Is Solfa good to save the VR industry, or is it dragging the VR industry into the pit?

According to some sources, Sony PSVR will be the first successful VR, because its brand, price, content and user base are not comparable to its factory, but is this success a good thing for the VR industry? This article attempts to give us an answer, authored by the VR industry practitioner Tiber River.

(Photo by Lei Fengnet (search "Lei Feng Net" public concern) Liu Fangping)

It is recognized that 2016 is the first year of the VR industry, and that VR products have finally become consumer products from the few pioneers' playthings. Both Oculus and HTC have introduced the first generation of consumer-grade VR heads. However, both companies have their own problems: Both are based on PCs and have fewer consumer groups; prices and hardware requirements are also higher; Oculus is the first time to do hardware, and the current production capacity is more or less unclear. No experience involved; Oculus and HTC are not particularly appealing to game developers, and there are few real "bigger" games on both the Oculus and Steam platforms.

The vision of the global VR industry has now focused on the Sony PSVR that will be released in October. In many people's eyes, Sony will solve the VR market dilemma in one fell swoop: Sony has many years of hardware design experience, production capacity and quality issues do not have to worry too much; PSVR has a huge PS4 player as a potential customer base; compared to Oculus and HTC, PSVR The price is relatively low, PS4 is also cheaper than PC, easy to gather customer base; Sony as a veteran host manufacturers are very appealing to game developers, there are many traditional game manufacturers have said they want to PSVR Launch the game.

Is it great?

But this may also be Sony's Waterloo: PSVR may be sold under Sony's energy, but it hurts the VR industry.

Why is that?

The reason lies in the particularity of VR as a consumer product. Here I use an analogy to digitize the user experience of any consumer electronics product from 0 to 100, say mobile phones. If I buy a mobile phone, or any other consumer electronics product, then the user experience 100, that is to say, I am completely satisfied with this product, it has achieved all the functions I want (this product certainly does not exist) If its user experience is 0, nothing more than that this product is bought back and found no way to use it, it is bad.

But as a consumer electronics product, VR Headset is unique in that the lower limit of its user experience is negative —a bad VR headshot not only does not bring about a good user experience, it also brings negative User experience: Users may be nauseous, vomit or even cause personal injury, which is a feature not found in other consumer electronics products. A restriction can be added here as "normal use case" because no one can foresee the explosion of the phone in his trouser pocket.

So how can we avoid giving users a bad VR experience?

The two companies, Oculus and Valve, summed up a series of rules in the experimental development and exploration of several years, and finally became the VR head-up products we have seen so far. These rules are now generally understood by VR developers and enthusiasts. For example, with low-glow OLED screens, the screen frame rate must be guaranteed to be higher than 75 FPS, the delay should be lower than 20 ms, and 6-DOF positioning must not be mandatory in the game. The lens moves, avoids intense scenes, uses teleports to move, and more. Both Oculus and HTC have requirements for the player's PC performance, and also for the player to experience more than a basic pass.

However, as far as the information disclosed by various parties is concerned, Sony has been relaxed on many of these basic principles in order to promote VR.

The first is the PSVR's selling price and hardware components.

PSVR as a VR head, its industrial design level is significantly higher than Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, in terms of my experience, is currently wearing the most comfortable VR head. But wearing the required industrial design is one thing, and VR's core location tracking system is another. The Oculus Rift uses an infrared camera and active mark tracking. The HTC Vive uses Lighthouse's relatively sophisticated laser scanning and positioning system. The two products are currently accurate and sensitive. PSVR uses the PS Camera as a positioning method. This is a method of using visible light to determine the position and distance by the shape and size of the light emitted on the device. In the tracking system, it naturally lags behind Oculus and HTC. According to the current disclosure, the positioning system of the PS Camera has a very poor accuracy in positioning the PS Move handle, and it is far less accurate than the Vive handle, and can only play a general indication and cannot perform very fine interaction.

(PSVR is tracked by the shape of these light sources on the head.)

Technical improvements can still be made, but business strategy is another matter. Previously, it was reported that the price of $ 399 for the PSVR only included the head display itself, and the corresponding positioning system and handles needed to be purchased separately. If you want a complete set of heads-up, positioning systems and handles, the price is $ 499.

Technically, this means that players who only bought a PSVR head-mounted body will only be able to obtain a three-degrees-of-freedom (using the head-mounted display's own inertial sensor) to obtain a full six-degrees-of-freedom position . This experience is bound to be incomplete for the player, he can not experience a lot of games, and some game experience is likely to cause damage to him.

This is why Oculus and HTC have included a positioning system in their sales kits: Providing six degrees of freedom positioning ensures that the player's basic experience is consistent.

Then there is insufficient performance of the PS4.

Based on the PS4 rather than the PC, the advantage is that Sony has a potential user base, the disadvantage is that PS4 drive VR performance is stretched. Sony is also preparing to launch the PS4 Neo, which is specifically designed to work with PSVR and upgrades its capabilities. However, just like the positioning system, if it is not mandatory in the business to have only a new machine to cooperate with the PSVR, development must be downwards.

This is a dilemma : If you want to ensure that the experience can only use the new host with the PSVR, then it will abandon the majority of the old PS4 users; if you let the old PS4 can also be used with the PSVR, then the experience may not be guaranteed. The media who tried the new VR game also said that the PS4's performance is not enough to drive many games on the current PSVR. Some game frames such as "Resident Evil" has dropped to 30 FPS; for ordinary games, this is Acceptable, but VR games mean that it is completely unplayable.

(Recent news indicates that the Resident Evil VR frame rate is seriously insufficient)

The third is Sony's understanding of the characteristics of VR games may be wrong.

As stated at the beginning of the article, Oculus and Valve have summed up the "VR Game Best Practices Guide" during several years of research and development to try to avoid making players have a bad experience; and the VR developer community also Most of them follow these rules. Sony has introduced many traditional game development companies. Sure, they will have a deeper technical reserve and more resources for game development, but they may not fully understand the difference between VR games and ordinary games.


( Resident Evil VR will be the main perspective VR game)

(Ace Combat 7 also has VR version)

From the current point of view, Sony's games have a lot of features that apply to traditional games and should not appear in VR games: for example, forced lens movement, dramatic movement of the scene, and, most importantly, as mentioned above, insufficient frame rate. This is completely flawed. If Sony wants to relax these places in order to be able to launch a large number of PSVR games, then what we will reap is a group of PSVR games with well-known IP, excellent picture, but the experience is very problematic. This is not good news for the industry.

(This set of PSVR is impossible to give HTC Vive experience)

These are all my concerns about the PSVR - it is also possible that these concerns are completely unnecessary, PSVR after the launch of a huge success, shipping million, from the game industry officially entered the VR era.

To sum up, the advantages of PSVR are also its potential disadvantages: the overall price of the PS4+PSVR is less than US$1,000, while the heads of the other two companies plus the PC are at least US$1,500. Is there a good VR experience when only $1,500 or more is available at the current state of the art? Downgrading to less than US$1,000 will of course result in a large number of users, but the VR experience will certainly be inferior to more expensive equipment. How to balance the price-experience meeting point, this is what Sony needs to ponder carefully.

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