Oculus VR Founder on Recently Unveiled Oculus Rift S: I Can't Use it, and Neither Can You. (palmerluckey.com)

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, shares his thoughts on the recently unveiled Oculus Rift S: Rift S is very cool! It takes concepts that have been around for years and puts them into a fully functional product for the first time. Sure, sure, I see people complaining about how Rift S is worse than CV1 concerning audio quality, display characteristics, and ergonomics -- some of the tradeoffs are real, some are imaginary, and people should really wait for it to come out before passing final judgement. [...] My IPD (interpupillary distance, the distance between my eyes) is a hair under 70mm and slightly skewed to the right side of my face. One of my best friends has an IPD of 59mm. I don't know what your IPD is, but both of us were perfectly served by the IPD adjustment mechanism on Rift CV1, a mechanism that was an important part of our goal to be compatible with male and female users from 5th to 95th percentile. Anyone within the supported range (about 58mm to 72mm) got a perfect optical experience -- field curvature on the focal plane was matched, geometric distortion was properly corrected, world scale was at the right size, and pupil swim was more or less even.

Sharp imagery from edge to edge of your field of view was the norm. The small handful of people with an IPD outside that range would not get a perfect experience, but at least they would be in the right ballpark. IPD skews in different directions by gender, race, and age, but we managed to cover almost everyone, and we were proud of that. This is not the case with Rift S. Like Oculus Go, it uses two lenses that are set about 64mm apart, perfect for a perfectly average person. Everyone who fits Cinderella's shoe will get a perfect experience, anyone close will deal with minor eyestrain problems that impact their perception of VR at a mostly subconscious level. Everyone else is screwed, including me. Imagery is hard to fuse, details are blurry, distortion is wrong, mismatched pupil swim screws up VOR, and everything is at the wrong scale. "Software IPD adjustment" can solve that last bit, but not much else -- it adjusts a single variable that happens to be related to IPD, but is not comparable in any way to an actual IPD adjustment mechanism. This is the main reason I cannot use my Oculus Go, even after heavy modification on other fronts.

Comments

A damned shame

[Immerman]

I would really like to know the reasoning behind that decision. It's not like a lens-adjustment mechanism is going to be break the bank, though I suppose it might cut into profits a bit to maintain that psychologically magical "less than $400" price tag.

I mean, you take a product that works perfectly for 90% of the population, and then make the next otherwise-upgraded version and make it only work properly for 1% of the population? While everybody else has to deal with degraded visual quality. That's pure stupidity, and Palmer speaking out would seem to suggest that it was a corporate decision that he strongly disagrees with as well.

Reminds me of ergonomic chairs on planes, buses, etc. Without the ability to adjust the settings you end up with a chair that's quite comfortable for the few percent of the population that happens to be almost average-sized, while being a torture device for anyone sized substantially differently. What was wrong with a boring, flat chair? It's not perfect for anybody, but it's a huge improvement over improperly-sized ergonomics for almost everyone.

Re:A damned shame

[jythie]

Years ago I worked for a company that built embedded systems that ran for a few thousand dollars apiece, and there were arguments about changes in washers or screen padding that changed the price by maybe a dozen cents. Hardware designers and the people who approve the designs for manufacturing can be surprisingly pennywise and pound foolish.

Though to be fair, there were other things that seemed tiny (like placement of a support or a cable length) but could produce multi-hundred dollar differences in manufacturing cost due to how it would change things like logistics or tooling, so sometimes stuff that seems like it should be cheap can make huge differences.

Oculus no longer relevant

[WaffleMonster]

Oculus has always been twofaced about specs. Palmer and crew went on and on about how important minspec was so people wouldn't get "sick" and end up hating VR.

Yet the very first product Oculus did was 3DOF VR in form of a plastic box that clipped on to cell phones where any head translation results in instant nausea.

Now after THREE YEARS they are releasing an inferior product lacking the very features they previously touted as necessary.

HP Reverb is bare minimum of what Rift CV2 should have been and best of all it's not tied to FACEBOOK.

I'm still waiting for Nvidia or someone to release a serious next gen VR HMD. What is needed is at least 32k display with eye tracking and custom foveated display driver to make using it feasible. Bonus points for light field / dynamic focus depth.

It's pretty clear Oculus is out of the VR hardware business which is fine with me.