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Oculus Raises $75 Million To Make VR Headset
An anonymous reader writes "The company making the VR headset that has John Carmack and many others in the gaming industry excited has just received another $75 million in funding to make it happen. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is joining the company's board, along with fellow investor Chris Dixon. Dixon had seen a prototype earlier this year, but it wasn't good enough to spark his interest. After recently seeing how the device has progressed since then, he was blown away, comparing it to early demos of the iPhone. 'The dimensions where you need to improve this kind of VR are latency, resolution and head tracking, and they have really nailed those things.' Now that the device is in good shape, Oculus is going to work on turning it into a product they can produce and ship for gamers."
That's what killed the 3DS for me. Fine tune the latency, resolution, and head tracking all you want, but if I can't play it for more than twenty minutes, I'm not interested.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Seriously, every bit of horizontal motion not matched by your head is going to make you feel a little sicker, and even a tiny bit of unmatched vertical motion will have you vomiting.
It is incredible, but your body's reaction ain't.
it seems like you want this to fail, just because your [xbox, ps4, pc, whatever] cant do vr.
the nausea and vomiting parts are laughable, did you guys ever go watch a 3d film, a sports game in 3d, play a 3d fps, etc?
if you dont like it thats one thing, but saying this will send everyone to the hospital is retarded.
this is nothing more than a smartphone that sits horizontally REALLY close to your eyes. nothing to see here.
rfta, 2nd one, see the guy holding a gamepad? what kind of vr is that which does not have movement recognition? wheres the immersion in that?
yes, i want one regardless of the shortcomings.
I Thought Oculus was an album by Paul Speer
Not because the technology isn't here, but because they will never get it down to a price that will be affordable to the mass market.
I can't wait til this comes out with Star Citizen. We are talking nerd heaven........
Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
>implying that you wont quickly adapt to the experience - its like seasickness, you adapt and many people dont even suffer from it.
your brain has been subjected to 60hz flickery input and mixed visual messages since PC's and TV's went color.
I'm surprised it costs this much to bring to market. Oculus Rift first fundraiser on kickstarter was targeted to raise $250,000. I'm not judging; rather, it is revealing how much more it costs to bring something to market than develop a working prototype.
The new next-gen consoles are all a bit lackluster, if you ask me. And Oculus Rift, though probably usable with existing games and GPUs, would really benefit with a big raft of new games and hardware made just for it. Sony, or Microsoft, or Nintendo, should have partnered with Oculus Rift and built their new generation of consoles around it.
Forget about gaming, how about a HUGE virtual desktop for work?
--PM
I think you could still do an FPS, but more in line of a mech sim - where you would have more of a plodding pace, or perhaps the sim was you inside of a cockpit looking at video screens that look out on the world moving past you very fast.
You could even stick your head out to risk an open air look but have to retreat quickly or risk being shot, which would naturally encourage you to have only short segments of more nausea inducing views.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I played Super Mario on the shitter.
And "weighs 0.22 kilograms". Surely "weighs 220g" would be clearer? Why use the word 'kilogram' when the device weighs a fraction of a kilogram? "weighs 0.22 kilograms" makes it sound like it weighs a lot more than it does, because you have to THINK how much '0.22 kilograms' is.
Epic fail.
The next step is to work on proper surround sound for the helmet:
Embed high quality speakers into the helmet so that they are positioned spherically to the head, and encode all software materials with Open Source Ambisonics in full-sphere sound field mode. Don't bother with the limitations and closed source nature of DTS or Dolby surround systems as they are only suited to sound fields that involve a central screen or stage.
After that a chair with integrated joysticks, pedals, a bass shaker, back massager, booze tube-feeder, and smell-o-tronics!
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Jeri Ellsworth is taking an interesting device to manufacturing in the very near future. It does both VR and AR... and uses quite a novel approach. It can both project images into the real world, or reflect them back into the eye. She raised over 1M (their kickstarter aimed for $600,000). Apparently they've already demoed it at a couple of maker faires and people lined up for hours to give it a try... considering how yawn-worthy most 3d solutions are, that's quite a rap.