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60,000 Oculus Rift DK2 Orders, 20,000+ Units Shipped, New Orders Ship In October
An anonymous reader writes The much lauded Oculus Rift DK2 is in high demand. Shipping began at the end of July and Oculus says they've already shipped more than 20,000 of their 60,000 orders. The company recently updated their order page to indicate that new units are expected to ship starting in October. The Oculus Rift DK2 is the company's second development kit which offers a number of major improvements over the original kit, called the DK1, which was the result of a successful Kickstarter back in August, 2012. Although the DK2 is intended for developers, the company openly offers the VR headset up for sale to anyone interested for $350. The Oculus Rift DK2s most notable enhancements are a higher resolution display and positional tracking capability as well as a number of other under-the-hood enhancements make the DK2 a huge improvement over its predecessor.
so in other words, you're paying over $300 for a tablet and a cardboard..err..plastic enclosure?
40000 will be 3D printed, right? Man, in spring I kept hearing about how it's a game changer, the world's never going to be the same, it's post-scarcity!
I'm still waiting.
Hopefully they'll get a faster supply line for a consumer release. At this rate, it will be several years before you'll be able to buy one next day delivery.
Doesn't help you from selling out!
Fuck kickstarting people who whore out to corporate cash.
Wow... That is a LOT of devs.
So we got 60k games coming to the platform.
I got a dk2 as well, and yes: I am a dev.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
I got mine a week ago. I couldn't get it to work on Linux, and it has been sitting in the box since then. Version 3.2 was just a black screen, so I tried rolling back to 2.5c and got something but it was skewed in a weird diamond pattern.
60,000 Oculus Rift DK2 Orders, 20,000+ Units Shipped, New Orders Ship In October!
Sweet! Keep this up and they'll never have to hit alpha.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
So the flawless ultra low latency positional head tracking, the low-persistent display and the SDK with time warping and all other optimizations that will likely come from Oculus mean nothing, right? Good luck with your Durovis Dive and your Cardboard box HMD.
> Well done Facebook. It's taken you a year to put a Samsung note display in a plastic box, and add extra cables.
FTFY.
Does everyone on ./ really hate Facebook that much? Oculus is on the bleeding edge of consumer VR, and if their little Kickstarter never came along, it might be another 20 years before a viable mass-market headset was in the pipeline.
Now we've got Oculus DK and DK2, Google cardboard, Samsung's upcoming Note VR headset, and Sony Morpheus. I understand that people have reservations with Facebook's ownership, or with the quality of the experience (1080p still not good enough), but these guys have brought VR a very long way. Their support of developers and the SDK is pushing a lot of content right now
For some reason I was thinking Dungeon Keeper.
Personally, I'm not THAT thrilled; I'm more interested in AR than VR. As for the imporvement: it would've happened, sooner or later. Technology marches on, etc, etc.
Oh, and I loathe facebook. DK lost any appeal to me when they sold out.
Flawless low-latency head tracking is easily doable with any phone that has a 3-axis gyro.
Got one at work the other day. Definitely an improvement over dk1, but the resolution just ain't there yet - can still see the red green and blue pixels with black in between. I get the feeling they're waiting for the gpus to catch up, we need 4k res at at least 60fps, probably more for decent quality vr. Gonna be a few years b4 we see that on google cardboard..
AND they should build in a kinect/leap to bring the rest of the body in to the experience.
The key word is positional. Makes the world of difference.
Everyone on Slashdot has read about all the backstabbing done by Mark Zuckerberg, all the data-gathering done by Facebook, all the security problems of Facebook and Facebook working with underground world governments to spy on Facebook users.
So yes, everyone on Slashdot fucking hate Facebook with a passion, and with good reason.
> Well done Facebook. It's taken you a year to put a Samsung note display in a plastic box, and add extra cables.
FTFY.
Yeah. I hear that one all the time.
"All You Have To Do Is..."
Its really strange. Who would buy the DK1 and NOT buy the DK2?
Facebook's ownership makes this a non-starter.
...1080 with a Pentile display so that resolution is only for green.For red and blue the resolution is half that. There are controversy about if it's openly a scam or not.
And have to split the display between both eyes. That is 960x1080 for green and 480x540 for red and blue per eye, for a total of 1555200 subpixels
The first DK1 with 640×800 per eye for every color has almost the same number of total subpixels 1536000. The "upgrade" is 19200 more subpixels!
My friend and I were playing around with his DK2 last night. We fired up Half-Life 2 (and later Half-Life 1 Source).
That big room with all the crates hanging from the ceiling that you have to jump your way across? That was just about the most intense gaming experience I've ever had. The vertigo feels completely real and you feel actual panic if you fall.
