Oculus Rift Raises Another $16 Million

Craefter writes "It seems that the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset caught the attention of investors after its showing at E3 this year. Spark Capital and Matrix Partners were able to push $16 million at Oculus VR in the hopes that the product will live up to the hype. The HD unit looks a bit more slick than the ski-goggles-with-a-tablet-glued-to-it prototype, but the device would look even more appealing if the next-gen consoles would commit to supporting it. (We all know how well the PS3's 'wave-stick' did as an afterthought.) That said, major titles like the 9-year-old Half-Life 2 and the 6-year-old Team Fortress 2 are getting full support for the device. Hopefully some developers are looking into support for the Oculus Rift as a launch feature, rather than an addition years after the fact. IA bit like the EAX standard from Soundblaster. That worked out well too."

Comments

Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[Sonny Yatsen]

I am really looking forward to the Oculus' public release, but I really hope they fix the lag in head tracking that results in motion sickness or dizziness in the users. As a guy who used to get nauseous after a few hours of Duke Nukem or Doom, that'd be a pretty major negative in determining whether I will buy one or not.

Also, I'm glad we've finally hit Johnny Mnemonic levels of tech in real life. Bring on the talking dolphins.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[Alejux]

There are a lot of things that will help reducing motion sickness. One of the main ones is perfect tracking, which means both low latency and positional tracking. These are two things that will likely be solved for the consumer version. Another thing that will help a lot, is related to the content you'll play. Games that have very unrealistic motion (I.E. super fast running and jumping) will tend to induce more sickness, while others that have more realistic motion, will be less likely to. Also, from what I've been hearing, the more you get used to the experience, the less likely you are to get sick. I've seen some people create an immunity to sickness after the the first 2 or 3 days using it.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[Trepidity]

Although I agree, your comparison,

As a guy who used to get nauseous after a few hours of Duke Nukem or Doom, that'd be a pretty major negative

...suggests that it may not be a big issue for sales, since Duke Nukem and Doom were not exactly commercial failures over the motion-sickness issue.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[backslashdot]

Have you tried the Rift? The kickstarter dev version has low latency .. it's not a problem at all at least for me and a few others I know who tried it.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[virgnarus]

The dev kit version already has latency tackled very well, so it's not really much of an issue. The HD prototype even further reduced it as well as adding the high res and removal of the screen door effect of the dev kit versions (due to low res display) that would exacerbate the issue.

Though understand that a lot of the motion sickness comes from the sudden, jarring and quick motions that are common with games nowadays. Games and demos being developed for the Rift are being designed with slower movement in mind to alleviate strain that the eyes may have. It really comes down not so much to the Rift itself but the developers and how they decide to design their games. Rift would work a whole lot better with Halo than it would Unreal Tournament.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[TsuruchiBrian]

I tried the dev version of the rift, and I could only do it for about 10 minutes at a time before feeling like I was going to puke. I wasn't the only one either. I was actually at a rift demo party and it seemed like half the people if not more, had the same issues I did. I don't know if it was the latency that was making me sick or something else, but I would really like this thing to work better. I want to play some VR FPS.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[dubbreak]

I suspect that the most successful and enjoyable VR games will be sandboxes and MMOs. I'd rather visit alien worlds for the sake of exploration than blowing stuff up.

The most successful early adopter of technology has historically been the porn industry.

I suspect the female body is like an alien world to many slashdotters. A world they'd like to explore but most likely won't get a chance to in their lifetime.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[am 2k]

The most successful early adopter of technology has historically been the porn industry.

There you go.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[Reapy]

Isn't the problem with the rift right now that it has no positional tracking yet? From what I've read the thing most inducing the motion sickness is not keeping track of your head moving around in space, basically the rift can only act as though you are swiveling the camera around, not panning it. Since our heads move around so much normally, that not being represented in the rift is what is causing the puke factor.

Some solutions mentioned were basically trackIR like tech and its equivalents. I recall carmack talking about it saying trackIR was really good but you sort of fall off a cliff as you turn too far, but that eventually they would figure something out that would degrade more gracefully.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[lxs]

And if you smoke enough you don't even need a VR headset to achieve full immersion.

Re:Hope they will fix the motion sickness problem

[i kan reed]

You should read what valve had to say about integrating the rift, themselves. They discovered they couldn't just read the rift's state at input processing time. They had to do it once then, then again at render time, because 2 milliseconds made a huge difference. Code makes as much a difference as the system itself. TF2 still suffers from absurd running speed syndrome(the walking heavy moves about like you'd feel a jogging speed would be), and isn't a suggested first game for that reason.

Re:HD is not enough

[Alejux]

Don't knock it off before you try it. People who tried the the 1080 version loved it (pretty much all the screen-door effect is gone). Plus, there's no point having a 4K or 8K resolution with our current level of graphics processing power, since one of the main requirements for a good VR is at least 60fps. These will come in a few years. Until then, people will enjoy the hell out of playing video games from within, instead of watching it through a rectangle.

