instance, SteamVR has full support for the Rift. The Chaperone features will even work with the Rift.
More than that, though, I see very few examples of people being upset about the existence of the Oculus Store. People are upset about hardware exclusivity. Hence...
> Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do?
I'd expect them to act in such a way as to maximize software sales, which means avoiding hardware exclusivity at all costs.
Again, I and most others don't really have a problem with Oculus creating their own store. Sure, it's a bit annoying, but we understand they can't really survive by letting Valve profit off software sales of games they've funded. None of this justifies hardware exclusivity though.
This leaves open the question of why they are in fact pursuing hardware exclusivity. I don't have a good answer to that and I'm not sure anyone outside of Oculus does. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that they must have thought that their content was just flat-out better than anything available for the Vive so that it was strong enough to drive both software and hardware sales. Unfortunately, I suspect they were wrong. Their approach backfired and developer support is centering around the Vive now.
It is grossly deceptive to say that Steam has a monopoly on games distribution when a vast number of the games on Steam are also distributed by other channels. I can't name any "Steam exclusives," which is more than I can say for Origin etc.
Frankly it's absurd to psychoanalyze Steam, saying that it wants to do what other companies are doing, and not to recognize that if it wanted to do those things it could easily do so.
> Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit?
This is confusing. If it's true that they make no money on hardware, then you'd expect them to be ecstatic that people want to buy their games (giving them money) without taking their hmd (which supposedly doesn't).
But Valve does so by providing a good platform. You have Origin, which is used mostly because of exclusive titles; most people I know would love to ditch origin for Steam.
Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.
I have an Oculus CV1, I had the DK2, and I've been making VR side-projects using their SDK for a couple years now. I'm really disillusioned about Oculus as a platform, though. I didn't even consider buying the HTC Vive because I've been riding the Oculus train for a while and had faith in them as the future of VR, but come on.
I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this.
Sidenote: for what it's worth, I haven't used my Oculus since the first week I received it. It was supposed to work with glasses (the DK2 does) by shipping with different foam faceplates that can change how far off my face it is (my glasses fit in the Oculus, it's just that the lenses are so close to my eyes that my glasses scratch them) but they silently took that off the "What's in the box" months before shipping.
> I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this.
My impression is that Carmack is working on GearVR-related stuff in isolation from the rest of the Oculus/Facebook bureaucracy from the comfort of Dallas, TX.
Ditto, I was one of the DK1 backers so got the CV1 for free.
I haven't used it much past the first week - only to demo to friends and such, really. I have some disillusionment about it also - it seems like Valve VR/Vive is getting a lot more dev support.
Having tried the Vive also, I think delaying the Oculus motion controllers was a critical error. It turns out the motion controllers really open up a lot of use cases, whereas a "simple" HMD-only feels particularly limiting in comparison.
The Rift is substantially more comfortable than the Vive - the Vive I felt was extremely front-heavy to an extent it actively distracted from the experience. That said, the idea that Oculus Rift "works with glasses" is a statement that's at most 30% true. My glasses are pretty small but while the HMD is on it crams my glasses literally up against my eyeballs - my eyelashes literally brush against the lenses of my glasses while blinking. After using the Rift my glasses are covered with eyelash/eyelid/eyeball(?) smudge marks. It's tremendously annoying.
The backing off of the "switchable glasses faceplate" promise is disappointing.
And honestly, there just isn't much content. Most of the content are tech demos.
Lucky's Tale is a really interesting vindication of the idea that platformers can work in VR - but it's also just not very compelling by itself.
Ditto Eve Valkyrie - the technology is tremendous and you can't help but get that "Battlestar Galactica come to life" glee when you first launch in your fighter... But the gameplay is just not varied or deep enough to hold you for longer than a couple of hours.
Between the discomfort of the HMD and the lack of content, there just isn't much motivation to dive back in.
I have the DK2, doesn't work with my glasses :(. Admittedly i didn't try with a CV unit I got to check out, but my brother did and it worked for him. Might just vary depending on frames.
What a shame. Rift started as a crowdfunded open project and ended up as a disgusting lock-in.
>Frequently secured through digital rights management (DRM ) technology, this functionality is typically standard for digital download stores.
Not really. There are enough DRM-free ones. I don't care about games that are released through some exclusive DRM-infested stores, but what's more worrying is that hardware itself is probably tied to those stores. I.e. can you use Rift with games for example released through GOG?
In this sense Vive isn't better now too, since it requires SteamVR (because no one else implemented OpenVR so far).
