Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset Blows Past Kickstarter Goal

Virtual reality headsets have historically been very disappointing. While the concept has been fun and interesting, the technological realities never quite lived up to expectations, and hardware developers largely gave up on research into this kind of device. However, it's been long enough that display technology has caught up to our ambitions. So, where are our VR headsets? Well, hobbyist Palmer Luckey asked that same question, and when he couldn't find a good answer, he decided to build one himself. He and his team have built a prototype, and they just launched a Kickstarter campaign to distribute developer kits. The campaign blew past its $250,000 goal in hours. What's interesting about this particular campaign is that Palmer took the Oculus Rift to various development studios and managed to get enthusiastic endorsements from some big names, including Cliff Bleszinski, Gabe Newell, and John Carmack.

Comments

Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack is deeply involved with Oculus. He posts on their forums with his ideas and Oculus runs Doom 3. The guys from the verge got to play with a prototype:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/30/3052191/doom-3-bfg-edition-announced-for-the-fall-we-try-it-with-john

This could be a game changer. VR headsets done right.

90s

[girlintraining]

VR goggles have been promised to be the future of computers since the 90s. Since before the internet was a household term, even. And yet time and time again they fail to work. The reason is that our technology just isn't as sophisticated as our eyes. We have hundred megapixel vision, realtime depth perception, motion sensing, and they scan at around 200 frames per second. The amount of information our visual cortex processes and compresses for other parts of our brain make most supercomputers look stupid by comparison.

It took millions of years to develop Human Eyeball v1.0. It's pretty arrogant to assume we'll just write a business proposal and KAZAM! (-_-) But hey, keep trying guys. In another 50 years or so, they might have evolved to the point where people don't get headaches using them.

Re:90s

[X0563511]

Low enough latency with accurate enough eye tracking might take some of that strain off. Human vision has some interesting quirks, and if you focus your rendering power where and when it matters, I'd bet you could make do with a lot less resources. Calling our vision hundreds of megapixels with 200fps just isn't fact. For example, we don't see anything at all when our eyes saccade, the brain stops looking at input while the scenery is still in relative motion. This could be exploited, by only drawing when our eyes are not in saccade (of course you need to analyze relative motion of objects with where the eye is going. Read that wiki link for more on that, particularly the bits talking about fast moving objects. Still more reading here.

Basically, if you can track the eye and perhaps even motor feedback (if we get that far, yea) we can exploit all these eye motions. Drawing the full screen at a full rate all the time is extremely wasteful.

I can't say anything about the motor feedback. Given the recent bionic eye work, and brain implants restoring a facsimile of vision, that might not be as far off as you think. We have basic working eye tracking already and a visor is the ideal environment for such a thing anyway.

Putting our money where our mouths are

[lordofthechia]

As a nerd who was heavily into consumer VR headsets and has been disappointed in the offerings available since the 90s, this excites me. Now consider that:

1. People here are highly interested in tech stuff (you know, stuff that matters)
2. Putting something here, to the attention of the 100s of thousands of Slashdot users increases the chances that a project such as this will reach its funding goal and you know, we get the story about it successfully shipping in the next year.
3. They already have a working prototype (must have missed the duct tape) and working software.
4. The developer units (you know if you pledge $300) ship in December.
5. Not all of us are cynical assholes and are willing to chip into other fellow geeks/techies/engineer's dreams.

So excuse us while we get excited over new tech and chip in any way we can to make it happen instead of bitching and moaning about it on a forum.

Now go check to see what things have been made possible via Kickstarter . Even things for all to enjoy .