EVE General Discussion

Fixed that for ya.


(Anyone got any old Traveller books for sale?)

Where you the guy who said to the inventor of the VCR "nobody will want to record anything from the TV" ?

There's a huge difference between something thats is functional, convenient, usefull and provides an other wise unavailable purpose and a toy.

Plug a little box into the tv and now you can do "x"

Vs

Buy a $2000 rig + $700 vr gear, setup a suitable room space and install sensors, strap a small shoe box to your head and connect it via umbilical to afforementioned pc rig thats likely as big as a small end table so you can.... See a virtual word the same as you'd be able to see without a shoe box strapped to your head.

Instead of comparing it to a vcr a more apt comparison would be laser disc or a car that can drive on water. Atleast w the laser disc it helped paved the way for the relatively small leap forward to dvd. A comparable leap for wearable, functional VR is as mentioned a LONG way off.

The real "lol" in the future will be ppl laughing at us for ever thinking such bulky, cumbersome and ultimately poor performing gear was worth paying money for.

As I said before, when VR gear can be utilized unobtrusively alongside similarly compact and unobtrusive hardware it will find a wide and prosperous market. Go ahead and hold your breath.

This generation of VR may very well be successful enough that it hangs around and continues to develop but ultimately with any kind of tech we're going to see in the next decade it going to be on the shelf alongside hotas flight controls that were all the rage in the 90's. There is a market for it but it's niche. It's very small and serves a very specific audience. One that is so small as to barely justify the marketing and production of said hardware. Flight sims were all over the shelves in the 90's and you could grab a HOTAS joystick from half dozen different manufactures at the end of the same shelf. Now there are few enough (mentionable) first person flight games that you can count them on one hand and about as many hotas manufactures as you can count on 2 fingers. And even then you'll most likely have to order them from a niche online retailer because they aren't profitable enough and don't enjoy a wide enough audience to warrant keeping in stock. In fact the number of ppl who will find encapsulated displays nauseating alone will be more than enough to prevent it becoming truly widespread in the near future.

There's certainly future application for the larger market but you're a little over optimistic if you think the technology required to make it happen is gonna be here next week.

VR is but the beginning, the not too distant future will see dedicated rooms sporting Star Trekian style holodecks containing a mixture of holographic imaging and hardware. Depending on how far out this concept becomes reality Eve may or may not be a part of it, but space sims, flight sims, power plant sims and even square-rigged sailing ship sims will be "on the shelf". This will not happen in my generation, nor the next, but one of these days the "holoroom" or whatever it winds up being called will not just serve as a gaming station but will be where people work, interact, order groceries, all that. A shame I'm not going to be around to see it.

The difference is that a VCR works on all TV shows and it's always useful to be able to watch something whenever you want. VR doesn't work in most games, nor would most genres gain anything from having it. It's also optional and very expensive, which means it's highly unlikely to go mainstream. Don't get me wrong, Valkyrie and that Tron game look cool and I wish a had $700 or whatever laying around to get a VR headset, but it's as unlikely for it to get big as it is for the mainstream plebs to all suddenly decide to get high end GPUs in SLI and 3 monitor panoramic setups.

Again, the technological leap required to truly make it practical is far beyond the leap between a 1980 cell phone and todays. Imagine putting the processing power of a modern highend gaming rig in a cell phone, developing the tech to transmit video from that device lag free and then a set of glasses not only with the processing power of todays cell phones built in but a power source that is going to be good for hours of use (and preferably without the risk of blowing up on your head on a hot day) all packaged in a frame comparable to wrap around sports sunglasses. If it took 30 years to go from a brick phone to an iphone6 then you're looking at at least another 30 before that type of tech is around. The difference in processing and form factor is enormous. We're talking chips WAY beyond the circuit density of cpu's today. Imagine 2 nvidea 980's, 16gb of system memory+8 gb of video memory, a 4gz/4-8 core cpu, wireless video transmitter and 256gb of storage memory on a device the size of your iphone. A rig thats currently the size of a 24 case of soda at minimum and just about as heavy and full of fans and liquid cooling. Just figuring out how to do that much processing in a device that size and keeping it from melting itself will be an enormous task.

When that happens THEN VR will be capable of providing features and performance capable of meeting the needs of a mainstream market. Why? Practical application. A device like that could be used for everyday use by average ppl to incorporate digital information overlaid as a virtual environment into their daily routines without it interfering with their normal behaviors or without it being physically intrusive.

Until then it's just an expensive toy that only ppl with money to blow on overpriced video game peripherals will ever bother to dish out the money for. (OFC there are potential professional applications with todays tech but thats a whole different ballgame and has nothing to do with "will *insert game here* go VR.)

And you can try to make comparisons to old scifi flicks all you want but by the same token 40 years ago they thought we'd have a moon colony and be living like the jetsons flying around in bubble cars with robot butlers by now soooooo... leave those poor monochrome monitors out if. High tech or not it was all about atmosphere anyway. Not like any real future FTL space craft is likely to look like some sort of rust bucket tractor trailer in space leaking oil and sludge all over the galaxy anyway now is it.

I hate to use the same joke again, but they did say that for the 3D TV too.

It is the same thing happening. Much lower quality graphics & gameplay compared to standard monitors. It's a gimmick for idiots with cash to burn.

Don't most people play Eve while watching Netflix/youtube/forums on a separate screen? Eve isn't like playing valkyrie/cod/bf where you need to be 100 percent engaged all the time so I don't think vr would be practical for most people.

If this ever actually becomes a reality, then I'll finally manage to quit EVE for real.