Posted on 05/17/2024 10:31:17 AM PDT by fireman15
The best VR headsets are so much more than devices that transport you to virtual worlds. They give you the best mixed reality experience with ever-improving passthrough technology, which unlocks new methods of getting things done like Spatial computing — overlaying your environments with augmented reality holographs.
As this industry is exploding with popularity, we have handpicked a small selection that offer the best bang for your buck. All of them can play most of the best VR games, and some can even serve as home gym replacements, productivity tools for work or even giant immersive screens to watch the best TV shows and movies.
(Excerpt) Read more at tomsguide.com ...
The VR headset situation reminds me of so many other computer software and hardware issues over the years. It takes quite a bit of research and experimentation to get the Quest 2 to perform as well as it is capable of. After visiting many flight simulator and VR forums and watching dozens of YouTube videos... it seems that this is a typical experience almost no matter what headset and computer that you choose.
I would say however that the rewards are great once you manage to get everything dialed in. It really ups the reality level with computer simulator flight training to the point that it greatly increases the usefulness of the experience.
When they have lifelike "travel" programs to enable you to feel like you're walking the streets of various cities, like St. Peter's square and the like. Or hiking in Zion Park, etc.
That said, VR gaming still feels like it’s in its infancy. There are certain genres that lends themselves very, very well to the medium (think first-person puzzle box type games like Myst and The 7th Guest.
But some genres, like RPGs and action platforms, while functional, just don’t work as well because you are controlling an external character inside an immersive environment as a spectator rather than personally being “in” the environment yourself. It’s a bit like playing a game looking over a diorama: works for some stuff, and not so much for others.
As for other practical uses for VR headsets, the tech just isn’t there yet. It isn’t at a place where you would put this thing on your head and go walk around in public with it. For one, it’s too bulky and heavy, and for another, it flat makes a person look like an absolute doofus.
I’m a software developer by trade, and VR has been an area of interest to me ever since the original Oculus Rift model showed up. It’s interesting tech for enthusiasts, but it’s still got a bit of growing before it’s matured enough for mainstream acceptance. In short, we are today in VR where Blackberry was in the smartphone market circa 2002-ish. You can see the direction we’re headed, and it’s almost there, but the cake’s gotta cook just a little bit more.
Oh, man, you're taking me back there.
I loved The 7th Guest!.......................
The list:
1. Meta Quest 3 - The best VR headset overall
2. Apple Vision Pro - The best premium VR headset
3. PlayStation VR 2 - The best gaming VR headset
4. Meta Quest 2 - The best budget VR headset
5. Meta Quest Pro - The best VR headset for work
6. PlayStation VR - The best cheap gaming VR headset
My favorite are my $5 reading glasses....
Add virtual smellorator and you can smell the feces of great cities like Paris or San Fransicko.
I'd be too afraid to visit, probably get mugged from behind not seeing the attacker sneak up..
Wow, the 7th guest. That takes me back. I had the sony VR and it had potential but still too cumbersome and too little content. Apple’s looks intriguing but again little compelling content and the price is high.
I prefer REAL Reality.
I think they should do sporting events. Put a camera in a prime seat alongside some entertaining celebrities and see how many would pay for the experience.
As a wheelchair-bound gimpy grandpa in my 70’s, I’ve often wondered if a VR headset could be linked to either an aerial or submerged drone for in-flight viewing. I have to plead ignorance on the subject, but that would be SO COOL as a new adventure for my gimpy ass.
There is currently aerial drones that have a vr head set for first person flying; seeing through the camera on the gimbal, versus watching the drone fly from a small screen on the controller.
I’ll explore further. I understand the modern drones can fly for many miles. What a hoot that would be, no FAA license required!
DJI drones are the most popular, flying with the first person view is certainly very cool, drones if used commercially need a permit, which also (crazy) includes if you post the video that you captured to the internet;ie: YouTube.
It doesn’t matter what the video was of either, crazy. The permit is very easy to get, you are really just registering your specific drone with the FAA.
If the drone weighs less than 255 grams no registration required. Some really nice and extremely capable drones fall into that category. I would start your research with DJI first to get up to speed. Good luck
I can relate, I am a little prone to motion sickness myself. But it just hasn't stopped me.
I actually have tinkered around with VR for a long time. My first set of “VR googles” were the SimulEyes VR which worked with a CRT monitor by blacking out one eye and then the other. The best game that worked with them was the DOS (pre-Windows) version of Descent. I had to shell out $175 for them about 30 years ago.
Since that time, I had various other versions of optical devices, cell phone adapters, like the Google Cardboard, and a fairly expensive 3D Television.
But I am new to the actual “modern” versions of VR Headsets. I am using mostly Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 with the VR headset. I purchased a gaming laptop at Costco for $999 last month. It is still on sale for $400 off. It is an HP Victus 16.1” Gaming Laptop - 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700HX - GeForce RTX 4060 - 144HZ 1080p - Windows 11.