As far as I can tell none of the vendors are pursuing that sort of aggressive vendor lock. You can distribute binaries through whatever method you wish and have them work with either the Vive or Oculus. The DRM issues stem mostly from content released on the Oculus Platform.
Your point about SteamVR and the Oculus Platform being roughly equivalent is true but I think about it in a similar context to drivers. Both platforms provide an API that you can build against, though personally I have been using SteamVR/OpenVR with both the Vive and the Oculus and I haven't touched the Oculus platform save a couple tests because building against OpenVR let's me use both the Oculus and the Vive.
OSVR is the real shining light of hope in this ecosystem but as of now it just provides a layer on top of SteamVR/OpenVR/Oculus/etc requiring you to run those services in the background.
Really cool tech, but kind of a depressing start to this young industry.
I feel like desktop apps are making huge strides in being cross-platform, both in attention from developers and the lower development effort required thanks to a myriad of software platforms and tools. It's just sad to see games still clinging to "exclusives" as if that's a positive thing.
Today's Internet industry is all about vertical lock-in, app store lock-down, and surveillance (customer is product), so an "eyeball grab" and "platform grab" for VR is to be expected.
This is particularly true when we're talking about a company where this is their entire business model.
The natural progression of all software industries has always been to use proprietary first movers to dominate and control the market with DRM and lockin, burn it down, destroy all consumer and fan engagement, and then slowly flicker out where the corporate goliath that dominated first is eventually supplanted by an open community that should have been there in the first place, but everyone drank the koolaid.
Be it web standards, OSes in general, word processing, graphics editing, CAD, 3d modeling, compilers, network protocols, graphics APIs, video game engines, and now VR. The only industry that I've seen even resist for a moment this tempting devil of profit has been 3d printing, which has been in many regards losing to "ease of use" DRM restricted proprietary tonka toys in recent years.
The winner will be decided by third party support. Oculus can continue with their DRM shenanigans, but in the end it's all going to be irrelevant. The third party developers will always exceed what Oculus or Vive put out in quality and quantity. And right now, according to Steam, Vive seems to have the majority of the third party developer support.
Oculus / Vive / PSVR are all "consoles" in a way, and that as competition becomes more and more fierce, profitability on hardware will go down over time. By staying a closed platform, if Oculus can deliver on their hardware while selling software on their platform.
What's different about consoles though is that, at least in Oculus and Vive's case, the software looks to be fairly compatible with one another (hack-blocking aside by Oculus). What I don't understand is, if it's trivial to run Oculus software on other hardware platforms with hacks, why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well? Is it brand protection? They can't make large margins on their headset forever.
I have both. I greatly prefer my HTC Vive for the room-scale + wand experience. I also really like Steam VR over Oculus Home.
The HTC Vive works like a peripheral. I launch Steam, start Steam VR mode, and put the headset on. It feels like PC gaming.
The Oculus Rift feels like a console. I put the headset on, and it launches Oculus Home. It's a very polished presentation and the HW-SW integration is deep and satisfying.
They're more peripherals than consoles. This is what makes it so frustrating to see what's happened to Oculus. Their recent moves are very anti-developer.
I think Valve is trying to create an open platform for VR, so at least you could use Vive or some other device (probably not Oculus, though) that works with Steam VR games. It also makes no sense for Valve to allow anyone else that doesn't abide by those standards to use the Steam store (including Oculus).
I'm not a fan of lock-in at all but if Oculus don't make money selling the hardware and can't expect a high chance of sales from their store then how are they suppose to make money? Is their whole business model based on purchases from the Oculus store?
Competition is good. I don't like how Oculus is trying to create their own locked in ecosystem but I don't like how some people only want to buy things from Steam either.
Rift has two major advantages that made me choose it:
1. Doesn't require to hang stuff on walls, a single sensor beside the monitor is enough. For me dedicating a room to VR is out of the question.
2. It has built in headphones. Yes they look "cheap" on pictures, but when you actually use a VR headset that goes on and off a lot you appreciate the convenience. Sound is also VERY good in them.
I don't get the blind Facebook hate and Steam fanboyism. Remember Steam is a 35% taking monopoly on PC gaming. If anything that monopoly needs to be dealt with.
As much as I'd like to see an "underdog" win the VR wars I think the Space race to market is a very small part of the battle. Facebook will be able to market non-gaming apps much better then gaming companies, imo, and so don't necessarily have to be first, just eventually get close to parity (which is inevitable).
Hey, come on, 3D was huge and the glasses you have to wear for this don't make you look as silly and are totally not going to give you headaches or make you sick, plus there'll be even more content for this, and because of the standards you can just buy any hardware and choose from thousands of great, great games.
