So I was driving like half an hour - this time fast - and I'dont feel sick, maybe a little bit dizzy. Huge improvement. Now FOV is worse, but I prefer that over sickness.
Scawen, is there going to be 2 separate modes for DK1 and DK2 in the options?
Cool to see some progress! None of the major players seem to be close to having DK2 support so I reckon you can get a healthy amount of new subscribers if you get it out first.
I went to a Rift meetup the other day and brought my portable wheel, and I think I managed to actually sell a few people on LFS!
Perhaps it was because nobody had seen (or even heard of) LFS before, but it seemed to me that the demo was very well received.
My own impressions:
Holy smokes what an understatement the "screen door" effect people have been talking about is. The DK1 is a horrible, blurry mess! But god damn, the wide FOV and head tracking is absolutely wonderful. You instantly get a feeling for how wide the track is and how your car is positioned on it.
The DK2 has slightly higher resolution, but sadly still nowhere near enough. It feels like the old Super Nintendo era on a CRT. Also, the "being there" illusion that the DK1 gave was shattered by the feeling of wearing a scuba mask.
So, definitely not ready for prime time.
If the DK2 would have had the same high FOV as the DK1, I would have bought one just for racing.
But for everyone on the fence, be warned: The screen door and motion blur in the DK1 is god ****ing awful, and the bump in resolution in the DK2 is not enough plus the FOV is small as hell.
Awesome work. One question regarding the debug blue background.
I´m sure you did this to check the max possible FOV and that nothing of the blue is visible when setting the eye to lense distance to minimum?
I've always made it do a blue background in my debug version so I can see exactly how it looks even when everything is black. It's not blue when I compile the non-debug version. But anyway, I couldn't see any of the blue edge at all with the goggles on.
DK2 is a bit like having a swimming mask on. Peripheral vision is not really good. But I have enjoyed the experience so far! Great sense of scale and feeling like you are in there. It is pixelly when you look into the distance. So obviously, VR still needs a larger screen with more pixels...
I've heard that if you set the eye relief so that the screen is further away from the lenses makes FOV a bit better in DK2 as oposed to DK1 where closer = more FOV. You should try that, if you haven't yet.
It's confirmed that CV1 will have a better resolution than 1080p, people speculate that it's going to be 1440p, but it's just speculations. They haven't shown any new prototype since the DK2 announcement...
If they can get a special screen made, they should go for a wider aspect ratio. At least it should be 2:1 instead of 16:9 but even wider would be good, to improve peripheral vision. Or maybe something could be done with those curved screens and some clever lens...
I doubt that.
I think when eye relief is further away from the lenses it only means that FOV is limited by the lense holder, instead limited by the screen size (black vertical border to the left and right).
The first limitation may just feel more natural because the border (from the lense holder) is round.
I have no DK2, but experienced this behaviour with DK1.
Tracks with a lot of corners and elevation change work best, since you aren't looking off into the distance to much. South city is great with the barriers and tunnel and stuff. Getting up close to the barriers and walls while going fast is really cool. Adding some AI cars makes it even cooler of course!
There's also a huge difference between driving a closed cockpit car and an open one. Well I'm sure you are testing all of that out now.
According to the official specsheet, 110 -> 100 degrees.
However the DK1 screen was slightly overspecced due to its huge size (they had to switch to a larger screen than the lenses were originally designed for in the last minute) so if you put the lenses as close as possible to your eyes, you could actually go beyond the specified FOV a littlebit, achieving something like 115-120 degrees of effective FOV.
My DK2 should be arriving today unless UPS screws something up, will give impressions/comparison on the FOV then.
The fov change is noticeable and definitely affects the experience. The improvements in latency and image quality from DK1 is just enormous though. Especially latency when rotating the head, should make driving much more comfortable.
Got the device, only tried a handful of demos so far. At first the FOV reduction was pretty noticeable, but after I moved the eye relief back, the experience became much more immersive and I don't feel like it's much of a downgrade from DK1 anymore.
Better resolution, low persistence, positional tracking... all fantastic and the device as a whole is MUCH improved over the DK1. For development and enthusiast purposes, it's great.
That said everyone should keep in mind, that the DK2 was developed and made before the money floodgates from FB opened up, so I think it's safe to say we can expect great things from CV1.
Anxious to give LFS DK2 test patch a go when it's ready.
How does LFS handle the bumps and gradients through OR?
I imagine that finding the right balance somewhere between locking "ahead" to the horizon, and every single tiny bump affecting your view, is important.
The car moving and bumping around is not a problem unless it's extreme. Independent head shaking is better to turn off. Pretty sure that was done by default in LFS, correct me if I'm wrong.
It's car shaking rather than head shaking. Your head would be subject to forces inflicted by the road-car-seat, but also damping them, and you also do not have to look "up" when going uphill, your car and seat point uphill, changing the position of your "ahead".
So surely somewhere in between locked to car and locked to horizon would work best?
DK2 uses the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 screen (whole front panel actually). I hope they will get a custom screen made for CV1. Phone screens work quite well, but quite well is not enough. I agree that 16:9 aspect ratio is not perfect for VR, but what about the curved screen? I've seen many people suggesting it, but I don't understand what is the benefit of a curved screen. It would allow to make the headset less blocky and more ergonomic I guess...
It would help a lot with the optics, especially at reducing chromatic aberration and making everything in the peripheral vision much sharper as it's better to focus a curved screen on to lenses.
While testing some things today, I noticed that running anything with direct HMD access results in stuttering with head tracking every few seconds or so, whereas extended mode is constant silky smooth 75 FPS.
Getting Unity demos to run in extended mode seems to be easy by creating a shortcut with an "-adapter 1" command, then starting them with ctrl+enter and unchecking windowed mode.
Pretty good, I hope to release a test patch this evening.
I've now made it quite helpful when you select Rift mode.
For a start, it tells you if the Rift needs to be set to extended mode.
If the Rift is already in extended mode, then when you click "3D" and "OK" to Rift mode, it asks you if you would like to restart on the Rift device. If you click OK to that, LFS exits with the correct settings in the cfg file so on the next restart, you are in the Rift.
Similar when you click 2D mode, it gives you the option to exit and set the correct settings automatically.
Not much left to do but I want to make sure the correct screen resolution is selected because otherwise bad things can happen!
