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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.
the nausea and vomiting parts are laughable,
As an owner of one, I have to disagree. You can come over and use mine. If you can beat the first 2 chapters of half-life 2 without taking it off or vomiting, I'll be staggered.
I Thought Oculus was an album by Paul Speer
I can't wait til this comes out with Star Citizen. We are talking nerd heaven........
Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
They're like vampires. Next thing you know you'll be up to your eyeballs in MyCleanPC and ass tickle trolls.
Yep, I agree. HL2 is a bad fit for the Oculus.
My findings so far is that anything that's like a FPS where you have to run around like mad and turn around constantly is going to make you very sick, very fast. And HL2 also has things like the screen freezing when the next area is being loaded, which is absolutely vomit inducing.
What seems to work best is constant linear movement, like the roller coaster. The next best thing is slow, reflexive games, where you move at human speeds and have time to gawk at the environment.
I think FPSes are going to need something like the Virtuix Omni. With that, you can turn around completely without forcing the camera to move out of sync, and that should fix most of the problem.
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.
They're like vampires. Next thing you know you'll be up to your eyeballs in MyCleanPC and ass tickle trolls.
No worries, just invite apk over to update your hosts list and you'll be good to goatse.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
seems like car racing games would work great, most of the time you are staring straight ahead with small movements to check on the apex of the turns and see if anybody is on your side via your peripheral vision
-- the cake is a lie
I don't care if it fails or succeeds. I just want a reassurance that I'm not going to hate it before I spend any money on it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
What is that price point, IYHO?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yep, vehicles are awesome.
The only really playable part of HL2 in the Oculus is the part in the airboat. It feels amazing.
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 haven't tried the Oculus Rift, but I do remember using an older headset that had a modified version of Hexen as a pack-in.
That thing was brutal. Swimming in a sea of jello surrounded by huge pixels of green and brown != fun. It was the Virtual Boy all over again, except on a PC and in color.
>I think FPSes are going to need something like the Virtuix Omni. With that, you can turn around completely without forcing the camera to move out of sync, and that should fix most of the problem.
Or, you know, it could usher in a new generation of FPSes where you move at reasonable human speeds instead of darting around like a squirrel on speed. I imagine something like the System Shock games would be far more VR friendly than say Unreal Tournament. As a corollary I would suspect that the increased situational awareness VR would reduce the need for such ridiculous movement speeds as well - IIRC the average "cramped little square room" in The Elder Scrolls series was something like 16 feet across, much larger than needed for the actual content (heck, at 256sq feet it's verging on a small New York apartment), but necessary due to interface clumsiness if you wanted players to be able move around without getting hung up on every little thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The squirrel on speed is part of the problem, the other is turning around, which is going to be needed in pretty much any FPS.
Something as simple as walking around corners in HL2 doesn't work. On the first turn you can sort of manage, but it's uncomfortable. On reaching the second corner in the same direction you have to look backwards from where you started, and are getting tangled in whatever wires you're attached to. Using a keyboard doesn't work.
So the alternative is using the mouse and moving the camera while your head is in place -- that's right when nausea starts setting in.
Navigating a 3D world comfortably seems to almost require an omnidirectional treadmill, unfortunately.
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.
I dunno about the Coward, but I think it's a good guess that the mass market won't pay much more than the price of a standard LCD panel. And by that, I mean the gamer mass market. It's a kind of display, so it falls into that category in people's minds, despite the additional complexity and capabilities. Maybe at the high end of the range, but only of the mainstream range, not the full range that includes Ultra HD.
Right. Just like all those high-end CPUs and video cards all end up in the land fill.
Do you really think some PC gaming enthusiast who's spent $500 on their CPU, another $600 on their video card, and at least as much on the rest of their system, is going to flinch at paying $300-$400 for a VR headset that promises to give them far more gaming goodness for their dollar than the 5% increase in frame rates they got by paying twice as much for their CPU?