[+] [-] errantspark|9 years ago|reply
The Vive is stunning, not only because room-scale VR is fantastic. (I don't share the opinion that the future rests solely with room scale, there's plenty of stuff to do in VR sitting down) but also because Valve just seems to have it together more than Oculus. The Lighthouse system is brilliant, it's a much more elegant solution than what Oculus has. The Oculus platform is gross, I don't see any advantages to using it from the consumer side, as far as I can tell it only exists to lock people into a particular ecosystem.
I understand why they did it, similarly to Origin or the Epic Games Launcher, but seriously? Steam won. I find it incredibly frustrating having to futz around with other platforms. Do they seriously think that I'm going to add all my Steam friends on the Oculus platform? That's ridiculous. I'm very doubtful that the platforms will get a userbase outside of the people who are FORCED to use them because they want a particular exclusive.
To top it all off it takes 3 USB ports to run the Oculus (4 if you want the controllers) vs the Vive's one.
[+] [-] tk32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phoboslab|9 years ago|reply
I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher walls for their garden.
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paavokoya|9 years ago|reply
sounds like a certain parent company..
[+] [-] proyb2|9 years ago|reply
Thanks, I didn't jump in the bandwagon early.
[+] [-] yarrel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cma|9 years ago|reply
Oculus/Palmer said they didn't care if you modded their games to work on third party headsets, just they weren't going to provide support themselves; instead they went out and broke it intentionally.
>If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware - if it was, why in the world would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers? The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke...
>As I already said in my first reply, I don't care if people mod their games as long as they are buying them. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke...
>Glad there are some sane people out there. [said to someone saying it was only an issue of support] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4etddh/this_is_a_hack...
[+] [-] __david__|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] istorical|9 years ago|reply
The PC gaming community online can be extremely toxic and idealistic, entirely ignoring business realities.
[+] [-] nilkn|9 years ago|reply
More than that, though, I see very few examples of people being upset about the existence of the Oculus Store. People are upset about hardware exclusivity. Hence...
> Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do?
I'd expect them to act in such a way as to maximize software sales, which means avoiding hardware exclusivity at all costs.
Again, I and most others don't really have a problem with Oculus creating their own store. Sure, it's a bit annoying, but we understand they can't really survive by letting Valve profit off software sales of games they've funded. None of this justifies hardware exclusivity though.
This leaves open the question of why they are in fact pursuing hardware exclusivity. I don't have a good answer to that and I'm not sure anyone outside of Oculus does. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that they must have thought that their content was just flat-out better than anything available for the Vive so that it was strong enough to drive both software and hardware sales. Unfortunately, I suspect they were wrong. Their approach backfired and developer support is centering around the Vive now.
[+] [-] pekk|9 years ago|reply
Frankly it's absurd to psychoanalyze Steam, saying that it wants to do what other companies are doing, and not to recognize that if it wanted to do those things it could easily do so.
[+] [-] kybernetikos|9 years ago|reply
This is confusing. If it's true that they make no money on hardware, then you'd expect them to be ecstatic that people want to buy their games (giving them money) without taking their hmd (which supposedly doesn't).
[+] [-] NKCSS|9 years ago|reply
Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.
[+] [-] jc4p|9 years ago|reply
I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this.
Sidenote: for what it's worth, I haven't used my Oculus since the first week I received it. It was supposed to work with glasses (the DK2 does) by shipping with different foam faceplates that can change how far off my face it is (my glasses fit in the Oculus, it's just that the lenses are so close to my eyes that my glasses scratch them) but they silently took that off the "What's in the box" months before shipping.
[+] [-] shazow|9 years ago|reply
My impression is that Carmack is working on GearVR-related stuff in isolation from the rest of the Oculus/Facebook bureaucracy from the comfort of Dallas, TX.
Hard to tell, but I'm not convinced he's even aware (or cares) about what's going on with Oculus in general: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/733761224098242560
[+] [-] potatolicious|9 years ago|reply
I haven't used it much past the first week - only to demo to friends and such, really. I have some disillusionment about it also - it seems like Valve VR/Vive is getting a lot more dev support.
Having tried the Vive also, I think delaying the Oculus motion controllers was a critical error. It turns out the motion controllers really open up a lot of use cases, whereas a "simple" HMD-only feels particularly limiting in comparison.
