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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."
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?
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)
Kickstarter: Non-dilutive, non-repayable financing, beta customers, PO paid up-front....
It will apparently also feed your children while you are magically flying around a unicorn filled environment with proper analyzation of your play-style and adjust how many magical unicorns will be within your particular server instance.
Sorry, but there's a load of different ideas on what that game will finally ship with and plenty of people all dumping loads of cash into that unknown. A lot of that has to do with Chris' unclear specifications. He has a vision he can't clearly describe, and everyone interprets that vision using the current model of gaming to try to best describe it to themselves. It wasn't until about two weeks after the initial hype hit that I found out that it will be a fully PvP game (unless you opt out of the social aspect and host your own), which they later changed to a mostly PvP game where you can adjust your "PvP preference slider" which doesn't allow you to completely avoid PvP (especially if you just want to explore the edges of the galaxy). I'm assuming that will change as production starts along with a great many other aspects, and I fully expect it to not meet the expectations of a great many people.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
They use lenses and software to expand the field of view to more than 110 degrees diagonal.
The optics are for generating the ridiculous field of view, and no, no LCD shutters. Shutters are baaad. You hate shutters and don't even know it. Shutters cut your framerate in half, cause flicker even if you double the framerate to compensate, often cause ghosting and bleedover 'cause they're ever so slightly out of sync with the display, and make the screen look dimmer, all at the same time. Oculus Rift dedicates half the screen to each eye. That eliminates all four of the shutter problems, plus it makes software really easy. No nonsense with trying to correctly sync output to two independent displays simultaneously. No nonsense with trying to correctly sync the display with a shutter, either. Instead you just shove one frame out to one display, and process the content of the frame to display two images side by side, one for each eye. Muuuch easier than independent displays, much better than a shuttered display.
That also means that the 7" display now provides more screen real estate that the optics can turn into better horizontal field of view. 110 degrees of vertical field of view and 120 degrees of horizontal field of view means immersiveness unlike anything you've ever seen. So yes, Rift 1 will have 640x800 pixels for each eye. That's better than 720p vertically, and only a little cramped horizontally. If the Rift 1 does well (and it probably will), they'll try to get their hands on the newest high-DPI displays for Rift 2. That will probably be possible. When Apple starts buying Retina displays from someone other than Samsung, that will free up Samsung high-DPI displays for lots of other people, including Oculus. Then you'll have better than typical desktop LCD resolution providing that crazy high field of view. Games will never be the same.