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Comment by sciguy77 | Hacker News Reader

Guys, please don't go to Zero Latency. When I was in Melbourne I coughed up the 80 bucks and went, and it was truly a horrendous experience. They had the worst tracking I've ever seen in VR. The gun's rotation was off by 40 degrees, even after switching it out and resetting it. There was constant stuttering, and severe frame drops were the norm, not the exception. And to top it off the game itself had crap graphics, embarrassingly bad AI, and glitched like crazy.

At a VR meetup I talked to several people who had went, and not a single person had a good experience. I am amazed and baffled by all the good press they're getting.

And for context I've tried the Rift DK2, the Gear VR IE, and the HTC Vive.

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That's genuinely interesting to hear, because I had such a good experience -- I'm the guy that wrote the story, by the way. It definitely has bad graphics, but I thought the head and gun tracking was excellent. It's the best I've ever tried, and I've used DK2, Vive, Playstation VR and the newest Gear VR (with a Note 5).

I reckon they must have been having some software issues on the day, because that's extremely different to my experience. If I was running that I would have given you a refund.

Wow, so weird to hear you actually had a good experience. You mean to say that the rifle's orientation in game matched its orientation IRL (i.e. you could hold it like a real rifle and not hipfire it with the laser)? What about the frame rate drops? IIRC they were constant and impossible to ignore.

I don't mean to contest your experience, I believe you of course, I'm just shocked to hear someone actually enjoyed themselves at Zero Latency.

We have a HTC Vive at work and it's pretty impressive, like no latency at all and very reactive.

Yeah, I loved the Vive. The controllers added so much to the immersion, and it was really cool to be able to walk abound in VR without getting nauseous.

There's good press and then there's good advertorials.

This ain't an advertorial, man. I even paid for my own flight down to Melbourne and back to Sydney to meet the guys from Zero Latency and try it out. They're literally five or six guys in a warehouse, they wouldn't have the kind of money that our ad sales team deals with daily :)

Fair enough.

I can't get past their brand name. Low latency is one of the biggest challenges in VR, to get below 20ms, and a lot of discussion around latency dominates VR engineering.

Reading your article annoyed me that they come along and declare "zero latency", which is the first thing I scanned the article for - as in, how the hell did they achieve that. Then to discover it's only their brand name and nothing to do with actual performance metrics, which I think could have deserved a mention in your article given the whole buzz and significance around latency in VR discussion.

A poor choice of brand name because it deserves a footnote* whenever it's mentioned!

No harm done. Not an advertorial. Got it.

When was that and why should anyone believe you? you could just be a shill. Just saying.

This was a couple months ago. I'm not recommending any other product or service. I don't know, how does one prove they're not a shill? By Doxing himself?

AFAIK Zero Latency doesn't have a competitor in Australia (much less Melbourne) so I'm not sure who you think I'm secretly working for.

Gah! Already paid, going in February. Hopefully they get their shit together by then :/

I hate to say it but I'd cancel. Seriously not worth the money. A guy I talked to at a Melbourne VR meetup said he tried it when they were in alpha and again recently and was shocked to see basically no improvement. This is only anecdotal evidence, so take it with a grain of salt, but I'd say reconsider.

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