EVE in VR

Communications Center General Discussion
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With today’s news I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences of playing EVE in VR. I did try to try Valkyrie once too, but was thwarted by the requirement to buy an additional controller just to accept the EULA (not required to play the game). My experiences with EVE in VR have been much more positive.

How it works
I have an HTC Vive headset and controllers, though I mainly use keyboard and mouse. I use a piece of software called “Big Screen Beta” to generate huge virtual monitors in a void-like black environment. EVE is still a “2d” flat game, but it’s displayed on the surface of virtual 3d curved screens.

My main screen is cinema size and sits in front of me, and the alt screen is flat in front of me like a desk so I can look down to control the alt and up to control the main. One of the monitors is powered by a “headless ghost” a tiny monitor-without-the-actual-screen device that plugs into my gfx card and acts as a super hi res screen in the virtual space.

The good
VR gives me huge screens that I could never have space for (or afford!) in real life. This gives me a lot of play space required for EVE and I’m sure I could add more screens if needed, and position them at the sides. I can easily switch between which account I’m looking at in the same way I’d look between two physical side by side monitors.

The Vive also has a high quality head mic built in.

The Bad
The biggest limitation of VR is that you can’t see your keyboard which makes typing a real pain. Teamspeak is a real winner here, but it does limit my communication with people not on comms.

There’s also a resource requirement of the VR environment itself on top of EVE, so I have to run low res gfx when running two accounts, or else avoid undocking two toons at once and gfx intensive encounters.

The Ugly
BigScreen Beta and VR in general are still a bit buggy and sometimes will crash, plunging me into darkness. It’s not cost me my ship yet but I expect it will some day. There’s also a weird bug where when switching between applications the mouse cursor will disappear. I can still click on stuff using hover effects as a guide, but when it happens it normally best just to quit and re-open Bigscreen to start again.

Is anybody else playing EVE in VR? How have you found the experience?

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Very interesting, thanks for posting.

I am thinking of getting a HTC sometime in spring next year (relocating and traveling shortly so now is not the time to buy one).

There is a ton of text you have to read in Eve, how does this affect your VR experience? Is it blown up enough to read easily.

I presume you have to look around to see different onscreen windows? Is that annoying?

Again, an interesting post, I hadn’t really thought about using VR for Eve before.

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Yeh, you have to position the screens close enough or make them big enough to read. The quality is not quite as sharp as a real monitor but it’s good enough for it not to be a problem.

No more than you have to look around to see windows on a physical monitor.

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