Oculus Rift Virtual Pinball Cabinet

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markc74:
Just after I purchased a 42" LCD and real DMD for my pin build... :banghead:

It does look very cool though.

Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: Grasshopper on April 02, 2016, 12:47:19 pm ---I'm not particularly a Pinball fan. But that's pretty awesome.

Anyone who thinks that VR is just a passing fad (Howard I'm looking at you) needs to watch this video.

--- End quote ---

You can look all you want, I'm still right. VR isn't a passing fad, it's "the next great thing" that's been just around the horizon for the last few decades. The tech isn't there, the cost isn't reasonable, it's doa.

If you think VR pinball is enough to get anyone aside from nuts like us or pinheads (which probably prefer the real deal come to think of it) to spend 600 bucks on a glorified monitor that will become obsolete in a year or so you are kidding yourself.

You've got to understand.. niche uses don't count because they aren't going to get the millions upon millions of units that need to be sold in order for developers to waste time supporting an optional accessory. Optional accessories have NEVER been successful in THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES. You just have to accept that fact. Here's the thing..... in terms of games support optional accessories typically get no more than 20 or 30 dedicated games in their lifecycle. If you are picking up a 30 dollar lightgun or a 20 dollar gamepad that isn't a big deal because if you are into those games it's not unreasonable to pay a little more for a proper controller. On the other hand buying a 600 dollar headset that needs a $1,500 pc to run the games at their minimum specs isn't.

For the record though the vr pin thing is awesome and I was just about to post the video. ;)

shponglefan:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on April 02, 2016, 02:57:57 pm ---You can look all you want, I'm still right. VR isn't a passing fad, it's "the next great thing" that's been just around the horizon for the last few decades. The tech isn't there, the cost isn't reasonable, it's doa.
--- End quote ---

The tech is there and the cost is less (inflation adjusted) than it's been in the past. It's still in early adopter mode for the current hardware, but the technology has mostly caught up to the idea of VR. There's also an support infrastructure (i.e. the Internet and loads of indie developers, plus backing from major corporations) that didn't exist in the same capacity back in the 90's.

People said the same thing about tablet computers a number of years back. Those caught on.

--- Quote ---You've got to understand.. niche uses don't count because they aren't going to get the millions upon millions of units that need to be sold in order for developers to waste time supporting an optional accessory. Optional accessories have NEVER been successful in THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES.
--- End quote ---

Sure they have. In PC gaming specifically, sound cards and 3D graphics cards both started out as optional. Eventually they became standard.

VR has the potential to do the same, provided it gets enough traction. The big hurdle is going to be on the application side and support.

BadMouth:
What I want is real time green screen, so I can see my own hands and controls merged with the virtual world.

Yeah not everyone is going to build a green screen bubble, but for those that do it would be spectacular.
It wouldn't be that difficult to make a pvc and green spandex canopy.

Howard_Casto:
Indie games don't count. They don't sell units because, to be frank, they aren't that good. Without AAA studio support on a massive level any optional tech is doomed to fail.

I'm honestly unsure what you mean about tablets... do you mean in regards to them being used as a gaming device? Because no, they never did catch on in that respect. People buy them because you can do a lot of things on them, but I've yet to meet someone that bought a tablet for gaming.

Sound cards and video cards have never been optional in the entire history of modern computing. Sure back in the pre-486 days.... put pcs weren't pcs until post- win95 and the invention of directx as a common hardware interface for programmers. Onboard sound and video cards are still sound and video cards... they have the same architecture as their more expensive cousins and thus games are written for them... that's scale-able tech, not optional accessories. Let's put it this way.... when you buy a new pc at the store it has sound and video right? See, not optional.

You'd be surprised to find that the vast majority of computers do NOT have add-on sound and video cards. The reason a brand new video card is crazy expensive, even today, is because only a slim margin of the computing world buys high-end video cards.

Even ignoring that, that's the pc.... the hardware platform and all of it's components have nothing to do with the I/O, which is what I'm referring to. Not a single solitary optional accessory has ever caught on.... from the NES zapper to psmove and even more mundane ones like the genesis 6 button controller. There were ~15 games made for the zapper over the nes's 10 year run. The genesis 6 button controller was virtually un-used in the entire genesis library.... the handful of fighters excluded of course. As for the move... forget about it. Meanwhile the wiimote, which is basically a psmove, was used in virtually every game in the Wii's library. Why? Because it was mandatory. The only thing that's ever came close is the 360 gamepad on the pc... that thing has certainly become fairly mainstream, but that's mostly because Microsoft released a library that allowed a programmer to read and write to it with a single line of code.

Remember, games are made to make money. This means by default developers, as a whole at least, do the least amount of work to get maximum profits. That means they don't waste time (which equates to money) adding support for a controller or what have you unless virtually the entire consumer base has the accessory. Sure some studios will take a chance at a game or two that use the new device and even more will add in half-assed, un-optimized support, but that's about it.

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