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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.
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.
Oculus Rift Forever
https://www.oculusvr.com/order/
It’s not the definitive product, but you can try it if you want.
This is the second version, and they've sold thousands of units. I have one.
They aren't going for perfect, but there are several things that it absolutely needs before it is ready. Head tracking tops that list easily. I have one of the earlier prototypes, and the lack is painfully obvious. Plus, core features like that have to be integrated into games, if you are missing it then you will have a compatability break between 1 and 2, which would be very harmful at this stage of affairs. The new display is less nesseccary, but it is something worth improving while they are working on getting other things running.
Probably he doesn't and he got a fair point here.
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.
Whether or not Oculus Rift will be the eventual winner, or whether somebody who polishes faster will get to it first, I have no idea; but shoddy VR implementations are pretty uncompelling except for 5 minutes of novelty use.
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.
The resolution could use some improvement (and has for the real release) but the tracking is AMAZING. It really feels like you are immersed completely in a 3D world. It works best in environments where your movement is decoupled completely from vision (driving and flying simulators). I've never experienced motion sickness in my entire life but 20 minutes in Half Life got me feeling quite queezy.
In this case though I think they may be right - VR has a bad name that will work against it because of the crappy hardware released in the 80s and 90s. Getting it right (enough) this time could well be the difference between having it take the world by storm, and being just another historical curiosity. And the single biggest weakness with the devkit would seem to be nausea - pretty much everyone agrees it starts fairly quickly, especially in First-person games, and takes a month of two of acclimation to fade. That may be okay for us hard-core gamers, but I'm sure they want our less dedicated friends to try out the headset for a bit and decide they must have one as well, and that's going to require a less painful acclimation curve.
At this point though it sounds like there's not actually much more to be solved in the helmet itself - they've got the higher resolution, faster response screen, and positional tracking to avoid the disorienting disconnect between actual and in-game head movement. I don't see much more they could add to directly improve the experience beyond bringing latency down firmly beneath the perceptual threshold - and if they can't do that with off-the-shelf electronics then I'd say it's time to get this sucker onto the assembly line and start working on the 2.0
On the other hand, if they've managed to source high-speed 4K screens that won't be ready until July, well then I hope they spend the next several months dialing in the remaining details on this version. And having followed all the drama with the Pandora handheld, I really, *really* hope they've got some folks on staff with lots of experience producing consumer electronics, because getting the device finalized is only the first half of the battle.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'll tell you what will make Occulus Rift a ton of money.
It needs an additional peripheral. Specifically, something that slides over the male genitalia and has programmable motors, maintains a certain amount of heat, and can be cleaned and lubricated.
Call it a milking machine with a USB port :)
With that peripheral and a VR headset, you have the possibility to make highly immersive pornography.
We've established that porn is the killer app for new technology.
VR porn may be what pushes the development and adoption of consumer VR.
Frankly, I'm shocked that the "milking machine" isn't already a real thing....
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I've watched 10+ movies in the cinema in 3D, including Avatar, The Hobbit, Star Trek Into Darkness and Gravity in IMAX and a range of others in regular 3D. As many other people will tell you Gravity and Avatar are a different class of 3D movie to everything else. As for the rest, I can easily tell they used 3D as a gimmick. You got the odd spear/bee/shrapnel flying out at you from the screen to remind you that the movie was 3D, because frankly for all else, you can easily forget it/not notice it.
However, I have also played computer games in 3D. The difference between a game and a movie is that the movie chooses specific things to show you in 3D. In a game, they simply render EVERYTHING from 2 viewpoints and transmit that to each eye. I played Crysis 2 on the XBOX360 and was blown away by how it (I really dread to say) added a new dimension to the game. The HUD was rendered to be right up in your face and everything was at not just varying, but the RIGHT depth behind it. Far away monsters were far away, close up were close up and everything in between had it's own natural place. If you had water splash it felt real. It didn't feel like your vision had simply been blurred, it felt like something had actually blocked you, it was there, real.
I also have an account from a guild mate who played WoW in 3D and wonders how he ever managed to play it flat before, all the players now seemed like they were actually standing in places in relation to eachother, and he wonders what would happen if WoW had player collision seen in other games, because when viewed in 3D it looked so horrendously wrong for one player to be standing in the sprite of another, shattering the complex illusion of realness by the 3D effect.
There is so much other than simple games that the Rift could be used for. I paraphrase Palmer Luckey when I say "The reason [Palmer] had chosen to make the rift the way I have, is to make a device that doesn't strive for perfection in one area, and falls down in others. I wanted to make something that was good enough in as many areas as possible, and be affordable, so that we can get it out to people. It is not until people have it, and start using it, that we'll know what it can be used for". He may have mentioned the Kinect as an example of something made for one use, being put to many unforeseen other uses.
You could use a HD version of google streetview to record famous places and locations. Then people could explore them without having to make the trip there. You could use them for 3D conference calls (imagine using a future version of FaceRig to make the Rift Headset disappear). The problem is that there's not enough of these out there for inventors to invent with just now.
What people are thinking this could be used for is only the tip of the iceberg. The reality might turn out to be so much more than first though.
20 minutes in Half Life got me feeling quite queezy
And I believe this is why the consumer version has been delayed. They've identified possible sources for the VR nausea (lag, lack of head *position* tracking) and are working to resolve them.
I'm OK with the delays while they iron out these issues as I'd prefer a VR headset that has a lasting market presence to one that is introduced and in bargain bins in 3 months due to wide spread reports of users getting sick with minimal use. That said... I'm am seriously giddy about this thing.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
No he doesn't, and you badly misspelled "has."
I don't care what the retail one costs.. it's not just the HMD; you can find very high end HMD units and they're awesome - it's the integration into all the games that makes this irresistible.
..don't panic
What kind of propaganda are you pushing, who are you working for, or how ignorant are you to not have read seemingly ANYTHING about the Oculus Rift before posting this? The entire idea has been to ship some time in 2014.
More importantly, Carmack just came on and it's not HIS project. If I'm not mistaken he was tapped after the car crash that killed the fellow who was heading this part of the project.
Jeez, seriously, how does this stuff get modded up?
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>Frankly, I'm shocked that the "milking machine" isn't already a real thing....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/robot-handjobs-vr-tenga_n_4261161.html
Latency. The screen isn't the only latency component, and if you're trying to get under 20ms (considered to be the point below which your brain won't notice the latency) and your 60Hz display is adding 17ms of latency, that's a problem.
Besides, your eye doesn't work like a camera with a shutter. A human can see a 1ms long flash of light, for example, but can't process more than 10-12 distinct images per second, for example. And the framerate required to produce natural motionblur is way in excess of 60Hz.
> 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?