3 Commando Brigade

Track IR5 vs Occulus Rift

Occulus rift and those other VR systems are a new technology and not really refined yet. If I am correct it also can only do 720p max at the moment. I would say get track ir 5 and wait a few years until the VR thing is really working.

We had a member that played ArmA with us using an Occulus Rift about a year ago.

From what I remember he got motion sickness...and doesn't play ArmA anymore.

TrackIR all the way.

Another thing that is (and probably will be a problem) is that if you wear one of those VR things, you will not be able to see your hands. In fact you cant see everything at all. This would make hittings keys quite hard when you have to.

Track IR is great I'm so glad I bought myself one despite the amount it costs but still it is worth it.  I don't see Occulus really taking off with keyboards you'd need a way of not having to take your hands off, despite that how are you supposed to grab hold of your beer and have a drink without seeing where it is.

Tracked IR is great, it works and is really quite intuitive.

The Occulus (dk1 and dk2) are both dev devices, they appear low resolution (compared to standard monitors), have serious colour aberration issues and significant latency.  The image quality is thus way behind a decent monitor.  The latency is the primary reason behind sickness, which effects a significant percentage of users.

There are new devices coming to market within the next 12 months Razer, HTC/Steam, Sony, Occulus all improve on the dk1 and 2 experience.

I've used several and the newer ones are much better, although there is still work to be done, especially in the supporting software. 

Unless the engine really supports HMD, the overall 3D experience is not good.  I've used an Occulus on VBS3 and it was very poor.  It was not the fault of VBS3 rather the 3rd party drivers used to "persuade" the engine to produce a stereo image.

There is also another interesting piece of tech that might replace TrackIR, and that's eye tracking.  It's supported in this weeks assassin's creed launch.  The technology is similar in price to the Tracked IR.  It tracks where you are looking.  It is currently being integrated into laptops.  http://www.tobii.com/en/tech/

That is a misconception. You are looking a lot more on it as you think. You could probably play some games with very simple controls with it. But If you would use it for a flight sim, you would have to press a lot more keys.

I'd say TrackIR. It is pretty lightweight and you don't even know it is there most of the time. I use the trackclip pro and apart from its flimsy design it is a nice tool for arma. It doesn't support many games but who cares. I haven't tried the rift but I don't think I'd like to sit in my room with a thing on my face for over 3 hours.

Mefirst is correct, the game controls in a VR world are causing the games industry a real headache,  It's one of the reasons why Sony, despite having good hardware in 2014 will not be releasing their HMD until 2016.

The standard controls we're use to can very easily break a users sense of immersion.

The keyboard in particular is not really a viable control mechanism in a VR experience.

I got my track-ir about a month ago, specifically for ARMA, although its great for FSX too, Im not sure i would want to go back to playing without it, well worth the (excessive) cost.