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New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

polygon.com

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Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#131

Post by cma »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #123
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would be possible to detect from user eyes where he is focusing and adjust the focus point accordingly. Would you think that would add another level of immersion?

From what I've heard from the Oculus folks, it won't happen any time soon. Your eyes move way too fast for a VR system to react to them. It will happen eventually, but it seems like we need cameras/computer vision systems/drawing pipelines with an order of magnitude lower latency for that to actually work.

It's pretty close to happening; they can already track your eyes fast enough to render at higher resolution at the fovea area as your eyes move around:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/fove...

Also, your eyes are very slow to focus relative to your eye movements, so it is probably doable now. It still will not feel like real life, just sort of eye tracked depth-of-field. Your eyes will still be focused at infinity, but near things will blur when you look in the distance, and vice versa.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#132

Post by cma »

ezarowny wrote: post #120
incision wrote: post #50

Generally not an early adopter, but after backing, using and being blown away by the original kit this was an easy decision. Interestingly, the checkout page reflected my Oculus Store Credit discount, but the confirmation email I received did not. Can't wait.

How much was your discount?

kickstarter purchasers got around a $30 discount because it was supposed to include Doom 3 BFG with VR support, which didn't end up being ready in time.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#133

Post by josephpmay »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #23
itcmcgrath wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the chance to play with it a few weeks ago, along with several others in our office. 1) It didn't make any of us sick, but I could see how it still would for users, particular if they didn't try to move their body in roughly the same direction as they would if it was IRL. If you have ever sat in a vehicle and watched the outside via a mirror - it's like that. 2) For me, while it was immersive (we had several us…

I wonder if it would be possible to detect from user eyes where he is focusing and adjust the focus point accordingly. Would you think that would add another level of immersion?

One alternate possibility is to use a lightfield display. The problem with these is they are currently extremely low resolution and require consistent rendering at all focal lengths.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#134

Post by Quaro »

berberous wrote: post #92

Maybe a stupid question, but: I'm not a game dev nor even a gamer, but I kind of want to buy a dev kit. How well will it work with a rMBP, and are there lots of fun demos already available?

There are tons of fantastic demos and experiments out there already, more than I ever thought would be at this point.

The retina mac book will be passable but will have trouble maintaining 60 fps with many of them.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#135

Post by aidenn0 »

onmydesk wrote: post #86

Oculus, pah! http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/02/technical-illusions-aims-f...

> Fortunately, Gabe [Newell, Valve's managing director] just let us have it all. It wasn’t exactly easy to get it past the lawyers, but we were able to negotiate, free and clear, all the technology

That was really nice. Not many companies would do that.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#136

Post by partomniscient »

tibbon wrote: post #99
catshirt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what purpose does Glass serve?

So you can see your tweets ;)

It's so other people can watch you seeing your tweets without being able to actually see your tweets.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#137

Post by malnourish »

Crito wrote: post #70
tibbon wrote: post #69

A (likely terrible) idea that just occurred to me- How cool would it be to use a VR headset to help you navigate a vehicle? Yes, I mean to say wearing this while driving essentially. Given a fast/good enough sensor/input system, you could scan your environment, know the dimensions of your vehicle (I'm mainly thinking boats and huge trucks here) and be able to "see through" massive blind spots on your vehicle to enabl…

My understanding is that this "see through the vehicle" capability is built into at least some helmet-HUD/Helicopter combinations that the military has. If it suffices for an attack helicopter, I'd say that the idea probably has serious potential for automobiles as well. I wouldn't expect to see it come to standard consumer cars yet, but for commercial drivers (particularly truck drivers who have massive blindspots)…

Maybe Erlang will finally get more popular.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#138

Post by sbierwagen »

modeless wrote: post #117
mortenjorck wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rendering it twice, but at only half the resolution. Thinking about this more, the closest analog to stereo rendering would seem to be games with a split-screen mode. Which, in my experience, often does entail a performance hit (though certainly not a generation-sized one). My guess is that how much a second viewport affects performance is highly engine-dependent. Ironically, the one game I remember having the b…

Rendering the scene twice has overhead, so it would take extra time even if it was the same number of pixels total. But that's far from the only reason VR requires more power. Due to the distortion caused by the lenses the scene must be rendered at about 1.4x the normal resolution. Then there's a warping step that performs the inverse of the lens distortion, which is an additional cost. Also, good VR requires renderi…

  Also, good VR requires rendering at 90 Hz
The DK2 can only do 75 Hz. Anything more than that is wasted.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#139

Post by modeless »

sbierwagen wrote: post #138
modeless wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rendering the scene twice has overhead, so it would take extra time even if it was the same number of pixels total. But that's far from the only reason VR requires more power. Due to the distortion caused by the lenses the scene must be rendered at about 1.4x the normal resolution. Then there's a warping step that performs the inverse of the lens distortion, which is an additional cost. Also, good VR requires renderi…

Also, good VR requires rendering at 90 Hz The DK2 can only do 75 Hz. Anything more than that is wasted.

DK2 isn't good enough. That's why it isn't the consumer version already. Palmer has said in interviews that the consumer version will be higher resolution and higher frame rate. The higher frame rate is required to enable low enough persistence without flickering.

Re: New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

#140

Post by nicpottier »

For those that have the first dev kit, how appropriate is this for a curious engineer who wants to play with Alpha titles? It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where I would actually have the time to develop something, but man, playing with it seems well worth $350.

Am I going to be disappointed in what is available?

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