Oculus Rift tech-specs 'many months away' from hitting the shelves The CEO of Oculus reckons his virtual reality upstart is sorta getting close to flogging a Rift headset that's ready for normal people to use. Speaking at a web tech conference in Ireland on Tuesday, Brendan Iribe said the techno-specs will be on general sale within months rather than years. A Rift headset for software …
Bit disappointed, I'd heard March (from a source so reliable I can't even remember who it was) this rhetoric seems to suggest "not March"
I can't help but think that if they had knocked up either crystal cove or crescent bay by late 2013 they would have said "good enough" and shipped them to retail. Wanting to make the best product you can is admirable, but sometimes you need to let joe public loose, see what non-enthusiasts end up using it for, see what cheap plastic aftermarkets mods appear on the market, and then take it from there.
From watching their keynotes at the dev conference a couple of months back, they seem to be of the opinion that they can't launch to mainstream consumers whilst nausea is a problem, as one bad experience will put people off for life.
I got the impression they know how to prevent it completely, but logistically it's difficult (at the moment it needs a room wallpapered with QR codes).
> they seem to be of the opinion that they can't launch to mainstream consumers whilst nausea is a problem, as one bad experience will put people off for life.
Then they'll never release. There will always be a potion of the population who get motion sick in VR environments - if you have a sensitive inner ear and the eyes say "moving" and the ear says "no you're not" then they feel sick. They can minimize it perhaps, but they won't solve it for everyone.
"Then they'll never release. There will always be a potion of the population who get motion sick in VR environments - if you have a sensitive inner ear and the eyes say "moving" and the ear says "no you're not" then they feel sick. They can minimize it perhaps, but they won't solve it for everyone."
It's really a minority of people who have that though - otherwise they wouldn't be able to have darkened cinemas.
The nausea they've been apparently experiencing is more to do with keeping framerates up, latency down, and reducing image tearing, as the human sensory sytem apparently goes haywire over that.
> It's really a minority of people who have that though - otherwise they wouldn't be able to have darkened cinemas.
You generally don't move your head in a cinema - it's a different problem. If all the VR environments provide is a 3D scene without head tracking, then you'd be right, but IIRC half the point of the head-mounted display is that you can look around.
I know it's a really poor point of comparison, but I excitedly downloaded the templates to cut and bought the widgetry to make a Google Cardboard so that I could get at least a taste of VR after ..what?.. 20+ years of hungrily wanting a go, and was horrified to feel nausea kick in after mere minutes of using it.
I appreciate there's a vast gulf in tech specs and latency and refresh between a homespun cludge and a well-honed end-platform, but it's very apparent to me that instantaneity and high refresh is absolutely necessary to ensure an enjoyable and engaging experience that can last for more than a few minutes.
I can't even begin to imagine how bad the Virtuality experience must've been for people like me who, apparently, suffer from mild motion sickness. I'm kind of glad the thing was offline when I finally got a chance to see a machine in person, in Trocadero, back in the late 90s...
For some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, I really don't believe that the Oculus rift will be a success.
Up until now it's full of fat promise but apart from 1 or 2 games what other purpose will it serve. The physical "side-effects", when used over much larger audience will start to surface after quite a short period, they state that they have ironed out the problems but what else could they say anyway. I imagine that several people will quickly become very claustrophobic if the experience is really as powerful as the various YT vids show.
Of course, I could be 100% wrong but in any event I will not be betting investing in these with my cash.
As with all new forms of visual media you can always count on porn to drive adoption.
That, or some bright young tech start-up will realize that a rack full of servers and some commodity gaming hardware is a hell of a lot cheaper than renting office space in central London.
Surely porn will fall foul of the uncanny valley? if you use computer models (as games will), the people will have dead eyes and unrealistic skin and generally not up to porn standards with live human models. If you use live human models, then you are stuck with whatever PoV the camera had when recording.
I think the problem is that you have to make the headset mimic the human body - ie your eyes can move independently of your head. You can move your head up and down or left and right quite quickly and if you're focussed on something your brain will make your eyes make adjustments to compensate for head movement. I think currently the rift dislay would be noticeably changing with every slight change the accelerometers etc detected. I am not an engineer but my solution would be to combine eyeball tracking with points of interest algorithms to reduce judder and nausea.
I bought a few kits online (self assembly required) and it works great with my note 3. Rift 2 is actually using the same display as the Samsung's one. At first there were only a few demos which often crashed but now there is an abundance of games to play which can be downloaded from various stores.
The other day I had the chance to finally play an immersive game and got no motion sickness. I strapped the Cardboard Virtual Reality visor to a helmet so I didn't need to hold it. Google Earth in full 3D glory was amazing. All this and only at the fraction of the price of the Rift. I know my phone isn't as powerful as a pc but I can really see this taking off with the next generation phones sporting a good graphics chip.
> I know my phone isn't as powerful as a pc but I can really see this taking off with the next generation phones sporting a good graphics chip.
Technically it will work, but who is going to pay > $150 (guessing here on price) for a headset, on top of an already expensive mobile, just so they can play $4 mobile 3D games in VR 3D? There will always be a few people, sure, but it just seems very very niche to me.
"it just seems very very niche to me"
Didn't you hear? Computers are dying, and will be replaced by pads and cellphones! Just ask Ballmer and Sinofsky!
Developing support for cellphones is a big part of the Oculus Rift's delay, as is developing virtual Facebook hangouts. If the focus of the Rift was still on gaming, it'd probably have been out for christmas.
I believe the "killer app" for the Oculus Rift headset will be 3D CAD and modeling, and not games. For that application I don't think a massive refresh rate is needed because the displayed items are fairly simple and static unlike a game. Personally I can't wait to get mine - I just hope Solidworks integration is available from the start!
It's all down to resolution.
For example, there are people crying out for a RIFT version of IL2-Battle of Stalingrad and the developers have suggested that they want to produce one; they have a dev kit 2 RIFT for testing. They also have made it very clear that at the current resolution there's no feasible way to succeed because a virtual pilot would not be able to discern another aircraft at any distance. The delay in the retail rift is probably as much about awaiting small oled displays that can handle a lot more pixels than today as it is ironing out the software. There's very little point in releasing a product if the software doesn't work properly on it and the primary use for most purchasers WILL be gaming (whether you like it or not).
Similarly the Swedish army tested a RIFT as a virtual world viewer for their tank crews and gave up because they couldn't see any targets at distance. Kind of important going forward.
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