Wouldn't it be cool if we had VR computer gear by now so we could play HL2 in VR!!

[MajorPayne]

I wish we had decent working Virtual Reality headsets and handgear (that were affordable) now so that we could play HalfLife 2 in Virtual Reality. Can you imagine how cool it would be to have HalfLife 2 ALL AROUND YOU!!! No small screen, no lights from outside the game, just total immersion. Picture reaching your VR gloved hand out to pick stuff up ingame, and having the game and visuals match perfectly, or having the damn Manhacks chase you right up in your face (some would probably need new underware afterwards). Does anyone else here want this too?? I know it is not available, but I sure wish it was. ;(

 

[nagual678]

escaping real life is ok, but this is TOO MUCH

 

[MajorPayne]

escaping real life is ok, but this is TOO MUCH

This is HalfLife2!! There is no such thing as too much!!

 

[kingthebadger]

if we had virtual reality, we would have better games than this..

 

[bouche]

i've been waiting for VR ever since the early ninties! Why isn't it here yet? 1st person shooters should be controlled with your head too so you can free your mouse up for just aiming while you can look around with your own eyes.

HL2 would be a great test of the technology.

 

[shapeshifter]

It is here, its just to damn expensive if you actually wanted a fessable useable thing, that and games would have to be litteraly cutom made for it.

So not going to happen.

There are Steroscopic Headsets you can get, they will give you more imersion, but the only games they ever seem to work in are a few flight sims. Where it tracks the motion of your head so you can look around inside the plane while flying.

i've been waiting for VR ever since the early ninties! Why isn't it here yet? 1st person shooters should be controlled with your head too so you can free your mouse up for just aiming while you can look around with your own eyes.

HL2 would be a great test of the technology.

becuase it wouldn't work well, sure if they did it and controlled where you viewed with your head would be sweet, but they would also need to make gloves that move virtual hands in the game, otherwise looking up etc and trying to shoot up would be problimatic.

 

[MajorPayne]

1st person shooters should be controlled with your head too so you can free your mouse up for just aiming while you can look around with your own eyes.

They have this head-mounted mouse for the disabled, that tracks your cursor wherever you look, but... It apparently is not very user-friendly, and when you use it, even if you aren't already disabled, you will feel like you are!

Also, I personally own this THING called a P5 glove, which billed itself as the "wave of the future" (beware of things calling themselves this, kids) for gaming interaction. It mounts on your hand, and the glove itself measures the tension of your fingers based on how you calibrate to determine whether you have launched an Action with that finger. It tracks movement via infrared from this tall sensor -- kinda looks like a shiny citadel -- the only problem is that this thing SUCKS ASS!!! It is totally unusable just for desktop work, and in gaming, only use it if you want to look like you have degenerative nerve damage. It is SUPPOSED to have a feature to lock the position while one finger is help, but it does not work half the time, so when you type (or have to grab the mouse for a sec), your character reels around the landscape like a drunken monkey. And the calibration is always losing itself, so you have to recalibrate every few minutes. Too bad tho, I wanted to be the first person around to own a cyber-glove like thingey, until I figured out why I was the ONLY one around with it... No one else was dumb enough to spend $125.00 on one. :upstare:

Although, come to think of it.. I never did check for new drivers on the thing, and it has been over a year. maybe I will drag it out of the attic tonight to see if I can get the combine laughing at my drunk monkey imitation.

 

[bouche]

that reminds me of the Nintendo POWER GLOVE!

 

[MajorPayne]

that reminds me of the Nintendo POWER GLOVE!

That was kind of the idea i think. The powerglove was soooo cool and useful for the right games, but unless they changed the drivers for the P5 since I last used mine, it was worthless. In a 3d game, it will get you killed quicker than snot, and you would look stupid till you died too.... We need a better implementation of this, cause I bet gamers would snap up a glove thingey that worked right.

 

[Asrai]

If HL2 was in VR, you wouldn't see what was there in reality, so walking down an in-game corridor might take you into a wall or a nasty trip down the stairs in real life.

 

[OrphanBoy]

ELSA used to make stereo 3D glasses for their video cards; in fact I bought some off ebay! They're just LCD screens which flash on and off alternately - you also plug something in between your *CRT* and video card (which has to be nvidia, btw) and you get full-3D in pretty much all stuff!

Drawbacks - you need a real high refresh rate (120Hz+) otherwise it looks flickery - so than means low-ish resolutions. It has to be used with a CRT, LCDs won't do.

My glasses got broken, so I couldn't test HL2 with them Plus I'd have to whip out my old Geforce 3 to test! You can get the stereo drivers from the nvidia driver page btw.

People have been complaining about headaches/dizziness/sickness with HL2 (me included), well these glasses always make the problem worse, esp when you get the 3D effect too exaggerate...

 

[MajorPayne]

Wow.... Flickering glasses to make the screen LOOK like it is 3d, but you are still looking at a screen... That sucks almost as much as my P5 glove-o-dying stupidly. Why haven't any companies put forth a SERIOUS effort to bring decent VR gear home? I know consumers would like this, and all you would need to do is make a really good VR headset (fully enclosed with a separate LCD for each eye, and a sensor in the head to detect when you move your head, and make the game look after it). This would be possible to do (I have been in a VR game that did it successfully), and you would just need to configure the game to use the input from the headset as your look. You would probably need some kinda hand held thingey to tell it when to go forward, back, left right, jump, fire etc (this is what the VR sim I played had), but this would still leave 1 hand free for using a glove like system to interact with objects (Imagine using this to grab and carry objects in HL2!!). I guess my main complaint is that I want these things, and I can see how they could be done if someone had the balls to produce them, but so far, noone has made a decent attemp at it. Hopefully by the time HL3 comes out....

 

[ExarKun]

We use TrackIR (head controlled mouse emulation software) all the time in flight sims, but I've yet to see an FPS game use it.

 

[bouche]

I had the VR glasses for my Asus Geforce2 V7700 a few years back. I used them in that FPS horror game with ghosts and stuff. I can't remember the name, but I had to run at about 640x480 mainly because the technology had to draw the screen twice for every frame. Since my card had no problem with 1024, I had to cut the res in half to use the VR.

It really worked well, and it was like playing the game in a viewmaster.

That makes me think that the glasses could be used for a computer version of Viewmaster....hmmm. I think I just invented something

 

[Wildhound]

I really don't think it would be that difficult to make VR headgear. All it would require is a monitor set in a visor and some kind of spirit level type control mechanism that would detect the movement of your head. You could still use your mouse and keyboard to control your actions.

I'd say give it five years. I'll have an Electronic Engineering Masters degree then, so if it hasn't been done I'll do it. And with this new 3D monitor technology that's slowly emerging, imagine the possibilities.

 

[Toffee]

Bah, you can´t have all the goodies at once.
I´m pretty satisfied with the 3D glasses. I used them with
Far Cry, among others, which looked really sweet on, but hadnt have the possibility to try them out on HL2 yet..