I am now getting good results, but it took some tweaking. I spent $15 for Desktop VR and use it with OpenXR toolkit which is freeware. It works much better than oculus app that comes with the headset or SteamVR which works with many games. I just about wrote the VR goggles off until I started using those two tools and then tweaked my settings a bit. MSFS 2020 especially was very jittery which was very annoying and promotes motion sickness. Now it is pretty darned amazing. It feels like you are sitting at the controls in the airplane.
I also use X-plane 12 with VR which works well also but has much less in the way of scenery which I enjoy. I own earlier versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-plane, but prefer the later versions. I like to fly the simulator versions that are very similar to the actual airplane that we own, a Piper Cherokee.
Basically, I can do all of that easier when running a free instance of MSSQL Server, using C# apps to pull data from my inverter exports or the stock market, storing that data into the MSSQL DBs, and running reports either from SELECT queries or C# apps or a combination of both.
So I've more than gotten my money's worth from it. Especially when running stock market scenarios (i.e. what if I had a portfolio spread out across these asset classes and was trying to live in retirement during the 2000-2002 stock crash, or if I had a different portfolio, or it was during the stock rise of the Bush years, or the stock crash of late 2007 to early 2009, etc.) That kind of analysis has helped me have an aggressive portfolio (75% equity mutual funds) so I can try to keep up with inflation, but be spread out enough across many asset classes so that even when I fully retire in a few years and experience market crashes, I'll have a few asset classes that are still up (withdraw from them so I'd be selling high instead of selling low).
Likewise with the solar and EV. Without the data analysis I probably would have spent too much on some parts of the system (fighting the law of diminishing returns) and not enough on other parts (not fully taking advantage of the economies of scale). As it is, in the past 366 days, 80.6% of our power consumed has been from homemade power (either directly from solar or from batteries charged by solar). Only 19.4% of our power had to be pulled from the grid. That's for an all-electric house, and charging an EV to drive it on average 1,200 miles per month (home charged miles, not counting road-side charger miles if we take it on a trip).
Every month when I get a power bill I look at the gas price of the local gas station where I used to buy gas (still do for what little we drive our gas pickup), look at the odometer of the EV, record those and details from the power bill in the DB and an Excel spreadsheet, I download telemetry from my inverters and import that into a table in the DB, then crunch the numbers to see how much gas I saved by not having to by gas for those miles, how much it added to my power demand by having to charge those miles, how much of that was saved by solar, how much the power utility was charging per kWh after subtracting flat monthly fees, how much solar saved me in dollars by the # of kWh I didn't have to buy from the grid, how much natural gas would have cost me if I still had 2 natural gas appliances, how much converting them to electric appliances added to my power demand, how much of that I saved by using solar, how much I'm paying in interest on the loan I took out to buy all of these improvements, how much the YOY inflation rate is on cost per kWh of power and cost per gallon of gasoline, how much my loan payment has gone down because I'm paying down on the balance, how close the energy portion of my budget is to year 2019's energy costs (power bill + natural gas bill + gasoline cost + putting aside $400/month into a car savings account to pay for the next car repairs or car replacement) vs what I'm paying now (small power bill + loan payment + car payment) and how much I would be paying per month if I still had no solar, had gas appliances, and had bought either a new gas car or used gas car (no car payment but lower gas mileage) instead of buying the EV when it was time to replace my wife's gas crossover 2 years ago, etc.
All of that was complex to set up. I did almost all of that a year and a half ago when I had had a small solar system for a year to try it out (call it Phase I) and was deciding on if it was worth upgrading to the full system I have now (Phase II). But now that I have the SQL queries written and C# apps written, it's just a few minutes of my time each month to manually enter a few things into a few records, then run apps to get the telemetry from the inverters and crunch the #'s.
As of my April power bill I've saved a total of $3,300 in my cash flow (call it keeping an extra $3,300 in my Roth IRA's to keep growing tax free) since I began the energy project 3 years ago right after Brandon entered the WH and issued executive orders jacking up our energy costs. Assuming energy costs go up from here at a reasonable 3% inflation rate, and assuming my wife and I keep consuming energy at the same rate (YOY monthly, so I'll assume this June we'll drive the same # of miles and run our home AC as much as we did last June), but our equipment and EV slowly deteriorate as per the warranties of each solar component and the EV, then at around August 2033 will be the point where the loan balance amount will equal the total savings of the energy project. Call that the break even point, and I'll still have a decade left on my solar panel and battery warranties, and EV battery warranty (assuming I will have just replaced the EV's battery on its 10-year anniversary, assuming a 3% inflation rate on what that'd be compared to if I had to replace the battery at today's cost without a warranty). Better still, all of that money I will have saved will have stayed in our Roth IRA's growing tax free for the decade between now and August 2033 (by me not having to spend a lot on energy costs). So instead of my breakeven point being 9 years from now, it's really more like 6 or 7 years from now.
Those are the kind of "games" I play on my laptop. LOL
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