My friend fell down that elevator shaft in "Unforseen Consequences" and his brain just about melted. An hour later, his real-world balance was still fucked up and he had to go to bed.
They need higher-res, but other than that the illusion is pretty damn convincing. You completely forget that the screen is redrawing itself based on your head movements... it just feels like you're looking around inside a virtual space. (To the point that when the head-tracking effect pauses, like on loading screens, it feels BIZARRE)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
The hatred for a company that is legitimately doing some ground-breaking stuff just because they got bought by FB is such hipster reactionary BS that it's astounding. As a developer for the upcoming Oculus commercial product, I can tell you personally that there are much bigger issues than just the hardware itself when it comes to making something that will work with the hardware without causing an uncomfortable experience. Hate on them for taking 2.2 bil from FB if you want (kinda a lame attitude from my perspective, which isn't to say that I don't hate FB--I do), but the nausea/discomfort issues have a lot more to do with software than hardware. It's extremely difficult building things for Oculus. You basically have to try to build a video game at 1/4 the expense (expense meaning graphical resource intensity) you normally would. We're talking months and months of going through every single element of your build and optimizing, re-optimizing, re-re-optimizing every single aspect of the way things function in order to hold to the 60 FPS frame rate required to achieve a smooth VR experience. Oculus is doing some really amazing stuff and supporting their developers tremendously. When you see some of the launch products, you'll change your tune.
DK2 rocks for any game with a cockpit -- space sims, driving sims, and some Mech Warrior like games.
FPS'... no so much. It's real easy to get queasy (for me anyway, YMMV). I'm hoping this becomes less of an issue over time but since there are other experiences out there that really excel with the Rift I'm not too concerned.
Oculus also has to come up with an standardize input system to enable more complex experiences. Something that is also positionally tracked (like the headset it) would be ideal since once you have your headset and headphones on fishing around for your mouse/keyboard or game controller is a pain.
Yes ! Thats exactly right. The piece of shit positional tracking that no one will ever use in a game and could get you killed while blinded by the Oculus is... WORTHLESS. This thing is at best a $10 gimmick. The ONLY things going for it are : STEREOSCOPIC and HEAD TRACKING. BOTH of which work PERFECTLY with DUROVIS and ANY new phone. Once again. F.U. FACEFOOK.
There is a lot of dissatisfaction from many people over on the Oculus forums due to lack of information and shipping delays. Many who ordered within the first 48 hours after orders opened on March 19th have not received units or even an update other than "we're working real hard to ship orders as quickly as possible".
Based on comments from the forums, information given about how many were sold how quickly and feedback from the oculus forums, about the only way they could claim that 20k were shipped is if they were shipped from the manufacturer to the distribution centers, not the customers.
Oculus has had my money from March 20th and I'm yet to receive any kind of shipping confirmation. They did not sell 20k in the first 24 hours.
I ordered within the first 24 hours and got my DK2 a couple weeks ago.
I also have a DK1
My initial impressions
- Screen certainly much improved. I like how vibrant the OLED makes things.
- Screen door effect much reduced, but certainly not eliminated.
- The low persistence display seems to help considerably with the previous blurring on head movement problem.
- Much easier to position on your head such that everything is crisp and clear.
- Having head position tracked in addition to orientation feels much more natural.
- Having your head position suddenly not tracked because you went out of the FOV of the tracking camera is very jarring.
- The FOV of the display seems slightly reduced from the DK1, reducing peripheral vision.
- No more breakout box & power supply being optional does not mean the setup is any less complicated. Now there's a camera to worry about along with a new sync cable connecting the camera and the headset.
- Chromatic effects, especially near the peripheries.
Overall, a very solid improvement over the DK1.
I actually talk about it (and the google cardboard I have) a bit on a podcast I contribute to.
Aliens Land here
Despite the agonizingly frustrating setup, chromatic aberrations and slightly juddery motion, the full system really is quite impressive.
Hold on a sec, pause the game, I have to vomit again.
Ok, back. This sure is lots of fun.
In all seriousness, this consistently hurts my head within 30 min or so of use.
Does that mean its "too good" ?
So which one will be the final costumer version, DK5?
It feels like Steam's Early Access. I would never play an Early Access game, but I don't mind games that are in there, and actually like it because other, people more 'enthusiast' than me, get to test and improve the final product so when I get to it, it's much better than if it had only been 'internally' tested.
I didn't KS the thing, but I don't see why people would be pissed about it (or worse, 'demand' a refund or even worse than worse, a stake of the money???). They received their Oculus Rift before anybody else, it's like anybody complaining that they paid more for a game on release than if they had waited 3 months and see the game half price on Steam.
I didn't realize Donkey Kong 2 was making such a comeback.