Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Feeling of immersion with VR Games: Mirror's Edge and Warthunder

Today were are testing the immersion effect of the Oculus Rift. At first we were looking for fitting games and thought that a flight game is of course a good choice, so we found Warthunder, which is on the hand a good flightsimulation and on the other hand there are enemies you have to challenge. We knew the game from the normal 3d view and we were very exiting to sit directly in the cockpit with the Oculus Rift. The second game we are going to play with the Oculus Rift is Mirror's Edge. Since we have the Oculus Rift we always said this game is a must have in our Oculus Rift gamecollection. Why? Because this parcour game is in normal 3d view such exciting, when you run and jump on the skylines that we thought we will freak out if you have to this with the Oculus Rift. So we think for testing the feeling of immersion we made a good choice so let's start our results:

Warthunder with Oculus Rift DK2:

Settings:

Setting up the game for the oculus was quiet simple, because Warthunder has an ingame support for the oculus and you only have to click oculus rift support in the game settings and restart the game. At this point the optimization is only for the Oculus Rift DK1 but it's working with DK2 too. The support is not perfect (like i will mention later) so we tried many different forum advices (to fix view and texture problems) but nothing really improved the result so we won't mention it yet. Warthunder directly support the DK so just wait a few month and they will fix it and improve it for DK2 too as they did it for the DK1.

Game support for Oculus DK2 & Feeling of immersion:

Ok lets play Warthunder with the DK2 and jump into the cockpit. At this point we highly recommend an joystick with throttle because this makes the controll easier and makes such much more fun. Ok lets start the engine. WOW! It's awsome to fly over the sky. You are really feeling like you sit in the cockpit. It's amazing when you turn the plane and role left or right. Everything feels very real. Nothing for people with fear of heights. Now let's try to put some enemies on the ground. Here comes the first problem, now you realise what the missing optimization for the DK2 means. You don't really get a good feeling of distances and also the textures of the enemies are not very smooth so its hard to hit other planes. It's hard to describe but if you try to fix an enemy (or a specific spot) with your eyes threw the Oculus then you feel like you are little bit crossed-eyed. So there is definitely a lot of work to do for the Warthunder team to optimize the game for the DK2. After the WOW effect at the beginning you also look sharper around and see that the whole view has to be improved because the distances to your instruments in the cockpit and you (pilot in the cockpit) is too less so after flying in the cockpit you feel like you fly in a small box. We tested the game a few weeks ago and we read that at this time the warthunder team had no DK2 to test it and improve it for it so it's clear that it's not working perfectly at this point. Never the less we high recommend every Oculus Rift owner to try this game because it's really an experience to fly with warthunder over the sky and make your first experiences as pilot in virtual reality. The feeling at first is just awsome and really a way in the right direction. So at this point playing this game for a few hours it's not possible because after few minutes you feel motionsick and it's really not possible to reach highscores in shooting enemies with this view and texture problems, BUT we are sure that in a view month this could be possible.

Here's a small video demonstrating a flight with Oculus Rift DK2 and Warthunder:




Mirror's Edge with Oculus Rift DK2:

Settings:

At first you need to download the tool perception vireio and install it like Juergen mentioned in his last post. Here is the like to his post, if you haven't read it already. [Perception Setup]

Mirror's Edge is supported for perception so just use their setup-files. This game is marked as "good"-support and not excellence so there are still some issues they are working on. We tried some other settings from different forum posts but the settings of perception it self worked much better so just use them. :) Like Juergen mentioned in his post you have to use perception vireio v213 and oculus 0.4.4.

Game support for Oculus DK2 & Feeling of immersion:

Ok let's try the game. When you start the game and you start at a skyline and stand on a roof of a building and everything looks awsome but when you move your head you feel again crossed-eyed. A solution for this is to press the NUM5 button to start the VRBoost of perception. There you have to quickly move around (like the ingame menu of the VRBoost tell you) and the driver will optimize the field of view. This will improve the whole view, distances and the headtracking. After this improvement the game feels way more realistic and makes it playable. Before we can start look straight with the oculus rift and press STR+Q to center the view. Now if you look around it really realistic and looks awsome. When you run over the top and jump around its pure rush of adrenalin. Especially the rails you have to manage is unbelievable real. This game is very fast and the view is cool because you see you feets and if you are climbing you see you hands like you are really conquering this different barriers. One good advice, don't look down if you are afraid of heights because when you are balancing on a small path it's really scaring to look down in the deepness of the skylines. The game is really fascinating also with "normal" 3d view but with the Oculus Rift it's an unbelievable experience. You just feel like you are really in the world of parcour now. Playing for a few minutes are really amazing but you can't play longer because there is a big problem with the field of view. As I mentioned before, by starting VRBoost, the view gets much better as it is without but it's working not perfectly. After a few minutes you realize that everything is just too near and so after view minutes you feel really really montionsick because of this effect. That's I guess the main problem of the game that this game is so fast that the view has to be perfectly optimized and it's not. I hope that the perception team can fix the field of view issues to find a way to setup the field of view that you can play this game for a few hours without feeling sick. If this issues get fixed this game would be a perfect game for the Oculus Rift. I love this game and we will definitely also try different settings the next time to find a way to play this game the whole day :). So if you want to get an adrenaline rush try this game out, no matter if its working perfect or not, because for a few minutes it's just amazing.

This is the coolest video we found on youtube to see how amazing the feeling of immersion with Mirror's Edge and Oculus Rift:



Well I hope you enjoyed our post and maybe you'll also try out this two games because of our posts then please write us a comment and maybe you found some better settings then we would appreciate if you tell us your experiences and advices.

In the next days we will try to find better settings for these two games and if we find some improvements we will tell you of course.

Stay tuned, greez micha

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