Hi all,
My Oculus Rift bundle finally arrived on Wed.  Originally ordered it from Amazon on 7/11 after a live chat with them verifying it was in stock.  Nope, on back order once I get the confirmation.  Waited about another week and canceled the order and went to Newegg where they confirmed it was in stock and arrived 2 days later!
Took me about 30 minutes or so to get it up and running in as far as the Oculus setup procedure.
Then I had to try it with a racing sim. 1st one was Iracing as that seemed to need the least amount of prep to get working, basically just go into settings and run the graphics config tool and go race.
Wow!  I started with the Lotus 49 @ Watkins Glen and it was pretty cool to feel like you are actually sitting in the cockpit.  In my normal viewing mode I have a wide screen LG monitor with the FOV and or seating position in window licker.  Can’t see the cars mirrors and can only see the top of the front tires and some front cowling.  In VR I can move back and use the car mirrors, see the front suspension and actually see cars on either side of me, you can even turn your head to the back and see the back of the car.  But the best part is how well you can see the apex.

Pretty much the same story in the next sim I tried and that was PCars.  Pcars was easy to get running in VR too.  It also has really nice graphics and detail.  I was in the 63 Lotus Formula Ford in the rain, incredible in VR.  One detail I noticed was the Smiths clocks on the dash looked so real.  I could lean forward and get close to the gauges and the metal bezel on the speedo for instance looked like real stainless steel.  You can see stuff on the car that you normally can’t see using a 2D monitor and you wonder why they even bother modeling such detail, the suspension components, brake caliper, nuts and bolts.  Pretty cool.

Then last night I got RF2 working in VR.  I had to kind of jump through hoops to get it going.  I have a separate install of RF2 DX11 and at first Oculus could not find it.  So I went ahead and switched the Beta thing on for my main install of RF2.  Still could not find it.  After a little Google Fu I discovered you have to install Steam VR and run that before you start RF2.  I just assumed that was optional or something to do with Vive only or something.  Tried the F3 at COTA, pretty awesome!  Sitting in the cockpit you feel like the cowling round your shoulders is right there and you instinctively try not to bump into it even though it’s not really there.  The steering wheel is much easier to read and see the info it provides.  And racing at COTA is so different in VR, again the apex is easier to hit and the feeling of speed and emersion is fantastic.  The little left hand sweep you kind of do after T1 to setup for T2, kind of a combo left on camber downhill to the right as you then turn right to T2… makes me want to hurl a little bit  , it’s the up-down-roll side to side motion you see and think you feel LOL.  And the 3,4,5,6 complex, wish I could get them all right cuz that is really cool in VR.

I also tried using it in Elite Dangerous, Euro Truck Sim 2.  ED… sublime.  ETS2… needs some tweaking; right now the GPS screen is right in the middle of my view , don’t laugh ETS2 is a great sim

I need to do some graphics tweaking but the only thing I don’t like about VR is the image quality is not really that great… compered to my monitor any way.  Screen door effect, not able to see clearly down the track.  Although, so far FPS as not been an issue but I only tried AI in Pcars, don’t know what it will be on the grid in EGT with you guys yet but in RF2 I’m getting a solid 90 FPS in solo on Chad’s server.

I am going try to run VR this Sunday with you guys for the final F3 race if I get more practice in VR between now and the race and feel safe to run with others.

I think there are a couple of you on the forum that is using VR?  Any advice, tips or experience’s you have would be great to hear about.
Cheers,
Gerry

One of the big things I see people doing is turning on supersampling within their video card settings or Oculus software. I've seen numbers from 1.4 to 1.6 throwing around as having the best pixel density and resolution before deteriorating signal and FPS

Thanks for the link Simon.
I tried the settings you are talking about Chad and there was a little improvement to be sure.
Still some more tweaking to do though.
Gerry

Oh yeah, don't forget to map the side mirror adjust buttons. I never used them in flatland. But now in VR, I adjust seat and mirrors just like in a real car!

