I don't get to go to the cinema much because my weekends and evenings are generally given over to a toddler, but I miss it dearly. The main use has been movie-watching, though. 2D games are another matter entirely: I played a whole bunch of Day Of The Tentacle Remastered in Virtual Desktop and it was just wonderful. 2D games are just fine.įactor in the Vive's existent image quality problems - a 720p-esque appearance (despite how much more it has to render) and a visible screendoor effect, and of course the fact that you can't see your controls, and most recent AAA games I've tried just lose too much sheen and fluidity to want to play them this way instead of back on my 1440p monitor. It's fine in the mirrored window on the desktop, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on - but in any case, dropping settings sorts the problem out. Something like Tomb Raider doesn't do that, and so I have to drop both graphical quality and resolution relatively in order to stop the image in the headset from flickering badly. That's a fairly big ask of the minimum Vive spec - a GTX 970 (which I happen to have), and as such most Vive-specific games I've played are heavily optimised and avoided top-end whizzbang. The Vive has a refresh rate of 90 Hz and thus is best suited to games which can play at 90 frames per second, but in most cases needs them to do so at its 2160 x 1200 total resolution. However, as with Stream Desktop Theatre, performance issues are a real problem. I tried the latter with Rise of the Tomb Raider, and it was a pretty sweet middleground between flat gaming and VR gaming. In Virtual Desktop, you get to resize the screen, play with curved options and even handle stereoscopic options for games which have them. games this way, but right now ">it's fairly flaky and lacks any customisation options. Steam already provides its own support for playing trad. Play a game and, in theory, it's the same: ultro-size, wraparound, beats having a heavy chunk of LCD sat atop your desk. Or gun up Netflix or YouTube in your browser for the same effect. #Vr desktop for htc vive movieWatch a movie in VLC and you get to watch that movie as if on a cinema screen, or on a large curved monitor if you so wish. #Vr desktop for htc vive fullIt recreates your screen or screens as a giant display, optionally curved like a high-end monitor, and scaleable to various sizes and 'distances.' In theory it's best used with multiple monitors, so you end up with a full wrap-around effect and can neatly swoosh off windows and applications into the furthest edges, then swivel in your chair to go look at them. Simply put, it renders your entire Windows desktop, and anything you run on it, within your Vive or Oculus headset (I've only tried it in the former so far). But in this case it's definitely the right name for the right application. #Vr desktop for htc vive software'Virtual Desktop' is the kind of name that sounds like it's been around for donkey's years, attached to VPN software or things which turn Windows into a horrific spinny cube that you use for ten minutes then give up on. Virtual Desktop is the first attempt at meaningfully answering that question, and it's about as essential a VR application as there is right now - but it also demonstrates why the technology just isn't quite there yet. There may well be various applications of VR in other fields - medical, scientific, tourism, military, porn, to name but a few - but general desktop computing is something that pretty much all of us have in common.Ī question which has occurred to me since almost the earliest days of this stuff has been "can I use VR goggles instead of a monitor?" Less physical space but more virtual space, and the possibility of doing Minority Report-y things with the operating system. VR, be it Vive, be it Oculus Rift or something else, is currently primarily discussed in terms of games, but given that what we're fundamentally talking about is a new paradigm for computer displays, that's hardly the be all and end all of it.
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