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For a list of decent games for Oculus Go / Gear VR check this wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculu...

Many people find it attractive as a portable video player (both 2D and 3D).

And then there is also an intriguing gimmick that is Oculus Home, which might gradually grow into a richer social VR, as envisioned in sci-fi classics like "Snow Crash" and "Ready Player One". https://www.oculus.com/blog/we...

To resolve the "Can’t Reach Oculus Runtime Service" error, please follow these steps:

If you currently have the Oculus app installed:

Go to https://www.oculus.com/rift-pa....
Click Download Install Patch to download OculusPatchMarch2018.exe.
Open OculusPatchMarch2018.exe.
If Windows asks you if you’re sure you want to open this file, click Yes.
If Windows Defender prompts "Windows protected your PC", click More info and then click Run anyway.
If your antivirus software restricts the file from opening, temporarily disable your AV and continue.
Select Repair and confirm you would like to repair the Oculus software.
Allow the repair process to run, download and install.
Launch the Oculus app.

Shortly after the repair you will be prompted for an update. Please complete the update. The download and update may take up to 10 minutes depending on network connection.

If you uninstalled the Oculus app from your computer:

Go to https://www.oculus.com/setup.
Click Download Oculus Software to download OculusSetup.exe.
Open OculusSetup.exe and follow the onscreen instructions to install the latest version of the Oculus app.

Source - https://support.oculus.com/217...

To resolve the "Can’t Reach Oculus Runtime Service" error, please follow these steps:

If you currently have the Oculus app installed:

Go to https://www.oculus.com/rift-pa....
Click Download Install Patch to download OculusPatchMarch2018.exe.
Open OculusPatchMarch2018.exe.
If Windows asks you if you’re sure you want to open this file, click Yes.
If Windows Defender prompts "Windows protected your PC", click More info and then click Run anyway.
If your antivirus software restricts the file from opening, temporarily disable your AV and continue.
Select Repair and confirm you would like to repair the Oculus software.
Allow the repair process to run, download and install.
Launch the Oculus app.

Shortly after the repair you will be prompted for an update. Please complete the update. The download and update may take up to 10 minutes depending on network connection.

If you uninstalled the Oculus app from your computer:

Go to https://www.oculus.com/setup.
Click Download Oculus Software to download OculusSetup.exe.
Open OculusSetup.exe and follow the onscreen instructions to install the latest version of the Oculus app.

Source - https://support.oculus.com/217...

To resolve the "Can’t Reach Oculus Runtime Service" error, please follow these steps:

If you currently have the Oculus app installed:

Go to https://www.oculus.com/rift-pa....
Click Download Install Patch to download OculusPatchMarch2018.exe.
Open OculusPatchMarch2018.exe.
If Windows asks you if you’re sure you want to open this file, click Yes.
If Windows Defender prompts "Windows protected your PC", click More info and then click Run anyway.
If your antivirus software restricts the file from opening, temporarily disable your AV and continue.
Select Repair and confirm you would like to repair the Oculus software.
Allow the repair process to run, download and install.
Launch the Oculus app.

Shortly after the repair you will be prompted for an update. Please complete the update. The download and update may take up to 10 minutes depending on network connection.

If you uninstalled the Oculus app from your computer:

Go to https://www.oculus.com/setup.
Click Download Oculus Software to download OculusSetup.exe.
Open OculusSetup.exe and follow the onscreen instructions to install the latest version of the Oculus app.

Source - https://support.oculus.com/217...

The price has dropped quite a bit.

$1,318.45 for PC + oculus + touch controllers -
https://www.amazon.com/A80CJ-D...

The oculus headset and touch package is currently $399 on the summer of rift sale - https://www.oculus.com/blog/ri...

The problem with content is being addressed -
Current higher budget games e.g.
Robo Recall - https://youtu.be/shiKcsjZnH0
Lone Echo - https://youtu.be/2pmV2mwAV9k
The Mages Tale - https://youtu.be/MKIr9-zrkI8

Upcoming examples -
Arktika.1 - https://youtu.be/KLkvbAFIOJc
Killing Floor: Incursion - https://youtu.be/i3SinWPbXnw
MARVEL Powers United VR - https://youtu.be/qcUbC1aQpeY

To help fund developers the following steps are being taken.

Facebook has spent $250 million on VR content last year and will spend another $250 million this year (Source : https://www.roadtovr.com/faceb... )

Oculus will pay Unreal Engine royalty fees for titles on their store.
https://www.vrfocus.com/2016/1...

There are quite a few mediocre titles out there, however you could say that about most platforms/ formats.

because the Rift has been available in various incarnations since 2012, whereas Vive only entered the market in April of last year.

Come on, Oculus started shipping real units only at the end of March 2016, and was heavily supply constrained for a while after that because they had to stop shipping for a while. They aren't counting dev units (nor should they). Vives were shipping in quantity just a week later around April 7th, but they were better at getting units out than Oculus. So by your own arguments I guess Oculus is doing better than Vive since Vive really had a shipping head start...

