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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.