The Rift is substantially more comfortable than the Vive - the Vive I felt was extremely front-heavy to an extent it actively distracted from the experience. That said, the idea that Oculus Rift "works with glasses" is a statement that's at most 30% true. My glasses are pretty small but while the HMD is on it crams my glasses literally up against my eyeballs - my eyelashes literally brush against the lenses of my glasses while blinking. After using the Rift my glasses are covered with eyelash/eyelid/eyeball(?) smudge marks. It's tremendously annoying.
The backing off of the "switchable glasses faceplate" promise is disappointing.
And honestly, there just isn't much content. Most of the content are tech demos.
Lucky's Tale is a really interesting vindication of the idea that platformers can work in VR - but it's also just not very compelling by itself.
Ditto Eve Valkyrie - the technology is tremendous and you can't help but get that "Battlestar Galactica come to life" glee when you first launch in your fighter... But the gameplay is just not varied or deep enough to hold you for longer than a couple of hours.
Between the discomfort of the HMD and the lack of content, there just isn't much motivation to dive back in.
[+] [-] thearn4|9 years ago|reply
That's a really good point - has he spoken at all about the direction of Oculus & HMD VR in general since the Rift was released?
[+] [-] agmcleod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
>Frequently secured through digital rights management (DRM ) technology, this functionality is typically standard for digital download stores.
Not really. There are enough DRM-free ones. I don't care about games that are released through some exclusive DRM-infested stores, but what's more worrying is that hardware itself is probably tied to those stores. I.e. can you use Rift with games for example released through GOG?
In this sense Vive isn't better now too, since it requires SteamVR (because no one else implemented OpenVR so far).
[+] [-] errantspark|9 years ago|reply
Your point about SteamVR and the Oculus Platform being roughly equivalent is true but I think about it in a similar context to drivers. Both platforms provide an API that you can build against, though personally I have been using SteamVR/OpenVR with both the Vive and the Oculus and I haven't touched the Oculus platform save a couple tests because building against OpenVR let's me use both the Oculus and the Vive.
OSVR is the real shining light of hope in this ecosystem but as of now it just provides a layer on top of SteamVR/OpenVR/Oculus/etc requiring you to run those services in the background.
[+] [-] ohitsdom|9 years ago|reply
I feel like desktop apps are making huge strides in being cross-platform, both in attention from developers and the lower development effort required thanks to a myriad of software platforms and tools. It's just sad to see games still clinging to "exclusives" as if that's a positive thing.
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
This is particularly true when we're talking about a company where this is their entire business model.
[+] [-] davesque|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|9 years ago|reply
Be it web standards, OSes in general, word processing, graphics editing, CAD, 3d modeling, compilers, network protocols, graphics APIs, video game engines, and now VR. The only industry that I've seen even resist for a moment this tempting devil of profit has been 3d printing, which has been in many regards losing to "ease of use" DRM restricted proprietary tonka toys in recent years.
[+] [-] bitmapbrother|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] some-guy|9 years ago|reply
What's different about consoles though is that, at least in Oculus and Vive's case, the software looks to be fairly compatible with one another (hack-blocking aside by Oculus). What I don't understand is, if it's trivial to run Oculus software on other hardware platforms with hacks, why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well? Is it brand protection? They can't make large margins on their headset forever.
[+] [-] breckenedge|9 years ago|reply
The HTC Vive works like a peripheral. I launch Steam, start Steam VR mode, and put the headset on. It feels like PC gaming.
The Oculus Rift feels like a console. I put the headset on, and it launches Oculus Home. It's a very polished presentation and the HW-SW integration is deep and satisfying.
[+] [-] rocky1138|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onewaystreet|9 years ago|reply
They don't. Oculus is selling the Rift at cost.
> Why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well?
Their goal is to build a user base through exclusives. Exclusives aren't exclusive if you can play them on other hardware.
[+] [-] serge2k|9 years ago|reply
Hopefully they will just go out of business instead. No more walled garden bullshit, this is a VR peripheral. It doesn't need an app store attached.
[+] [-] seanwilson|9 years ago|reply
Competition is good. I don't like how Oculus is trying to create their own locked in ecosystem but I don't like how some people only want to buy things from Steam either.
[+] [-] nol13|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bni|9 years ago|reply
1. Doesn't require to hang stuff on walls, a single sensor beside the monitor is enough. For me dedicating a room to VR is out of the question.
2. It has built in headphones. Yes they look "cheap" on pictures, but when you actually use a VR headset that goes on and off a lot you appreciate the convenience. Sound is also VERY good in them.
I don't get the blind Facebook hate and Steam fanboyism. Remember Steam is a 35% taking monopoly on PC gaming. If anything that monopoly needs to be dealt with.
[+] [-] ben_jones|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] highCs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dave2000|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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