The HTC Vive will reportedly cost $799

I find it funny that people were going on about how the Vive would cost so much less than the Oculus back when the price was revealed back in early January.  I felt that the fact that there’ll be more hardware coming with the Vive would cause the price to be higher, and it appears that I was correct.  I find it interesting that so many people are getting very agitated about the high prices of the upcoming VR Headsets, but VR is a fairly new technology.  Back when the price for the Oculus was revealed some people pointed out that DVD players, Bluray Players, and HDTVs were all extraordinarily expensive when they first became available.  Some of those pieces of equipment could cost in the thousands of dollars back in the day.

I for one am planning on ordering the Vive when pre-orders start at the end of February, I’d love to compare the Oculus CV1 to the Vive.  I’m hoping that the facial padding is a bit better than in the Oculus DK2, as it has started to pull free from the plastic and has become a bit of a nuisance.  It’ll be fun getting to play games in higher quality VR in the near future.  Preorders for the Vive will start February 29, and they’ll start shipping in April.

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iPhone Date crash, Windows 10 update history, and Intel overclocking

This has been a fairly interesting week in computer news, first of all, a number of articles about Intel stopping motherboard manufactuers from allowing overclocking on their non K series CPUs.  I can certainly see why Intel would want to stop people from overclocking their cheaper lines of CPUs, They want people to buy the higher-end K series or X series.  This only appears to apply to the Skylake line of CPUs, older CPUs cannot be overclocked unless their in intels K or X series.  There are also some articles talking about Intel and Microsoft pushing ‘microcode’ updates to the CPUs via Windows Update to make sure that they can’t be overclocked.  In the end it would be best to purchase the more expensive CPU if you want to overclock.  Here’s a more in-depth article about this, though the title could be a bit … misleading.  The mircocode update hasn’t been pushed out yet.

On more Windows Update related news, Microsoft has started posting the full changelogs for Windows 10 updates.  This is a very good change, as it will allow IT Staff to see what MSFT is pushing out before they deploy it to their orginizations.  I wonder why they thought that not showing people what has been changed was a good idea, every previous version of Windows has had a site where you can see their update history.

The site looks a bit spartan, but here is the link if you want to see the changelogs.

And finally, Apples 64 bit IOS devices have a very huge bug…

 

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Extra Credits – 5 challenges for VR, and my view on their video

I feel that they certainly do have some points in their video…

VR does certainly have some hurdles to get over, the first VR craze will show us some examples of the hurdles that will need to be overcome.  I’m sad that VR didn’t take off in the 90s, but at least it appears to be getting a second chance at the consumer market.

I feel that it’s much more likely for VR to take off this time, the headsets are far more comfortable, computers have become far more powerful, and there will be some games that appear to be very high quality coming out, at least with the Rift.

Here is my take on their points

1 – None of the VR headsets are packaged-in peripherals

They talk a bit about the Kinect and Motion controls during this part of the video, the kinect was a packaged-in, almost mandatory peripheral for the XBox One, people just didn’t like it much.  Probably because Motion controls such as the Kinect, and the wiimotes do make people look a bit … silly.

Also the VR Headsets themselves are more like TVs than motion controlls, and your TV/Monitors aren’t usually packaged in with your Console or PC.  Both the Vive and Oculus will have their own motion controls though, I wonder how those will work out.  the Oculus won’t have the motion controls coming on release, unlike the vive.

On a sidepoint about motion controls, the Wii had motion controls as it’s main input, and from what I’ve read and seen, people did really like it.  My biggest gripe with the Wii and the Wiimotes is the fact that a large number of games were right-handed only.  Right-handed controls don’t work well for left-handed people like myself.  I really hope that the Oculus and Vive don’t have a large number of games like that with their motion controls.

2 – VR isn’t actually good for all games

No, it certainly is not.  At least without with some different design choices on the game itself.  I’ve seen people talking about how the classic Dungeon Keeper games and Black & White would make good motion control/vr games, thanks to how those games played.

3 – Delayed hardware

This has been bothering a lot of people, as they said, VR started coming up in 2012, now it’s 2016.  That is a bit of a long wait. At least it means that they’ve had a long time to work on the hardware and fix a lot of glairing issues that appeared in the Oculus DK1 and DK2.  I can’t say anything about the vive though, sadly.

4 – Too much hype

This one could be a problem.  I’ve seen when people get too hyped up about a new tv show or movie, just to be disappointed.  Some people will just give up on things like that and won’t come back until it isn’t being hyped up so much, that said, I don’t think that being overhyped has really completely killed something, at least unless it was a poor product on top of the overhyping.  I have the Oculus DK1 and DK2, I really like my DK2, and am looking forward to trying out the CV1 in March.

 

That’s what I’m thinking about this, I hope that you have a nice day. 🙂

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7 Gamers, 1 CPU – Ultimate Virtualized Gaming Build Log

Well, this got me to keep on working on making my new build work the way that I want it to…

My new build is almost complete, though I wasn’t able to do much work on it during my week off, seeing this reminded me of why I decided to make a new build in the first place.  I want to be able to switch between Windows Gaming and working on Linux with a button press.

I’m looking forward to having the computer running like that.  As of now, it is dual-booting between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.  It sadly isn’t quite as crazy as the one in this video, primarily because I’m not planning on running 7 VMs at once.

I think that the final build in the video looks very cool.  I’d love to see the OS Configuration that they have going.

Well, that’s all for now, have a nice day. 🙂

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