Facebook is going to want to see a return on their investment.

I don't think you understand Facebook very well. Or really Silicon Valley companies, at all.

Disclaimer: I have no horse in this race, other than wanting to see the facts win.

I want only the same thing which is why I found your post so disturbing. I have no horse in the race either but I do have a lot closer understanding of the whole market as I have been thinking of what platform to work with for a long time now, I have a number of different VR systems and have used all of them (well the ones that have been released anyway).

I think all VR goggles are a fad and little more than a stepping stone to more immersive (yet-to-be-invented) experiences

It's called a Hololens. It's inherently more immersive to have a virtual world overlaid on a real one around you.

But all of the platforms available today have some things they do very well and deliver really fund and/or interesting experiences. That's why Sony's VR headset is selling better than expected with almost a million units sold now, and at least one game (resident evil) getting really great reviews (I've not tried it on there yet).

You want to plug an Oculus Rift into an USB port (or even more than one considering there are too few) - now you proved you are an idiot

Actually it seems you just don't know what an Oculus Rift is. It is a VR Headset and "constellation" tracking system, it connects to your computer by a USB cable and HDMI cable from the Headset to the PC and the "constellation" connects via another USB cable. So that is 2 USB connections required plus then there is the dongle for the wireless controller that requires a 3rd, so on my MBP, which only has 2 USB ports, I need a USB hub so that I can plug in 3 USB devices.

Why do the idiots at Occulus not use Bluetooth? Are you an idiot because you work for those idiots?

You want to plug an Oculus Rift into an USB port (or even more than one considering there are too few) - now you proved you are an idiot

Actually it seems you just don't know what an Oculus Rift is. It is a VR Headset and "constellation" tracking system, it connects to your computer by a USB cable and HDMI cable from the Headset to the PC and the "constellation" connects via another USB cable. So that is 2 USB connections required plus then there is the dongle for the wireless controller that requires a 3rd, so on my MBP, which only has 2 USB ports, I need a USB hub so that I can plug in 3 USB devices.

"Enough horsepower to run an Oculus Rift well?"

Quoting from the The Rift’s Recommended Spec:
"For the full Rift experience, we recommend the following system: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater"

Ars Technica writes "Faster than a GTX 980".
PCworld even uses the title "GTX 1060 is a $250 GTX 980 killer".

So, yes, it's easily enough to use the Rift.
And the HTC Vive for that matter.

More here: [url] https://forums.oculus.com/comm... What matters most to me, from the referenced thread: blocking traffic on port 443 blocks the phoning home, and the hardware still works. I would love some confirmation of this. If the hardware refused to work without a live connection to Facebook, that would be a deal-breaker for me.

You are wrong

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/g...

He's talking about the Gear VR, which is actually an Oculus product (though sold by Samsung):

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/g...

Shifting the numbers around to deceive parents into coughing up money for their teen's toys may work in the console world, but this isn't a console. This is a high-end PC gaming peripheral. PC gamers have money, or at least don't mind leveraging themselves into mountains of debt for their hardware. On the other side of it, they're accustomed to not spending much on games unless it's a AAA title and even then they're a fair bit cheaper than consoles.

As for VR devices in general, you've got a choice. You can go with dedicated, purpose built hardware like the Rift, or you can leverage your existing investment in a smart phone and get a Google Cardboard derivative like Gear VR--as a $99 add on.

First off, games that are optimized for pure eye candy strain current cards, yes. But you don't have to have teh bezt pozzible grafix for everything. Take Alien: Isolation - looked really good, but ran at excellent framerates even on older cards. And even has some vr support. Tradeoffs can be made to crank framerate, and not horrible tradeoffs. I can handle 2010 graphics on VR, it's not like those games looked bad.

And no, a $4000 PC isn't necessary. The official specs are more like $1K these days. In fact, definitely $1K.

And no, 120fps/eye isn't necessary. You need low latency, definitely, but not that low. The DK2 peaks at 76fps, and yet few people report sickness at that rate.

You don't "need" 2 video feeds, it would be nice but it isn't necessary.
Imagine the following scenario: Instead of having a VR helmet you display a panoramic video on all walls of a room.
Will this cause nausea? No, not if done right. VR developer Jesse Schell wrote down a few simple rules in a blog about "I Expect You To Die"

Now instead of projecting the video on the walls you place the panoramic video on a skybox and place around the consumers head.
The consumer is free to move his or her head freely within the skybox. This means that you can tilt your head, move it back and forth. There will be a slight difference between right and left eye, and the difference you get will tell your brain that the video is mapped on a flat surface not that far away from you.
It will still be possible to get immersion from the video even with the lack to parallax effect. You still have perspective.

If you have an oculus and want proof of concept you can just follow this guide to make a panoramic view of your choice.
There is a similar guide for still photos if you find that more convenient.

> The resulting virtual reality product is set to hit the shelves around Christmas 2015.

