oculus-rift | The colorful wolf

Racing with the Rift

Today I spent some more time trying to get the Oculus Rift dev kit to work with netKar pro. It seems to be a fairly untrodden area as the only resource I could find was this youtube video, showing that you can use Tridef Ignition in combination with Opentrack to get it up and running. It took a bit of fiddling with Opentrack to get it stop switching the axes around, but after a while I was good to go. Fired up netKar Pro with the Osella on the Nordschleife and drove away.

It didn't go well. At all. Since netKar Pro doesn't support the Rift natively, any 3d effect is added on after-the-fact by the Tridef middleware. Tridef does a great job of splitting up the image and warping it so that even the peripheral vision looks quite decent, but the 3d effect in netKar is practically useless. With the 3d effect set to zero you're looking at what is essentially a 2D image, which makes it extremely easy for your eyes to suddenly unfocus from the track and focus on the pixels instead, confusing the crap out of you. The alternative is increasing the 3d effect using the Tridef OSD, but this doesn't seem to work very well for netKar Pro. All it does is make you see things double.

The other thing that makes netKar pro unplayable with the Rift is the head tracking. Opentrack just doesn't quite cut it, for several reasons. First of all, netKar Pro doesn't really do freelook when you're in the cockpit. It snaps to certain edges and also appears to have different acceleration for different viewing angles, all of which make it feel extremely unnatural and nauseating. Then again, we have no right to expect anything from the sim since it was supposed to support TrackIR-like devices, not VR headsets. I'm not sure if it's Opentrack's fault or netKar's, but there's also a noticeable lag between physical and in-game head movement. Lastly, there's no tilt support, so if you tilt your head sideways nothing happens in-game. That turned out to be only a minor nuisance compared to the other problems I listed though.

I'm quite sad about the game not being playable. netKar Pro is by far my favorite racing simulation, but none of the other sims I play (LFS, rFactor) have native Rift support yet, so they tend to suffer from the same issues. The only racing game I know of that does support the Rift natively is iRacing. I have to give props to the iRacing devs for supporting the Rift so quickly, and the support is very well done. iRacing compensates for the dev kit's low resolution by showing you the in-game screens 'in 3D', increasing the size of the screens so you can read the text easily, while using your head to look in various directions to see the rest of the screen. The 3D effect in iRacing is just right, and how all racing games should look like on the Rift if they implemented it properly. Unfortunately that's where the fun ended for me, as I found myself very unimpressed by iRacing as a game. I don't like any of the default cars and I don't like most of the default tracks. Since iRacing is a subscription model you have to pay for extra content, but I don't feel it's worth it at all. I took several of the free cars around Laguna Seca and some other tracks, but none of them felt right. It felt more like Gran Turismo than like a proper racing simulation. What a shame. Oculus Rift support does not outweigh quality of physics and force feedback, so I'm sticking to netKar Pro. I have high hopes for Assetto Corsa though.

The resolution of the production model Rift seriously worries me. When playing racing games you tend to look towards the horizon a lot, focusing only on a very small portion of the screen. I found that the effect of a low resolution screen was much more pronounced when playing iRacing or netKar compared to when I was playing Half Life 2. I'm now convinced that 1920 horizontal pixels will definitely not be enough for a consumer version of the Rift. The horizontal resolution per eye is just too damn low! It needs to be at least 2560 pixels, but what it really needs is 1920 pixels per eye. Even if that makes the device twice as expensive, I'd gladly pay extra for it, because resolution is set to become the Rift's one major flaw.

Oculus Rift dev kit: first impressions

About 3 weeks ago I ordered an Oculus Rift dev kit, thinking it would take a long time to arrive, but today it arrived! I could hardly contain my excitement at work, but then finally it was time to go home and unwrap the goodies.

The first thing I noticed is how incredibly high-quality the entire package is. A solid box with lots of foam inside to protect the hardware. The kit comes with all the accessories you need: power supply, usb cable, corrective lenses, and of course the Rift itself. Everything looks and feels solid and professional. It even came with a little lens wiping cloth with the text 'Oculus Rift' on it. And that's just the developer kit; imagine what the final product will be like.

Connecting it up was easy enough. The usb cable registers the head tracker and the HDMI or DVI connector lets you treat the rift as a second screen. With that set up I fired up some of the demos made for the Rift, starting with the Tuscany demo, which lets you walk and look around a nice country house. As soon as I put the Rift on my head, I was amazed beyond belief. The head tracking is beyond excellent, the 3D effect is so close to real life that it's hard to tell the difference. I've never had such an immersive experience as I had with that first demo wearing the Rift.

The second thing I fired up was a roller-coaster demo, which blew my mind a second time. Comparing the Rift experience to watching a video of a roller-coaster in 3D does not do it justice at all. The motion tracking and full field of view coverage makes it an experience that nothing else can rival. When the roller-coaster carriage returned to the starting point I instinctively looked down to my keyboard to locate the escape button so I could quit the demo, but instead I just saw my legs, and for a second I was genuinely confused. My brain really thought I was there.

The Rift works incredibly well with stationary experiences, where you don't have to walk around. In the Tuscany demo I ended up getting a weird sensation between my ears and a sense of vertigo when making sudden walking movements. This was quite strong at first but I got used to it quite quickly, and after a while it was hardly noticeable.

Having played with the demos I decided to have a go at some proper gaming, starting with Skyrim. A lot of games are unofficially supported by a 3rd party app called Vireio Perception, which converts any regular 3D game into the required dual-eyed bulginess that the Rift lenses require. Unfortunately this is where I really started to notice the main flaw of the Rift dev kit: the resolution. Even when using the demos that were made specifically for the Rift you can clearly see the giant pixels and the black space between them. This effect only got worse in Skyrim, and it was very difficult to see anything with the low resolution.

After Skyrim I gave Euro Truck Simulator 2 a try, but was also left unsatisfied. The resolution is still a problem in ETS2, albeit less than in Skyrim, but the main issue with ETS2 is the head tracking, which doesn't quite feel right. Apparently the ETS2 developers are working on official Rift support though, so that's something to look forward to.

My first experience with the Rift is not something I'll soon (or ever?) forget. The sense of immersion is just unbelievable. I really can't wait for games to support this technology properly. It is a must-have. I've heard rumors that the final version of the Rift will have a Full-HD screen. After having played with the dev kit, I don't think that one Full-HD screen will be enough. Each eye should at least have a Full-HD screen if this technology is to be truly, ultimately immersive. I don't care how much that drives up the cost; I'll gladly pay whatever it takes for a higher resolution version of the dev kit. VR is the future. There's no doubt about it.