Perhaps it will never expand beyond that enthusiast market, but I truly doubt it. Heck, I'm a penny-counting budget gamer and I'm considering delaying a long overdue video card upgrade in favor of the headset, knowing that it already has a long list of older games modded to support it, including many favorites and promising backlogs in my own collection. As for future price reduction, there's simply not that much inherently high-dollar hardware in it:
*Screen - the smaller the better, being cheaper is an added bonus, and if there's an actual demand for tiny high resolution screens I'm sure the screen manufacturers would be *delighted* to encourage it - far less wastage and higher profit margins at that end of the spectrum
*Motion tracking - accelerometers and gyros are getting better and cheaper at a pretty decent clip, as are video sensors and other more esoteric techniques
Both of which are also incidentally off-the-shelf components benefiting from Moore's Law, so they'll only get cheaper going forward, regardless of the success of any particular VR headset.
That leaves just two elements whose prices aren't in freefall:
*Speakers (assuming they're integrated in the final model) - I haven't checked lately, but last time I looked it it seemed like the $25-$75 range was where all the drastic improvement was, and it didn't necessarily track well with price.
* Optics - these may well be custom, and good optics aren't cheap, but if they can currently break even on a $300 Dev kit I'm not that worried.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Both the technology and price is already there. The devkit cost just $300, which is already extremely low for a highend non-mass-market tech gadget. The mass-market version is targeting the same price while getting some additional features. Given how the price for small displays is developing there is no reason to assume that the thing won't be $150 or less in a few years.
BTW, whatever happened to a Joystick ? Every PC store had them in 90ies. Not so much, anymore. Did $300-400 bucks kill it ? No, i think my trusty old Sidewinder Pro cost be around 100 max.
However, the content dried up ..
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A fair point, but even in vehicles our inner ear is going to be expecting certain accelerative inputs when turning, yet it sounds like VR cockpits lack the same nausea factor as FPSes. I suspect the problem is more that in addition to ridiculous linear movement speeds FPSes also involve ridiculous turning speeds - it's not at all uncommon to be able to turn 180 degrees at the flick of a wrist, whatever fraction of a second that is, and indeed it's quite common to be doing so almost constantly since turning and aiming are overlayed onto the same movement axis for convenience. I challenge you to do that in real ;life - go ahead, try whipping your head and/or body around at those sorts of speeds for a few minutes, I'll wait. Heck, I'll join you. ... ... ...
Feeling nauseous? I know I am. I suspect that limiting the maximum "waist turning rate" to 180*/sec or less would dramatically reduce the effect, in essence adopting a "Mech pilot" control scheme where a joystick/keyboard/etc control turns the body slowly, while head tracking provides much more responsive "turret control" Combine with the ability to simultaneously turn and sidestep gracefully and you haven't actually lost any maneuverability, just changed the inputs a bit.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think it was a combination the coming of age of the mouse-and-keyboard control scheme for FPSes, the waning of the flight/space sim genre as a driver of action games, and the refinement of the console-style general purpose game pad into something that kinda-sorta-almost approached the flexibility of the m&key combo while allowing much more flexibility in posture (incidentally I'm going to be really interested to see the Steambox controller in action). Heck, the last few space games I tried I gave up on the joystick flight controls in disgust, despite really preferring the feel of a flight stick it was just insufficient to the demands of an flight system designed with a mouse in mind.
So yes, the content dried up because superior/more common technology took it's place (sure, an adequate joystick might be only $30, but everybody already *has* a mouse, so that interface gets more development time). Somehow I think if/when VR fades away it will be for similar reasons (neural jacks maybe?)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
It's funny because HL2 made my puke all by itself when it came out. It wasn't until I could hit about 80+ FPS on it years later that I could get through the air boat levels. I can imagine combining it with an OR would be some sort of nightmare induced vomiting for me.
Am still super excited about the device and will attempt to train myself through disorientation. Strangely I was ok with the 3ds, took a touch of finding the right angle but overall ended up liking it.
But yeah I'm basically picturing the next IL-2 game with this on, should be pretty damn awesome. So much potential for many things with this device.