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Kickstarted Oculus Rift VR Headset Shipping In March/April
An anonymous reader writes "After an amazing Kickstarter campaign garnering over $2.4M in backing, VR headset Manufacture OculusVR has announced manufacturing details and also a shipping delay until March or April 2013. Oculus says that due to the number of backers, mass manufacturing would be required. 'All together, preparing the factory for mass production of a product like the Rift takes approximately 90 days and the factory can’t begin until design and feature set has been locked down. Our manufacturer is already underway with the first tooling (T1), which takes roughly 50-70 days. Once the primary tooling is complete, we’ll do a series of pilot runs for minor tweaks and adjustments before mass production. Simultaneously, we’ll be testing and certifying the device for public use.' Additional details are included on their 1000hz 9DOF head tracker and 7" screen: 'Ultimately, we selected a modern, 1280×800 7’’ display for the developer kit. The bright side is that the new display beats the old display in almost every key area including response time, switching time, contrast, and color quality. The improved switching time of the panel actually alleviates most of the motion blur people saw in earlier prototype demos. The downside to our new 7’’ is the weight differential: approximately 30g more than the 5.6".' It looks like the VR revolution will have to wait a little bit longer."
This is not good !! Stay away !!
I am somewhat interested in VR glasses but not enough to have followed them in detail. Is the Oculus any better than what Sergei Brin is wearing?
Finally I can retire my VFX1 and move onto new VR games. Can anyone recommend a game to play with this new headset? I just finished Quake and this new game called Half Life sounds promising.
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
does that make me a dick head?
Maybe. However nuts on your chin would probably mean a dick in your mouth... ZING!
That Its getting released how much kickstarted hardware will be able to say the same?
But at least the revolution will be televised!
Can't wait until I get mine.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
One of the main reasons why I didn't do this KS was because they said on their main page that the initial developer units are NOT compatible with glasses, but the one that becomes commercially avialable will.
Since the design has to be locked down - did they end up supporting glasses or not?
While the news of a good-enough virtual reality headset for the masses is amazing, I'm wondering if it would be anywhere possible to couple the occulus with a real-time binaural reverberation solution. Given that, contrary to the propagation of light, sound propagation involves delays that can be easily perceived, I am aware that a real-time binaural simulation can be very costly in terms of resources. But still, I'm wondering if with today's graphic cards (which should be used to perform this kind of calculations) and today's algorithms it could be considered to integrate this into modern game engines. I believe that the "reality effect" of sound immersion have too often been neglected by most gamers and developers. (The following video should be enough to convince non-believers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA)
Yeah, but you're a fucking moron so who cares about anything you say?
It would have been nice if they could get some of them nice new cellphone LCD's in the 4" ballpark. The Galaxy S III is 1280x720 in a 4.3". Even the much cheaper Xperia S is 1280x720 4.3". A 7" screen is a big thing to strap on your face.
Kickstarter: Non-dilutive, non-repayable financing, beta customers, PO paid up-front....
my virtual boy is now obsolete
Making an ass out of yo... or just me.
For some reason I was thinking there's a display for each eye and couldn't figure out why they would show both views on the preview monitor. Duh, it's easier and cheaper to split a single screen between two viewpoints than to have 2 separate screens.
Could these be used to view 3D porn (and 3D videos in general)?
The Oculus is 640x400 per eye for a total of 1280x800. Not 1280x800 per eye. I've no idea why the total resolution is always mentioned since it's a completely useless metric. I think they've solved a lot of hard problems with this device -- in particular head tracking lag -- but it still has some baking to do before it's ready for your average gamer to use as a monitor replacement. In particular the resolution needs to approach or surpass 720p. Can someone more familiar with HDMI comment on the viability of pushing 2 720p signals @ 60Hz over HDMI? I know it's an issue for 1080p, not sure about 720p.
You'd use your real account and not hide behind the apron strings of anonymous.
It will remain forever virtual, by definition.
I was under the impression that Google classes provide augmented reality
Not really, they provide a data stream you can look at but it's not overlaid on the world you see at all, which is what most people think of when talking about augmented reality. If GG are "augmented reality" then so is your smartphone since you can hold it up an look at it.
GG is really more an omnipresent data stream in a way that is not practical with smartphones.
Occulus is not really meant for augmented reality, but it could be used for that. There's no reason you could not feed a live view into the display and then overlay other things on top of it. It would look WAY geekier though and be really heavy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Come now - the Occulus has a wider FOV than any consumer VR helmet to come before it, but it's nowhere near what our eyes have. The human eye has a roughly 155* horizontal FOV and 135* vertical, and due to asymmetrical distribution (only 60* toward the nose) the combined fixed-eye horizontal FOV is roughly 180*. When you factor in the fact that our eyes continuously move and what we "see" is actually a brain-assembled composite the effective FOV is a bit over 180* in all directions.
