Great news for VR (Patreon)

Hello friends! Thank you so much for your patience these days while I've been trying to work out a few kinks from my AER v2 implementation.

Let's begin with a piece of awesome news that only tangentially involves me. Then I'll tell you about what progress I was able to make on the mod ("Status report" section below).

As you know, the PSVR 2 is going to launch on February 22. The hardware looks really impressive. IMHO, Sony is doing everything right. Finally a single headset will have all the characteristics that are needed for a satisfying experience in VR, instead of pushing a few specs to insane levels and completely neglecting or cheaping out on other essential factors.

PSVR 2 will feature an OLED panel (in my view a fundamental requirement, but completely forgotten since the glorious times of the Oculus Rift CV1 / HTC Vive). And HDR! Resolution and FOV will be good, although not so high as to turn games into slideshows; lens will be adjustable; there will be haptic feedback on the HMD itself, eye tracking... the works.

And the launch lineup is rich and diverse! See Eurogamer's Ian Highton talk about the 93 confirmed PSVR 2 games in development right now.

As we all know however, VR has an Achilles' heel that could nip it in the bud yet. Many people suffer from motion simulator sickness when playing in VR the first times, and a small (but very vocal) percentage of them never seems able to overcome that queasy feeling. The videogames industry, and investors in particular, do not want to be associated with negative words and concepts like "sickness", "it makes me puke", "can't play more than 10 minutes without feeling sick for the rest of the day", and so on.

Luckily, somebody is finally doing something to address that issue. Just a couple months ago, I came into contact with people working at NeuroSync Laboratories, a startup that applies neuroscience to the problem of VR locomotion. [Note: I'm in no way affiliated with them, nor do I receive commissions on their sales or anything like that. Just a fan of what they're doing, and convinced that their approach has scientific validity.]

They have built the first device based on those principles, a sort of VR chair/controller called the C-Infinity, which they demoed at CES with great success. The device serves at least three different purposes:

• it provides lumbar support and helps your body maintain a correct position to avoid fatigue and bad posture while your mind is away during long VR sessions;
• it gives subtle vestibular stimuli to your body, helping align what your limbic system perceives with what is being registered by your visual cortex. That immediately provides relief against motion sickness (for instance people who have trouble with smooth turning can perform it without issues while using the C-Infinity);
• what's most important, the device trains your brain to gradually stop believing that you are losing your balance (an illusion which comes from the incongruous stimulation of the vestibular and visual systems in VR, and which in turn triggers the vomit reaction to purge the organism of a possible poisoning that might have caused the sensory misalignment). Thus, the device effectively trains you to become less and less sensitive to motion sickness, until after a few sessions you're completely cured of it.

The video that I posted above is a compilation of an initial segment from Cas and Chary VR's video "I Tried the Future Of VR & It’s AMAZING - CES 2023" (please go and subscribe to their channel if you haven't done so already, because they provide amazing and impartial content and deserve all our support), together with NeuroSync Laboratories' own presentation video. Both segments are used with permission from the respective creators.

Little self-promotion: around 1:50 and 2:10, you can see Oculus founder Palmer Luckey trying his hand at the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod by yours truly :-)

Cas and Chary will keep reviewing the C-Infinity in the next few weeks, and after that they will post a final video with their overall impressions. Unfortunately I'm not a good tester of the device myself, because I'm totally immune to simulator sickness, but Cas is (she still gets sick after intense sessions in VR) and her preliminary findings were very encouraging, so fingers crossed!! If the C-Infinity keeps its promises, or even just part of them, it could just be what VR needs to become mainstream!!!

Status report

Once again, apologies to all of you as during the past few weeks I was unable to respond to anything but a very small fraction of your messages. This AER v2 thing is really draining me :'-)

That said, I must add that I am really happy about it. The tech has been received extremely well (which humbles me and pushes me to always try and do better), both by you, my Patrons and invaluable supporters, and by the community at large.

Finally the message is being received loud and clear, that it's possible and practical to game in VR at 60 fps, on a midrange system, without the insane requests that just one year ago were being put on developers trying to port their game to VR. I have positive confirmation that at least a few major actors in the gaming industry are beginning to change their view from "VR = fad = loss of money" to "VR = better keep an eye on it".

Not that I can or want to take credit for that ;-) Sony's tide floats all boats. But this year has the potential to become a tipping point.

Also, I'm just a lone-wolf developer who's juggling a dozen games while trying to push disrupting technological changes. Lots of companies with way more resources and brainpower than me will contribute to push VR forward.

So, during the last weeks I have been trying to understand and possibly fix the performance issues that some of you have encountered, especially when playing at very high resolutions, while using AER v2 as opposed to legacy AER.

I still need to conduct a few tests, but in the end it seems that I was able to squeeze about 10% more performance at high resolutions from AER v2 (so for instance users who were getting ~80 fps should be able to get a more or less stable 90 fps).

AER v2 will still have a raw performance penalty with respect to legacy AER (which is expected because the GPU is doing additional work), but we must keep in mind that the new tech effectively doubles/triples the frame rate. For instance, all graphics options being equal, a game/PC combo that used to run at 70-80 game fps (35-40 fps per eye sent to the HMD) with legacy AER, now will push the same resolution at 60 fps (90 fps per eye sent to the HMD). So the performance apparently suffers for the game, but the in-headset image, which is what counts in VR, is actually updated 2x-3x faster, and most importantly without the repetitions that used to trigger the ghosting illusion.

I will be releasing this updated version soon™. And since I know that you'll be asking: I should be able to extend it to CP2077 by the first half of February []-D

Stay tuned for the upcoming new release, and happy VR gaming!!!