Rudyrae, are you ready for that thing I was hinting I'd heard rumored Creative was working on? Got your hands firmly gripping your armchair? Get ready to wish you had $1,750, lmao:
http://us.creative.com/soniccarrier/
Dolby Atmos 15.2.4 soundbar. With multiple HDMI and optical inputs. Able to connect up to four subwoofers, wirelessly. Comes packed with free lawlz.
Looking at my bank account, the calendar with "Wedding" circled in November, and my collection of headphones, all I can realistically hope for is some trickle-down tech, but still... Wow. A surprise product for sure!
Funny that you bring that up, since a friend of mine overseas needed help pre-ordering it due to their refusal to ship outside the States. His is the 60th unit sold.
He even let me keep the bundled Sound Blaster Roar Pro speaker (CES period promo) as a gesture of thanks. Got it yesterday, still trying to decide if I should keep or sell it.
We'll find out if that soundbar's worth it come September. I'm skeptical that it can deliver convincing surround compared to discrete surround speakers due to dependency on room acoustics, but there's only one way to find out...
I'm 100% certain all these VR devices initially coming out will be hella proprietary. The only thing that will not be will be the Microsoft Hololens since I'm sure Microsoft wants that thing to be everywhere, like schools and hospitals, so it's def gonna be XB1 and PC.
I do hope a company decides to make one that works for all types of systems. PS4, Phone, PC, etc.
As nice as it would be, the fact that modern HMDs rely on lens distortion and have different, customized lenses is NOT going to help matters one bit.
We've also got issues regarding the APIs used. If a game is coded to only use the Oculus Runtime, forget about using any other HMD unless it can fool the Runtime into thinking that's actually a Rift connected. The Vox Machinae demo from over a year ago is already unplayable on non-Rift hardware due to this, and it hasn't even had its Runtime updated beyond 0.4.0.
On the SteamVR side of things, the Rift apparently works... suboptimally. Not a good sign for games that use it as the API of choice, presumably for Vive support.
Then you've got Oculus Touch, the Vive controllers and expected use of room-scale tracking to take into account. There's gonna be tons of fragmentation, and supporting all of this will be more work for devs than what '90s PC devs got away with by simply enabling IMU support for the old VFX1/i-glasses! VPC/CyberMaxx HMDs.
Oh well, I'm banking on the Rift. Here's hoping Elite Dangerous supports it properly again by the time mine shows up in April. If not that, I'll just reacquaint myself with DCS for a while.