The Occulus' FOV covers most of the effectively high-res FOV of our eyes, but does nothing for the remaining 75% of our FOV that comprises peripheral vision. And that's a real shame because, as NASA discovered many years back, with near 100% FOV coverage something really cool happens - your brain decides that your eyes are more reliable than your inner ear, and you start actually *feeling* the motion that you're seeing. If you've ever watched a movie in one of those tilted-dome theaters you've had a taste of what I'm talking about. It's pretty unnerving at first, but quickly becomes an incredible experience. There's nothing quite like desperately gripping the arms of your chair to keep yourself from flying up out of it while the rational part of your brain is still quite certain that, despite all sensory evidence to the contrary, gravity *is* still pulling in the proper direction.
Of course the first VR goggles to actually manage a 180*FOV will probably need to ship with air sickness bags, but the way I see it that's a major marketing point.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
180 degrees in all directions. Ha. Some of us wear prescription lenses you insensitive clod. And ever since tiny narrow frames came into fashion, our FOV that's any more than irrelevant fuzz has been even lower than the normal high-res FOV.
A Rift will cover more of my vision range than I can normally use. I'd have to fiddle the optics to let me focus, but supposedly the developer kit will be adjustable. In any case, 180 degrees is far more than I've had since I was a very small child.
(The Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel Lucifer's Hammer describes a physicist who had glasses with wrap-around lenses. I've often yearned after such a thing, no matter how funky they might look. But I don't have access to a lab to custom make my own lenses and frames, as presumably that physicist did.)
And that's a real shame because, as NASA discovered many years back, with near 100% FOV coverage something really cool happens - your brain decides that your eyes are more reliable than your inner ear, and you start actually *feeling* the motion that you're seeing.
Well, part of my brain decides that. Unfortunately, when that part secedes and declares war on the parts that are still trusting my inner ear, it's my digestive system that suffers the most collateral damage. I found this out the hard way after 20 minutes or so in a CAVE -- persistent motion sickness for the rest of the afternoon.
Between the time that VR is widely adopted in the working world, and the time that we develop good vestibular transducers to sync up balance with visual inputs, I'm going to have one heck of an occupational disability.
You'd be surprised - unless your vision is drastically worse than mine (I can read large facial expressions from a couple feet away) your brain is still pulling an incredible amount of information from your peripheral vision. Motion, object tracking, etc. A lot of the general situational awareness/immersion data. It's not exactly high-res vision to begin with so blurriness has much less effect than on your central vision.
Try this - hold your hands out at arms length near the opposite limits of your glass's FOV so that you can see both clearly, then focus your eyes on one thumbnail (which is now pretty much covering your "high res" FOV - it's tiny). Now try to see your other hand while keeping your eyes fixed on that nail - all you'll see is a vaguely hand-shaped blur. Hold up a boldly colored DVD case or something in our second hand for an even more dramatic effect.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Bummer. Are you sure it was the full-immersion that was throwing you off though? Were you in control of the camera? I've never had problems with full immersion video, but have had some really hideous motion sickness while just watching friends play first-person games on a 22" screen. When under direct control (without all the smooth camera work of a professional cameraman) the camera makes lots of unsettling little moves. When you're at the controls your brain is expecting them so they get filtered out, but with someone else at the controls (or if you're not reflexively familiar with them) it can be a problem.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I generally can't distinguish a face, at that distance. I only know it's probably a face because of fill-in guesswork--I can tell it's a head, and I can tell by color that it's probably not the back of a head, but other than that, I can't say much about what I'm seeing.
Worse, the FOV of my glasses is so tiny that I have to move my head to get a clear image more than 2 or 3 degrees in any direction. Even with high diffraction index plastic, most of what should be the effective FOV of my lenses is actually out of focus for me. I'm not sure if I just have an incredibly shoddy pair of glasses or if the narrow frames forced the choice of a uselessly narrow lens, but either way, my high res FOV without moving my head is so small that the Rift will feel like a panorama (if it can be adjusted to deal with my vision).
In any case, this whole thread started because I said " The Rift, more than any other VR headset before it, is about cranking up the field of vision as far as your eyes can see." I didn't mean to imply they had actually succeeded in encompassing the entire human FOV. Just that high FOV was what the Rift is all about.
Yikes, sounds like your eyes *are* worse than mine. Just a thought, but have you considered experimenting with the FOV of glasses from someplace like EyeBuyDirect? For $7 you can get a pair of big goggly-eyed glasses with basic polycarbonate lenses. Higher diffraction ratings are available for progressively more money, but one of the major issues with HDI lenses is that the index isn't constant across the visible spectrum so they introduce substantial chromatic aberration for stronger prescriptions, especially as you move away from the center of the FOV, which sounds like it may be what you're having problems with. Effectively you're wearing one prescription for red light, and a completely different one for blue, with only somewhere around green getting the correct prescription, and since the vision-correcting distortion is most dramatic at the extremes, so is the blurring. Glass and polycarbonate have much more constant indices so don't have as much of an issue that issue. Of course if it's vanity or weight considerations that are governing your choice then you may be stuck, but a few extra data-points may reveal a more optimal sweet-spot - while high-index materials do tend to have higher abberation ratings as well, it's not a 1:1 correspondence so if that's your problem it could be worth investigating. If nothing else you never know when a pair of 5lb Elton John glasses with a wide FOV may come in handy....
As for the Rift, you said it. While still having much room for improvement it promises to stand head, shoulders, and waist above the competition, at least among the consumer-grade headsets. Finally a VR headset worth buying.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.