the_atm: Honestly, unless I'm missing something I can't see VR working in any way outside of a few niche games. I can see it working in games like Euro Truck Simulator, Racing games with cockpits, space sims and walking simulators, but nothing with combat.
Why? Because how do you control were you walk and where you aim when you move the camera with your head... you can't... how do you look quicly behind you without breaking your neck? You can't! Not that I can forsee without it being awkward...
Lets not forget neck injuries that will happen because of it. But the biggest thing that will affect it is FOV. If we can't trust developers to put adjustable FOV into games now, how can we trust them to put it into every game in VR where it will have the most adverse affects?
Again... if you can answer these questions please do, but I can't figure out how it will successful at all in games like COD, or even Skyrim. It would work in Skyrim until combat... you can't turn your head quick enough for it to be good, or it's just disorienting. And 3rd person would ruin the point of the game...
Depends on the game, but head tracking is nice in FPS games and gives some really good advantages to players that have the hardware. I have a NaturalPoint TrackIR 4 Pro which I've used with ArmA games and there are a number of advantages the hardware provides to the serious FPS gamer. One is that you can be running in one direction while turning your head to scout for enemies. That is particularly useful while reloading your weapon or while running down the side of a wall, so that you can maximize your field of view to look for the enemy instead of seeing a wall cover half the screen. Another advantage is minimizing your body profile while peeking over a ridge while prone. With the head tracker, you turn your in-game head to look around and your body profile is hidden. Without the head tracker, your entire body turns in the direction you look - exposing your entire body to the sides and creating a lot more movement. With human opponents this is particularly effective at making it more difficult for you to be spotted. Another benefit is being able to run up to a corner and actually peek around the corner with your head for real. Most people end up doing that unconsciously while playing due to game immersion, only when you have the proper hardware - it actually works for real which is nice.
As for how to look around quickly, the head tracking hardware has a configurable movement scaling factor. When you're looking at a fixed desktop type display, in order to see the game your eyes have to always be able to see the monitor so obviously you can't turn your head around 180 degrees in real life to see behind you as you would no longer be looking at the monitor anymore so you wouldn't see what was happening. The TrackIR implements movement scaling/acceleration to handle this and you can configure it per-game per-axis, so you decide what the maximum degrees left or right you are comfortable turning your head while still being able to view the display, and what level of in-game head turning you want that angle to represent. So for example if you decide 45 degrees left/right movement is comfortable you can then decide that 45deg of real head movement will translate to 180 degrees of in-game head movement, so you turn your head 45 degrees left or right and you are now in-game looking behind yourself. No doubt each piece of hardware will have options to configure this sort of thing custom to the individual game to tailor it to both the game and the player. TrackIR has a fancy program to calibrate this functionality until you're comfortable with it.
How well these type of features will work in reality heavily depends on the individual game, the hardware one has and the configurability of the software it comes with, whether a game has native support for the hardware that is good or has to use some external hack/mod that may or may not be a great experience, but it also depends on the individual player and their expectations, whether they experience vertigo or other uncomfortable experiences with the hardware, whether they have any eye, neck or other physical problems that would make such hardware difficult or impossible to use properly (bad astigmatism for example). It also depends on how people's emotions are triggered by such immersive environments and how they react to that. It could be a very pleasurable experience for some, and very terrifying or sickening to others.
In short, I think it's going to be a very individual experience that some people greatly love while others strongly dislike, much like 3D movies at the theatre. I have to admit though personally I am anxiously awaiting the Oculus Rift and can't wait to try it out with Skyrim and dozens of other games, I love this sort of technology and look forward to ways to improve my gaming experience with this stuff. In the mean time I manage to have some fun with the TrackIR in games that support it (mostly flight games/sims, racing games/sims, and a handful of FPS shooters like ArmA series). It is truly a breathtaking and immersive experience for me anyway.
Klumpen0815: I don't see a big problem with making this holodeck, all you'd need are
a) augmented reality glasses
b) a specially designed blank room (maybe with curved walls) with some bright infra red LEDs
c) a white or transparent Cyberith Virtualizer in the middle of the room
d) force feedback suit
e) vr gloves
f) very sophisticated software
=> lots of money and space
Actually, most of this stuff is already out there and
I'd prefer this to the Oculus and it's brothers.
Some TV show made an expensive highly custom VR tent for Battlefield 3 a few years ago. If you search Youtube for "Battlefield 3 simulator" or something like that you can probably find it, it was pretty amazing. Video displays all the way around, with a special piece of hardware on the floor to run on that forces you back to the center constantly, with motion trackers, real simulated gun, and you even get shot by paintballs when you get hit in game. It was pretty wild, but it was just an experiment they did for fun. They got a military guy to test-run in it and he was pretty blown away by how real it felt, seemed like a lot of fun. Must have cost them a fortune for all the hardware though! :)