Not it's for Q1 2016 : https://www.oculus.com/en-us/b...

Perhaps for current-day games, but the proposed specifications for the commercial Oculus Rift are quite high (and that's just the "recommended" specs): https://www.oculus.com/en-us/b...

The high-end cards of today will be the mid-high range cards of next year, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more demanding VR games make full use of the available power.

The 90fps is pretty much required everywhere, as the issue is your head motion, not the action happening in the game world itself. If the screen image and your head motion aren't in sync the whole virtual world is wobbling around and can make you motion sick extremely very fast. However both Sony and Oculus have a form of timewarp frame interpolation that can take the last rendered image and reproject it to your new head position, this allows smoothing out lower framerates a little. Sony is using it in some games all the time to scale an 60fps input to a 120fps output. On the Rift it's used more as an emergency tool when the framerate dips.

The demo of course takes advantage of Sony’s ‘asynchronous reprojection’ technique to ultimately output at 120 FPS." Translation: Two eyes means two frames, so you get 120fps from 60fps. Right?

No, they are talking about a technique that is also used by Oculus to translate variable frame rate renderings to smooth fixed frame rate output without judder.

My understanding is that they are working directly with NVIDIA to get VR-specific extensions. If you're really interested, check out this blog post for a primer.

I call BS on a large part of this. I have had slight movements at low frame rate that has made me almost hurl immediately, yet a game like Windlands which is like a spiderman simulater with swinging from tree to tree I was able to play with large sooping motions for hours without getting sick.

Anecdotes aside, this seems to be echoed pretty heavily in the Oculus share forums and VR related sub-reddits.

Here are links for those of you wondering what asynchronous timewarp and late latching are. ATW is a technique for reducing judder. Late latching is a way to insert positional and orientation updates as late into the graphics queue as possible.

Here are links for those of you wondering what asynchronous timewarp and late latching are. ATW is a technique for reducing judder. Late latching is a way to insert positional and orientation updates as late into the graphics queue as possible.

This is dead in the water unless they quickly find a way to add the glove-free hands tracking that Oculus is presently adding to the Rift. Oculus just bought a company that was about to make an add-on for the Rift that sits on the front of the Rift and tracks your hand/finger movements (very precisely) and mirrors them in the VR world so that you can interact with VR without any controllers or gloves.

This is a "Game Changer" that HTC/Valve are dead in the water without.

This was my post, I didn't have my password at work. The company Oculus bought was Nimble VR. Here are links including a video of the tech in action, it just works and has a larger FOV than the Rift:

Original Kickstarter (With VIDEO): https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
CNET Article about the Aquisition: http://www.cnet.com/news/oculu...
Oculus Blog announcement : https://www.oculus.com/blog/ni...

I wonder how well this could work for tracking "other" protrusions for use in VR Sex?

This is dead in the water unless they quickly find a way to add the glove-free hands tracking that Oculus is presently adding to the Rift. Oculus just bought a company that was about to make an add-on for the Rift that sits on the front of the Rift and tracks your hand/finger movements (very precisely) and mirrors them in the VR world so that you can interact with VR without any controllers or gloves.

This is a "Game Changer" that HTC/Valve are dead in the water without.

This was my post, I didn't have my password at work. The company Oculus bought was Nimble VR. Here are links including a video of the tech in action, it just works and has a larger FOV than the Rift:

Original Kickstarter (With VIDEO): https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
CNET Article about the Aquisition: http://www.cnet.com/news/oculu...
Oculus Blog announcement : https://www.oculus.com/blog/ni...

https://developer.oculus.com/d...
The Oculus VR Rift SDK may not be used to interface with unapproved commercial virtual reality mobile or non-mobile products or hardware.

https://developer.oculus.com/d...
The Oculus Mobile SDK may not be used to interface with unapproved commercial virtual reality mobile or non-mobile products or hardware.

The other consideration is that the USB ID's used by Oculus' tracker are 'owned' by Oculus, any other company could not legally sell a product using them. However this is not a product, it is a suggestion based around a firmware file ('.hex') for the STM32F3 discovery board (http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF254044), which is around $10 from multiple vendors..... now go hack!!

Obviously with a name like 'mungewell' I am not a lawyer, these are just the opinions of a hacker...

https://developer.oculus.com/d...
The Oculus VR Rift SDK may not be used to interface with unapproved commercial virtual reality mobile or non-mobile products or hardware.

https://developer.oculus.com/d...
The Oculus Mobile SDK may not be used to interface with unapproved commercial virtual reality mobile or non-mobile products or hardware.

The other consideration is that the USB ID's used by Oculus' tracker are 'owned' by Oculus, any other company could not legally sell a product using them. However this is not a product, it is a suggestion based around a firmware file ('.hex') for the STM32F3 discovery board (http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF254044), which is around $10 from multiple vendors..... now go hack!!

Obviously with a name like 'mungewell' I am not a lawyer, these are just the opinions of a hacker...

3D isn't hard.

3D that doesn't make people nauseous is hard.