Oculus Unveils the Rift S, a Higher-Resolution VR Headset With Built-In Tracking (theverge.com)

Oculus VR unveiled the Oculus Rift S, a higher-resolution pair of virtual reality goggles that remove the need for external cameras by incorporating built-in tracking. The company partnered with Lenovo "to help it speed up manufacturing and to improve upon the design of the original Rift," reports The Verge. From the report: The result is a new VR device that is more comfortable, sports 2560 x 1440 resolution (or 1280 x 1440 per eye), and features the same inside-out tracking system that will ship on Oculus' upcoming standalone Quest headset, which the company calls Oculus Insight. That way, you won't need cumbersome cameras to enable full-body movement. In another twist, both the Quest and Rift S device will cost exactly the same at launch: $399, with the same pair of slightly modified Touch motion controllers included and the same integrated audio system (plus a headphone jack for external audio). That decision makes it clear that Oculus wants its VR platform to offer a choice not between two vastly different pieces of hardware, but by the more simple determination of whether you have the hardware to power PC-grade VR. The Rift S will support every existing and future game on the Rift platform. "The company is also enabling cross-buy and cross-play features," the report adds. "That way, you can buy a Quest and, at a later date, upgrade to a Rift S and still have your entire library intact. Additionally, multiplayer games that support both platforms will let players play one another, regardless of whether you're playing on a Quest or Rift device."

The Rift S and Quest will be shipping this spring.

Comments

Re: Downgrading the PC Rift to focus on Mobile VR

[Miamicanes]

Compressing with something like h.264/265 that depends upon having a few frames to reference adds latency. Doing things like HuffyUV... YPbPr with 4:2:2, RLE, etc, is fast, because it doesn't depend upon knowledge of anything besides the current frame.

The big delay with most codecs isn't literal calculation time, it's the need to wait until you have at least 2 or 3 frames in the pipeline before you can even START compression. For a modern GPU, matrix transformations between RGB & YPrPb or between 4:2:2 and 4:4:4, are practically instantaneous.

The key to making something like this work with a 1-2gbps link is to forget about codecs designed to be maximally-efficient, and instead look at codecs designed to be fast & "efficient ENOUGH".