This is the Oculus after spending some time with the Vive. I still think VR has a very long way to go before we get an AAA experience with it, but with the Vive I feel like the range of possible genres with which to do that is significantly larger than the Oculus. The biggest problem with the Oculus is that you are stationary, and that you must use a controller. Vive fixes these by giving you motion controllers and by allowing you to move.

First, the motion controllers are really cool and amazingly appear exactly where they should be. You won't have any trouble picking them up, and they enable interaction that is much more natural. The Valve demo lab had very good interaction, and picking up and moving stuff was very easy. Other games have varying degrees of success. If you have trouble manipulating objects in the world, then it's the game's fault, not the hardware's. Unfortunately, the demo lab was probably the BEST in terms of immersion and seamlessness that I was able to play, with all third party games being much less refined. At least I know it's possible.

Being able to walk around is HUGE. You do not know how much this improves the experience until doing it. It's completely natural. Absolutely second nature, to the point where if you go back to Oculus it feels completely wrong. There was a mini golf game for Vive I played that worked exactly how you'd expect: you could walk around your ball, examine the play area, etc. The larger your room the more you can move before hitting a wall. The Vive puts up a transparent mesh to let you know when you're going outside the bounds of your room, and games have options to move you via teleport if you need to go farther. It's pretty seamless. Again, it makes Oculus look like total shit. I can't stress how much this improves the experience.

The demo lab had several presentations with actual animated characters, and I was surprised at how cool it was. It felt very 'real', but I still knew my brain was being tricked.

The mini golf game was great, and I think the Vive could do adventure games or dinner murder mystery type experiences very well. I think something like PT on the VIve would never get released because too many people would be shitting themselves out of fear.

The biggest problem is that while the movement is crucial to an immersive experience, you are constrained by several things. The first most obvious is your physical room space. You can only walk so far before you hit a wall. Thus, all the games have a teleportation mechanic when you can point at an area and instantly jump to it. The second, is that you can't physically interact with the game geometry. You can walk through tables, and sloped surfaces are a huge problem. This is unfixable unless you can somehow have shit rise out of your floor on demand to create physical replicas of the terrain, which is not happening in the near future or possibly at all for home use.

The last problem is more fixable, but still a huge pain in the ass and that's the cables. Vive needs to go wireless. You quickly get tangled up, and there's way more cables going into the headset than Oculus. While mini golf was cool, I was constantly fighting the twisted mess of cables on the floor and around my body.

The Vive also has a much smaller field of view than the Oculus, and it is rounded instead of rectangular. You feel like you are looking through a snorkel mask. No VR system I have used so far has filled my entire field of view. I don't know why they are making these small ass screens and cutting off my peripheral vision. You do not get used to it, and it constantly makes the experience claustrophobic instead of immersive.

Bottom line: Oculus fucked up with no motion controls or ability to let you walk around. I had some cool experiences with the Vive, but they are essentially either gimmicks or minigames, which is fine because they were fun for a bit, but it's not going to be a staple gaming experience any time soon.. I think maybe in 15 years we can start having quality AAA experiences in something like adventure games, and maybe within a few years in something like Flight Sim or Racing.

But we will never get Uncharted 4 in our lifetimes or anything remotely close.

But we will never get Uncharted 4 in our lifetimes or anything remotely close.

How does it know how big my room is?

The walk through stuff does seem to be a pretty big problem. Maybe someday we could have a belt or an entire suit with some multi-directional force feedback that would bump you as your bump into things like walls or tables or whatever?

One of the neatest thing I've seen with regards to VR was the idea of old laser tag arenas refitting themselves with custom physical geometry like rooms of defined shape and size, padded pillars in the middle of rooms and hallways, and strings hanging down from the ceiling. Without the VR it looks a lot like a McDonalds playpen or something. With the VR you're in a forest or exploring a dungeon. The pillars become trees or stone supports. The thin strings become spider webs or a doorway separated from the outside by beads.

I never really saw the promise in 3DTVs. Too expensive, not enough support, would only really work for one or two people at a time without a lot more expense. But immersive VR where you can really walk around and explore a custom space without too much fear of bumping into a unmatched wall. That sounds cool!