Gerry, I am curious how your VR experience is going. I am probably getting a Rift during the summer sale. I can't pass up the whole kit for $400.00. I am nervous though. My only experience with VR has been through the Gear VR standalone (great experience, but no hand presence or positional tracking), or the Gear VR hack acting as a wireless HTC Vive. Again there is no positional tracking or hand presence.

In the Vive hack I get a small amount of lag due to the wireless connection not being fast enough to flow the data back and forth from the headset to the computer. The resolution on my Galaxy Note 4 is almost good enough to consider as a replacement for the triples but the lag is making it impossible to use consistently, and definitely not usable for running in a league race.

My questions are, "Do you have any lag?", "Is the resolution good enough to see your apexes and breaking points reliably?", "Now that you have used it to race do you think it is the future of sim racing?"

Away from racing, have you found games that are "Must haves"? I am super excited but still nervous about spending a good chun of dough for this peripheral. Help ease my nerves.

Hi Chad,
Sorry for the long post
I haven't noticed any lag.
Straight out of the box I was not impressed in the performance in RF2.  But I have done some tweaking and it doesn't look too bad now.  I had some low frame rates and some stuttering on the server during Sundays F3 practice session.  That was the first time I had to run the rift in multiplayer with ten players.  I think I can do a bit more tweaking and get it to perform even better.  I am just used to having my graphics settings on ultra or high with single monitor.  I just need to scale some settings back a little bit more.  It seems like everything in RF2 you got to work and dig around insidefor getting it just right.
Over all the quality of the graphics is lower than I expected but I was able to improve it a bit and the immersion and the ability to see apex’s and braking points as well as other drivers around you more than makes up for the little bit lower quality graphics.
I also play Iracing and mostly race with the Lotus49 group.  Iracing was a lot simpler to get running well.  I just made a few recommended changes in the graphics settings and started racing.  I get 90 to 120 FPS in Iracing with 10 to 15 other racers in a race and that is not too far from what I was getting before the Rift… like 120 to 160 FPS.
The other racing sims I have such as AC and Pcars worked well with the rift although I had to turn graphics settings down quite a bit in AC.  But I don’t really spend any time with these two sims, haven’t played them in months.  Just wanted to try the rift in them to see what it was like.
I also play Elite Dangerous.  I used head Track IR5 in that game before.  Now with the rift it is pretty cool.  Works much better the Track IR5 did.
I have only just started looking at the other games you can see in the Oculus library.  There are some free ones to download so I tried one called ISS.  You are aboard the International Space Station and obviously floating.  You can grab stuff and work the crane to grab a supply module outside and walk in space I guess (haven’t got that far yet).  I read the revues on the download page and almost all of them said if you get motion sick easily you should not play this game.  They are close, not too bad in the station but just looking out the window is pretty weird and the revues said that walking in space is even worse, we’ll see LOL.
I would summarize by saying that for $400 it is worth it.  I would not have bothered if it was still in the $600 to $800 range; however, I have a GTX 970… the rift now has me thinking I will by a new GTX 1080 to hopefully get even better performance.  You know how it is, you get one thing for your racing rig and it usually leads to another and another and so on.  I’m not as much an equipment **** as *Simon is but when does the madness stop?  LOL
(*Just ribbing you Simon)
HTH,
Gerry

I have heard there is no eye strain because your eyes are focusing on "Distant" objects just as they would in real life. They are not crossing or straining due to not having to focus on something 1 inch from your face, but rather focusing naturally.

Yeah, I'm an asteroid miner all the way. I hear there are some good multiperson mining tactics. But I've never teamed up with others in ED.
Perhaps someday Gerry?! (I think Chad is into ED also.)
Sadly, I don't have much free time for gaming these days so not sure when I will be back in ED for any serious amounts of time.

I started looking at some of those Rift tuning threads for rF2. But some of them are really old and I couldn't be bothered to read through the entire things to figure out which settings still applied to the latest version of rF2. Being that lazy, I'd love to see what settings you've ended up with so I could give them a try. :-)
Paul