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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

#151

Post by pjspycha »

grandmaster789 wrote: post #121
tsenkov wrote: post #82

Has anyone used it for coding?

The DK1's resolution is way too low for reading large amounts of text, and I'm somewhat skeptical that the DK2 is good enough to be used as a monitor replacement. Different applications that place less emphasis on text may be a better fit for VR - think photoshop and autocad for a start.

This. There is an article by Michael Abrash that goes into good detail about this:

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/when-it-comes-to-resol...

quoted:

"Given which, the obvious question is: how high does VR resolution need to go before it’s good enough? I don’t know what would be ideal, but getting to parity with monitors in terms of pixel density seems like a reasonable target. Given a 90-degree field of view in both directions, 4K-by-4K resolution would be close to achieving that, and 8K-by-8K would exceed it."

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

#152

Post by DonGateley »

pjspycha wrote: post #150
DonGateley wrote: post #72

It's beyond commendable that Palmer et.al. seem to have no problem at all employing people smarter than he is wherever they can be found and enticed away from what they are doing. I've gotta wonder, though, if he's looking up at everyone around him and seeing not only stellar talent but stellar ambition and ego how he'll stay on top of it. I've got a DK1 and had a whole lot of fun with it despite its laughable resolu…

I don't know if you are praising Luckey or calling him just a figurehead. Don't underestimate his intelligence, he is a really smart guy.

Praising, for sure. I was afraid my comment might be taken as an underestimation. Not so, I'm just blown away by the extraordinarily accomplished people he has brought on board and know that, smart though he may be, many of them have accrued far more impressive technical track records.

His early work demonstrated potential with contemporary, off the shelf technology along with a visionary template. His growing team is taking it so much further. I consider that kind of talent acquisition and management a form of genius.

I just expect it to be a really tough herd to manage in a collective fashion and for it to get increasingly difficult as time makes room for the inevitable ego expansions and the elbowing for power, influence and credit. But then it also appears that he has placed some very alpha managers at the top of the executive team.

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

#153

Post by talmir »

stesch wrote: post #79

I guess a lot of people won't buy a VR system if they get forced to set up a camera for it.

I guess they wont "need" to set up the camera. But it is recommended as it is there to help with head-tracking. So your movements inside the 3d environment will feel more natural with more degrees of freedom.

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

#154

Post by jo_ »

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…

I remember being surprised that the bottleneck for some modern devices (like cell phones) wasn't the number of vertices one could push, but rather the fill rate and number of draw calls. Do consoles these days hit performance bounds as a function of the number of draw calls rather than the number of polygons/vertices?

I ask because I can completely understand how doubling the number of draw calls could be problematic in a VR situation.

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

#155

Post by modeless »

jo_ wrote: post #154
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…

I remember being surprised that the bottleneck for some modern devices (like cell phones) wasn't the number of vertices one could push, but rather the fill rate and number of draw calls. Do consoles these days hit performance bounds as a function of the number of draw calls rather than the number of polygons/vertices? I ask because I can completely understand how doubling the number of draw calls could be problematic…

Mobile devices are often limited by memory bandwidth, and by OpenGL driver overhead. Consoles have very little driver overhead, so number of draw calls is not as big a problem, but state changes are still costly, so doubling the number of state changes hurts performance. I could imagine some clever techniques to avoid doubling the number of state changes (perhaps a geometry shader that duplicates triangles to render both eyes at once) but I don't know how well that would work. VR rendering is still mostly unexplored!

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

#156

Post by dm2 »

nefasti wrote: post #5
dm2 wrote: post #3

Does the latest versions make people sick after prolonged use? How similar does it feel to looking at real far away objects? Is it easy to tell it's not 3D and the screen is flat? If I tied a passed out "friend" up and put on the Oculus Rift glasses and played a movie of them being thrown out of a helicopter from 1st person, would they be able to tell that it was fake or is there a perceived feeling of it being real?

That is some sick thoughts you have there.

It's just a thought experiment to gather some information.

How would you better word that statement to get the same information back? One of the keys is that the person wearing the goggles doesn't know they are wearing goggles and is in a panicked and rushed scenario with lots going through his head so that they don't have time to consider, "Wait, did someone put a virtual reality device on my head?".

Also because I realize that bumping into things and a video moving when all other senses are saying something different is happening would be clues that it would be easy to guess you are possibly in a simulation, being tied up takes away this freedom of movement (and is safer than drugs that paralyze) so I just made up a random scenario that was slightly humorous and anyone could easily imagine.

I do hope that nobody actually tries that, it would be funny but could be considered torture. I've heard of the media blacking out things willingly because they do not want people copying it, it would be an interesting article if anyone wants to research that stuff, not sure if that's ethical or not though.

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

#157

Post by stesch »

talmir wrote: post #153
stesch wrote: post #79

I guess a lot of people won't buy a VR system if they get forced to set up a camera for it.

I guess they wont "need" to set up the camera. But it is recommended as it is there to help with head-tracking. So your movements inside the 3d environment will feel more natural with more degrees of freedom.

Too bad it's a camera by Facebook now. No, thanks.
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