More Oculus Rift goodness

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-rift-at-ces-2013-recap/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJo12Hz_BVI&feature=youtu.be

Flight sim developers will really miss a great opportunity if the don't get involved with the Oculus Rift developers kit being released in a few months for only three hundred dollars.

I heard that Jason was looking/thinking about this for the new BOS. It would be nice if it was supported!

Looks great! though wonder how we would work chunky headphones and a mic into the set up for simming?

Even the bulky developer prototype has plenty of room for a headset and mic. The consumer version looks to be much smaller.

I want!

Now, this is awesome. Something I have waited for a long time. I really hope BoS will support it.

This looks like having the same impact to gaming this decade that Track IR made 20 years ago.

I first tried a VR headset in Hong kong back in the early 90's and was impressed by the potential especially as home computing was essentially still in it's infancy then as well.
Unfortunately, the whole VR industry seemed to have stalled since those early sets, but now with Oculus it looks like we're back on track in a big way.
Personally I can't wait for this, especially if they can debut with a 1080p HD version to really showcase the technology at it's best.
I just hope that they can bring this to the market without any interference as I suspect some of the big players in the technology industry would love to snap this up and bury it.

Looks great, but my biggest concern is can you wear it over your eye glasses?

Me too.... VR has always been a dream for me.

The developers are aware of this problem. I don't believe its possible to wear glasses with the prototype OR, as one user mentioned he found it disconcerting when he felt his eyelashes brushing the lense. Hopefully the developers will find a solution to this problem.

Looks like I need some contacts.

Watch one of the clips. One reporter mentioned that, upon donning the Rift, he was surprised by having no trouble with his glasses.

Wow, this looks like a pretty amazing technology!

TrackIR was commercially available in 2001, so not really 20 years ago. Even with being the market for 12 years, only 137 titles support it - which is sad considering how great it is and what it does for any first person game such as shooters, virtual flying, rpging, racing, etc.

The current resolution is quite low for the current device, much like how TrackIr only supported 2 axis at release. I didn't purchase TrackIr until V5 simply because the trackball mouse mounted to my joystick worked just the same and was far cheaper. I see they are hoping for 1080i for consumer release, I certainly hope they achieve it.

It'll be interesting to see how this device works out, and if the 3D is actually convincing and better than nVidia's current 3D vision which is great but only because that's all there is. It has many flaws and downsides, but is acceptable because there are no other alternatives. However, I'm not interested in spending money on so-so 3D so nVidia's offering is out.

Hopefully the Oculus Rift developers can deliver on it all, and it costs less than a 57" LED TV.

The Oculus Rift development kit is $300, and they're trying to keep the consumer version in the same price bracket. All the re-viewer's before and during CES have been blown away by the prototype. I think they currently have ten thousand prototypes shipping to developers etc in Mar/Apr 2013. I've seen very few printed or youtube reviews complaining about the prototype's poor resolution which is a good thing considering the consumer version's resolution should be much better. There has been a significant improvement in small screen resolutions recently, that include bendable screens, so it will be interesting to see what the consumer version will have.

Normally I could care less about 3D, and have only just recently seen a 3D movie {Life of Pi} but a prelim to the movie had a short 3D clip of an aircraft flying thru clouds and I was totally blown away by the effect. 3D, 6DOF, 110* view with no visible borders, and a high resolution would revolutionize the immersion in flight sims. They may even be able to increase the field of view with the new bendable screens. The sky's the limit. This will be very interesting to follow, and has put my search for a new monitor/s on hold.

*couldn't care less

The few times I've seen 3D that works, I have wanted it for air combat games. But it's very little it has worked and in only certain segments of the movie/game did it work properly/believably. Having depth perception in air combat sims/games would be awesome though if it could be achieved.

However, without having a 3D effect - Oculus Rift is just taking trackIr's use of the head to change your view and replicating it with a narrower FOV on a small screen that's burning out the user's retinas. I don't need to physically turn my head 160 degrees to feel like I'm looking behind me when I can turn my head 5 degrees to get the same effect. I'm still using my head to naturally look around, and I have a much larger viewing area with a 37" TV than the lenses. So without 3D, my interest in this device would be lessened since the same "using neck and head to look" can be achieved with a device I already own.