Re:HD is not enough

[jtownatpunk.net]

Try it before you get too locked into your position. I tried Sony's headset last year and almost forked over $800 for it. Same resolution as the current OR headsets. The main thing that kept me from buying it was the resolution. I agree that it's not sufficient. But it was close. And the consumer OR headsets will almost certainly be 1920x1080. That would be enough of a bump to look pretty darn good.

Would more pixels be better? Of course. But what do we have on the consumer market that can drive 4k displays? Nothin'. Okay, there are a few things that can upscale to 4k at 30Hz so I guess one could claim a few edge cases. And the Mac Pro will be able to improve on that by the end of the year. But that's it. There's simply no point in trying to make a 4k headset until we have something to plug it into and content to deliver.

Re:HD is not enough

[Alejux]

I don't trust the opinions of all journalists, but I do trust some. Also, there are currently over 6000 DK's out there, and I have communications with many of the people who have them. And NONE, absolutely NONE have found the Oculus Rift a bad experience. Most, even agreeing that the current 720p resolution is low, still have an amazing experience , being immersed in Virtual Reality. I have no doubt the consumer version will spread like wildfire when it's released. About the HMZ, it's absolutely a whole different animal. It's not a VR device. Not only it lacks head tracking, but it also has an extremely small FOV, is very heavy and costs nearly 3x what the Oculus does.

I was wondering that

[ikaruga]

It's been a year since the kickstarter funding and the company formation. They got 2.5M from kickstarter and I suppose another 2.5~3.5 as a personal investment from the current CEO. So they basically had around 6M in the bank at start.
Then they hired a lot of people. I think they have 20 employees in total if my sources are correct. Assuming a average of 100k/person including bonuses/insurance/etc that is at least 2M/year in expenses.
Then there is renting, utilities and taxes. That is another 500k/year at least.
And finally there is the actual development/deployment of the dev kit and promotion(E3 booths, CES, etc) as well as R&D infrastructure build up so there goes most of the rest of the money.
Without this VC investment, I feared they'd sell off and/or close doors in a question of months. I just hope the VCs don't let their "expertise" go out of control.

Re:Add-on

[jones_supa]

I would like to project Google Street View photography based on my GPS location and compass orientation. Then I would go walking on the streets (system powered by huge batteries) and trying to navigate my way around.

Re:HD is not enough

[Namarrgon]

Everyone I've shown my Rift to has been delighted by the experience of being inside the game world. The immersion is unquestionably impressive, despite the many flaws. Oculus nailed the important parts of delivering real VR (low-latency, high-FoV) at a cheap price - but I don't think their success is assured yet.

Things like resolution will certainly help, though most people quickly looked past the chunky screen-door effect, and I'm sure it'll get smaller, lighter and cheaper too. What concerns me is that all but one of the dozen-plus people I showed it to experienced some degree of simulator sickness within 15 minutes, including myself. Most of those had no prior problems with fast FPS games, and it appears to me to be tied largely to the greater immersion. This usually reduced a lot after a handful of sessions, but I feel that this may be a real barrier to adoption - professionals can work through that, but I think a lot of gamers and casual users will have one go, quickly feel sick, and be put off.

More appropriate game design will surely help, and by minimising lateral & spinning movements and sharp accelerations, I think people can be eased into it. But this is outside Oculus' control, many games will do it poorly at first, and I'm expecting a pretty severe backlash when it hits the market, given the current hype. I just hope VR will survive it.

Re:Very cool tech.

[TsuruchiBrian]

Finally a way for 2 lonely dudes to have sex with each other while both are looking at a VR woman. This is the end of the human race.

Re:How's this different?

[gl4ss]

I remember Quake on the VFX1. Novel, but not practical for everyday gaming. How's this any different?

because it's practical. it's that much better, even the dev unit.

Re:HD is not enough

[Jaruzel]

OK, as a HEAVY Quake 1 and Quake 2 player and modder back in the day, I can say that with those engines at least, what you are describing is what you get when the FOV value is set too high. By default in id games, it's 90. A LOT of serious gamers up that to 120 or higher (so they can see more). As a result the fish-eye effect is enhanced and objects are stretched at the edge of the screen, and compressed in the centre.

In almost ALL games, FOV is user definable. A little bit of research at the time would have solved your issue completely.

-Jar

Re:not Fun, but honest clip

[Hast]

I found that more reminiscent of Louis CK's rant on "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy". :-)

There are some valid points though, the screen door is an issue on the dev kits. Personally I find that after a while you don't think about it too much. It feels more like watching "the real world" with a net in front of your eyes than a low resolution screen.

That the current screen is a compromise is not really a surprise to anyone who has followed the project. They had to swap screens as they started to produce the dev kits, so they went with a 7" screen because that was the best they could get with respect to resolution and refresh rate. Unfortunately it leaves a large part of the screen area unused as it's outside what you can actually see through the lenses.