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New Oculus Rift Prototype Features Head Tracking, Reduced Motion Blur, HD AMOLED
crabel writes "The Oculus rift prototype Crystal Cove shown at CES uses a camera to track over two dozen infrared dots placed all over the headset. With the new tracking system, you can lean and crouch because the system knows where your head is in 3D space, which can also help reduce motion sickness by accurately reflecting motions that previously weren't detected. On top of that, the new 'low persistence' display practically removes motion blur."
The new low-persistence AMOLEDs also achieve 1920x1080 across the field of vision. Reports are that immersion was greatly enhanced with head tracking.
..until John Carmack left id software to work on it.
I feel like they've been talking about this for 2 years now and I've heard about 3-4 different versions of this thing which are "coming soon (tm)."
Just stop hyping the damn thing if you're not going to release it relatively soon. By the time this thing comes out for real, everyone will be tired of hearing about it already, like some awful, over-pushed summer blockbuster movie.
Thinking way out there... but if the Rift catches on, will significantly more brains be trained to cope with motion sickness? Will we be better equipped for space travel? I wonder if it will reduce motion sickness medication sales.
I really hope this doesn't turn out to be what the 3D trend has become for movies. Contrary to other past attempts for VR headsets, now there's both the hardware and the knowledge available to build something revolutionary that actually *works*. Plus JC is on-board so expectations are very high.
I've wanted one of these since I played around with an early unit from VIO, I think, in 1996.
Please, pretty please, ship this. Stat.
..don't panic
perfect is the enemy of good.
Carmack will keep dinking around with this and never ship a product. They should just get version 1.0 out the door and start working on 2.0. Instead, they're already on version three or four hand haven't sold one unit.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They missed something. AMOLED screens also mean the thing now has ultra contrast and the ability to do pitch black, that is very important for immersion, at least to me. I can deal with the reduced color accuracy.
Carmack will keep dinking around with this and never ship a product. They should just get version 1.0 out the door and start working on 2.0.
Have to be careful with that when it comes to technology. You might be quite right but in many cases if the technology isn't sufficiently well developed then then potential customers get pissed off and never come back. This can be true even if you eventually work out the problems. See Apple's Newton for an example. A lot depends on the sort of customers you have and how forgiving they are of rough edges on technology. Consumer electronics customers tend to be not too forgiving in my experience.
I used to do a lot of work with (older) technology like this in my day job. The market for this sort of stuff is surprisingly niche. Military, some industrial prototyping/testing, marketing and in some cases entertainment. It's one of those things that sounds like a good idea but the real world applications are more limited than I would have thought when I first got into VR technologies. Even if the software is easy to use (it usually isn't) there has to be a lot of effort (thus $) put into virtual model development which means that you have a chicken and egg problem. No one wants to develop the software unless there is an installed base of hardware and no one wants to buy the hardware without the software.
But last I heard, that wasn't happening in the foreseeable future.
They should bundle these with a Fleshlight.
That's why they released dev-kits.
It would be a mistake to release the current version as a finished product as the name would suffer major damage.
This way early adapters can play around with it, the developers can get feedback and they don't suffer such high losses during the investment phase.
If they stick with OLED, I'll lose all interest in the product since they're notorious for their burn-in (or rather burn-out).
It's bad enough on phones.
As I understand it, one of the big problems with VR sickness is latency. If the display refresh and the tracking-camera frame rate are both 60 Hz, there's no way to get less than 33ms of lag as the display tracks your movement -- and that's assuming zero time to process tracking info and render the scene.
I'd hope that they're using at least 120 Hz refresh on the display, and something much faster for the tracking camera, but I don't know what the state of the art is like on the tracking end.
I seem to remember many years ago some research with non-progressive field rendering -- I don't remember if it dropped to low-res/faster-updates during fast motion, whether it blurred everything but central vision, or something else. In any event, I think it required highly non-standard display hardware. This was probably in the CRT days. I'd think it would work well to drop back to (say) 480p resolution during fast slews, increasing the frame rate 4x, but I don't know how accessible the necessary hardware/software would be.
pitch black
ready for Doom3 !
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Given that we've had 'imperfect' (read 'downright sucky') VR available to the public essentially without success for over a decade now, I'd say that they have reason to keep polishing.
I used to work with technology like this about 10 years ago. Even if it were spectacularly good imaging that isn't really the problem with it. The biggest problem is that most people do not like wearing headsets. Oh, you can get someone to try it out for fun once or twice but after that the novelty wears off quickly for most. You might get some hardcore gamers and technophiles to buy it but I really cannot see this being a mass market item. It's fairly expensive to make, the market size is relatively small, there are a lot of development costs, etc. Don't get me wrong I think it is neat and I wish them the best of luck but I don't see this being interesting to a wide audience.
I have no idea; but shoddy VR implementations are pretty uncompelling except for 5 minutes of novelty use.
Even very good VR implementations are uncompelling except for 5 minutes of novelty use. Somewhat like 3D glasses this is a technology that sounds better on paper than it turns out to be in practice.
I have been tracking this for a long ass time and with both google glass and oculus I keep asking where the fuck is Microvision? Their tech deals with all of the FOV, depth of field, focus, focal length, and resolution issues in spades so... WTF?
It isn't like reading in the car makes a person vomit immediately, perhaps if they just read for one minute more each day they would get to a point where it wouldn't make them sick.
There are very very few people who would go to that effort in this case. 99.999% of people would get motion sick once and then never use the device again. Since it is for entertainment purposes primarily what would be the point?
I'm a bit worried that if I'm in a complete and total 3D immersive space that I won't be able to use it indoors for fear of bumping into invisible furniture.
I'm in a modest house and I have a tiny postage stamp yard. My Wifi signal is pretty good out on the street, all things considered, but I'm also afraid that if I revert to a five year old and play in the street that I'll be hit by an invisible car.
Have they considered making safe places to use this as part of their marketing strategy? Sort of a big open VR gym? And in that case, let's make multiplayer games where I can shoot my friends who are being presented to me as orcs. It'll make laser tag look like kinder blocks.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Seems to me that the very best results will only come when you pair Oculus Rift with that treadmill-like product. Though I'd still like to sit down with Oculus on, in front of a keyboard for some first-person perspective games, and just ditch the mouse... or just use the mouse for the left + right click and scrollwheel.
Well when I spent 3-4 hours playing several games with occults dev version I was heavily drunk and did not experience any nausea. Am I on to something here? :)
Why not just use an accelerometer to track in 3d space?
Finally they're using some resolutions that might actually be worth buying.
I hated the way they talked about an "immersive" experience with pixelated low-resolution screens. Blocks are not immersive.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
> 1920x1080 across the field of vision
so depending on the stereo implementation method, per-eye will be 1920x540 or 960*1080.
Sigh. Come on guys.
Is it really soooo frikkin impossible to have a seperate 1920x1080 panel per eye?