okay, this is a new era. let’s face it. ever since william gibson’s neuromancer (the guy who invented the word cyberspace), i’ve been waiting to dive in into data. in the mid nineties, i bought myself a cybermaxx helmet. and yes, i recently re-descovered it in the garage of my parents. and yes, i will do a head to head comparison of both soon :-).
i did the setup today with my tiny little zotac computer that has a quadcore core i7 and 16gb of ram, however only the intel 4000 hd graphics. i thought that it should be proably enough to power the samsung galaxy note 3 display built in the dk2. no. not at all. zero. forget it. latency is like you’ll get seasick in about 2min and will vomit over your keyboard 30 sec later.
so the 350$ DK2 led to follow up costs of about 2k€ for a decent silent gaming computer from silentmaxx (seems like the cyberspace demands names with a double x, shouldn’t the movie be called “the matrixx” then?) with a brand new nvidia gtx980 (2000 shader cores, anyone?). let’s burn this baby.
but otherwise, the DK2 is simply a phantastic experience. for the two minutes i’m able to stay in it, it’s even with this latency a gorgeous experience. the head-tracking in space is phenomenal and dramatically enhances realism simply because you can freely look around even behind you. the strange thing though is that you don’t have a body. nada. what i really miss are my hands. if you look down your body, there’s nothing! i want to see my hands at least. it’s very interesting that from a psychological perspective this is a missing feature in the user experience. then again, it may mean good news for leapmotion, maybe zuckerberg has a couple of dollars left…
so the next step is to hook up my leapmotion controller and somehow have it attached to my goggles. or i’ll ask nils hitze from 3ddinge.de to print me a clip for the DK2.