It knows the size of the area because you set up sensors on the wall, then with the controllers 'paint' the playable area. You mount the sensors in opposite corners of the room.

Where is our artificial intelligence that behaves like humans? In the 70s they said we'd have it by now. But we don't. We don't because of fundamental limitations of computers. The brain is not a computer and does not process data representationally. You cannot get around this fact. Hence why we do not have human level machine intelligence and probably never will. I've been seeing a lot of papers on this in the popular media recently which now agree. I only wonder why now the idea is starting to take hold, when in college it took me 4 hours of research to determine the argument had already been pretty much conclusively settled.

VR has fundamental limitations. There is no fundamental limitation in having more memory. You can always have more. It's just more of the same. But when you map these improvements to VR tech you get better tracking and more pixels etc, but this doesn't solve the problems.

I thought you recently said PSVR was the winner. Was that for effect? It certainly seems to me that Vive is THE VR to get if you must choose just one.

I thought you recently said PSVR was the winner. Was that for effect? It certainly seems to me that Vive is THE VR to get if you must choose just one.

PSVR will be the winner commercially. Not nessesarily in terms of tech. The Vive not only requires a huge investment in hardware but also in living space as well. Those without large rooms need not apply.

There have been some reports that PSVR will not work well until you buy a new PS4 Neo. So the price difference at least might be a little closer if the reports are true.

There have been some reports that PSVR will not work well until you buy a new PS4 Neo. So the price difference at least might be a little closer if the reports are true.

Yeah who knows. I look forward to trying Gran Turismo and Golem on it though.

Where is our artificial intelligence that behaves like humans? In the 70s they said we'd have it by now. But we don't. We don't because of fundamental limitations of computers. The brain is not a computer and does not process data representationally. You cannot get around this fact. Hence why we do not have human level machine intelligence and probably never will. I've been seeing a lot of papers on this in the popular media recently which now agree. I only wonder why now the idea is starting to take hold, when in college it took me 4 hours of research to determine the argument had already been pretty much conclusively settled.

Neural nets are a core component of a lot of modern computing (like language recognition). There's no fundamental limitation preventing a computer from running a whole brain emulation.

While the analogy is usually made, neural nets and actual neuron nets are still quite different. Still, I agree with you that there are no fundamental limits preventing a computer from simulating a brain, I just think we're still WAY too far away from that.

Where is our artificial intelligence that behaves like humans? In the 70s they said we'd have it by now. But we don't. We don't because of fundamental limitations of computers. The brain is not a computer and does not process data representationally. You cannot get around this fact. Hence why we do not have human level machine intelligence and probably never will.

I'd say that's a bit of an oversimplification. For fascinating reading on the issue, see Moravec's Paradox.

Where is our artificial intelligence that behaves like humans? In the 70s they said we'd have it by now. But we don't. We don't because of fundamental limitations of computers. The brain is not a computer and does not process data representationally. You cannot get around this fact. Hence why we do not have human level machine intelligence and probably never will. I've been seeing a lot of papers on this in the popular media recently which now agree. I only wonder why now the idea is starting to take hold, when in college it took me 4 hours of research to determine the argument had already been pretty much conclusively settled.

Neural nets are a core component of a lot of modern computing (like language recognition). There's no fundamental limitation preventing a computer from running a whole brain emulation.

Other than not really having any clear idea how to do it, no.

Have you seen places like this? I'm excited to try this out and see what the experience is like.

Yeah, this is only a few minutes from us, I've been thinking about giving it a shot!

Keep in mind that the Oculus rift will have controllers similar to the vive soon, they just didn't get them out the door in time. All the different VR systems will have slightly different trade-offs and you'll have to pick the one that gives you the experience you want. Ars Technica has a good article talking about the difference between the vive and rift.

Ultimately though, VR is just like any other gaming system. You have to bring a bit of imagination to the world since it can't actually change the world around you. When playing on a console today, you still have to pretend the world around the TV doesn't exist for the experience to be immersive, VR isn't going to be different.