Oculus Rift noggin-bucket ... heyyy, errr ... have we all got them on already?

Both the Unity 5 and Unreal 4 games development toolkits will be free to Rift developers.

Errrr those are already free, or are they offering to pay the threshold licencing fees?

Golly. something even naffer looking than Google Glass. They said it couldn't be done. Mind you, they also said that a VR headset couldn't be done, and they were right. Two head mounted screens and a PC to drive them isn't quite the same thing.

Getting a comfortable stereoscopic image

"A dial on the bottom of the unit adjusts the gap between the screens and the user's eyeballs so he or she can focus on the images."

I'm sure the focusing between screen and eye is done using lenses which are adjustable to take account of varying degrees of short/long-sightedness. Is there also an adjustment for inter-screen separation to take account of varying inter-eyeball separation distance?

this was all well and good...

and like getting excited about Nest until the google buyout, Oculus is now a subsidiary of facebook.

no thanks.

Too late?

The HTC/Steam and Sony devices looks like it will make it first to the market.

So £425 (UK) for the headset - wild guess, £700 for the PC (and that's Aria so you know it's the best price for an i5 and GTX760), and there's no way the Xbone is rocking those specs... Not going to hit the mainstream for a while, if ever.

Tit for tat

Microsoft will bundle an Xbox controller with every headset, and has been working with Oculus on compatibility.

So first they announce that they're dropping support for anything but Windows, and then reveal that they've been snuggling up to Microsoft. Didn't see that one coming.

So have they fixed the problems yet?

I've had a prod at every version they've released so far and have yet to see any evidence that Oculus have really managed to overcome the problems everyone comes up against. I really want them to crack it but so far it hasn't happened.

The displays have always had inadequate resolution and the latency has always been too high to prevent motion blurring. Maybe they can fix it, I suspect it would need bigger panels further away to get something adequate which ruins their packaging.

But the killer is (and likely always will be) the delays from the sensor though to pushing image out of the frame buffer. Up/down/left/right motion isn't too bad because you don't notice it, but try rolling your head from side to side and you'll see exactly what's going on.

With tight integration of the hardware you could get the thing to work but a headset hanging off USB and driving a standard video card isn't going to manage it. You can work out what the latency is going to be and and the numbers aren't good enough.

From the way people talk you'd think Oculus had some really magic technology and had sorted out the issues everyone had come up against for years. The reality is more that they got to the same point as everyone else did with this particular idea and the last 10% has stumped them which is why nothing much has happened for so long.

It'd be brilliant to have access to cheap commodity headsets that worked but Oculus so far just doesn't feel like anything more that a bro driven hype machine with good PR and adequate hardware.

'Touch controllers'

Those 'Touch' controllers look wierd.

A magnet holding the pair together would make a good steering wheel.

"Microsoft will bundle an Xbox controller with every headset"

Can we ask them not to? An Xbox controller costs in the region of £50. I may well be interested in a Rift once they're done, but I don't want another controller. A Rift at £350 would be a lot more attractive than one at £400+ that comes with a pile of useless shit I don't want or need.

@ Boothy

"The listed spec requirements are around what would have been classed as a high end, but not top end ((i.e. single GFX card, rather than SLI etc), gaming PC from about 3 or 4 years ago."

No, the listed spec requirements are what would be classed as high end right now. A GTX970 is close to the best GPU currently on the market, with only the 980 (and soon 970Ti) any better (plus the AMD equivalents of course, don't know the names off the top of my head). Similarly, the CPU is near the top end of current Intel offerings, with the Broadwell line to replace it only being released this month. Of course they're planning ahead to actual release a year or more from now when there will be new and better parts around and a Rift won't require a brand new PC, but to claim these are specs from 3 or 4 years ago is just silly.

Never mind gaming..

VR Headsets could be used for concerts etc. Recorded with the right camera angles it would just like being there. The same with sporting events and so on.

Will this make me hurl?

I'm not good when my eyes see movement but my head is not actually moving.

And those controllers look like teapots.