As builders plan for a world to be seen by Oculus Rift users we hear a bit more about building things to real life scale. It is a good idea and has many benefits.
What we aren’t hearing much about is how to avoid making visitors sick, simulator motion sickness. I suppose many think that the Oculus Rift people will take care of such problems. The Oculus people are certainly putting thought and engineering into building a system that will avoid giving people simulator sickness. But, they advise those building for Oculus headsets to make sure they can keep their frame rates above 60 FPS…
I suspect the majority of Second Life users seldom see 60 fps. I know with my Quad Core and GTX560 I seem to get 25 to 50 FPS most of the time. If I am in a crowd, it is more like 8 to 12.
Hypergrid Business has an article up on their site: 5 tips for designing for virtual reality.
My major take away from the article is Second Life builders are going to have to get MUCH better at reducing texture load and increasing detail. The author thinks normal mapping is a poor substitute for detail in a world built for Oculus. That is going to make building for 3D Oculus worlds challenging.
Yet many of the oculus demos out there are not what I’d call highly detailed or even realistic realities, yet you get enough to ‘feel right’. Playing technolust moving from a relatively detailed urban environment into a vector based computer world showed that graphics detail isn’t vital, but the frame rate is.
Builders can build a place in the sky away from water and ground terrains, that increases frame rates, use little to no textures that increases frame rates, use no alpha blending textures, buy a full region not a homestead, make sure there are no neighbouring regions, then finally only allow one person on that region at a time :-p if only regions grew freely n trees.
Would be great if oculus or the SL viewer could increase frame rates using prediction, like my TV does.