But, the product features state stereoscopic 3D - so I am hoping it pulls it off. Having depth perception would be amazing.

I believe the field of views of the original IL-2 was a low of 30* and high of 90* with some outside programs that expanded it but with alot of distortion. I don't think a larger tv expands the default 90*, so I'm thinking 110*, should be a little better. Match that with 6DOF, it should be a decent experience.

The depth perception is nice for the distinction between the
cockpit and the outside world, and so for general immersiveness,
but it isn't particularly useful in any sense of increasing your
perception of the action, as the world outside the cockpit is
pretty much effectively at infinity most of the time, anyway.
But I do like having a real turn of the head, and not having
the totally disorienting regular TIR thing of turning your
head while counter-rotating your eyes to keep looking at a
stationary monitor.

I've been using VR for simming for about five years now; initially
with TIR for head tracking, so with a sort of non-linear head mapping
which starts out one-to-one and accelerates to compensate for TIR
not being able to comprehend head motions over 90°. But, as I spend
most of my hobby time building terrain, I don't do a lot of flying,
and even less with the full headset system running. That just seems
to be where my attention has been attracted. And, as I don't do a lot
of flying, I'm a lousy pilot, so that decreases my enthusiasm. At
some point I'll feel like I've modded enough, and other people are
doing a decent job of taking up the slack, and I'll kick back and do
some more flying...

i beg to differ; i was using TIR in a much earlier guise when the very first tracking unit was used purely as a replacement to a standard mouse for those that had difficulties with co-ordination. I had to order direct from Naturalpoint and import into the UK where it was held up in customs for a month while they decided what the hell it was.
Naturalpoint got involved and I had to state what I was going to use the unit for and they were amazed when I told them as a view controller for flight sims.
This was around 1996 and I used that unit until the first commercial unit aimed at simmers came out in 1991.

The first guy I knew who saw the potential for TIR was a guy on SimHq called DMNE, he put me onto the unit and helped me with the early set up as it wasn't the piece of cake it is now.

You can disagree, but it can't have an impact on gaming until in the hands of many gamers - which would be when it hit commercial availability.

Not true, the amount of impact is not dependant on the amount of gamers using it, more the ultilisation of the technology in your gaming experience.

There was a lot of scepticism about TIR as most people didn't get how it could improve their gaming experience which was to essentially ehhance their SA to compensate for the fact that you were flying in 3D but viewing a small monitor.
So for the few early adopters the potential was more than evident, the fact that people were slow to take up TIR was purely down to Naturalpoint being overly cautious to enter the simming market.
Roll on to Occulous which is essentially TIR on steroids and there isn't the same problem with early adoption and investment primarily because the guys behind the project know exactly how to market themselves effectively.

So to sum up, this will have the same impact on gamers as TIR did 20 years ago to those that saw the potential and adopted early.

The early adopters of TIR were the ones that purchased it in 2001 when it hit the market.

You can't "early adopt" Oculus Rift until it's commercially unavailable.

Your statement is both inaccurate and pointless.

i am excited for oculus rift. i have trackir, and it did not do it for me. the moment i got trackir in 2007, i was like what is this crap. i tried many of times to give it another chance, i just didnt work for me. im all about 1:1 translation

I meant commercially available. I was typing up a sentence to say that Oculus Rift can't be early adopted if it's commercially unavailable but edited to be shorter and forgot to change unavailable to available.

But yes, good luck adopting the Oculus Rift before it's commercially available and any program has been designed to use it.

What on earth has that got to do with the impact of both devices on consumers; my original point is that they both have/will have a similar impact on the gaming experience and now you're banging on about early adoption.
If you can't contribute anything worthwhile to a forum then leave it to people who can.

I purchased Track IR when it first came out, and remember having a conversion with the Natural Point developer. He was asking if I thought the product would be adopted by the flight sim community. I told him their product was far more realistic and immersive than using a switch to change views, that I didn't see how it wouldn't be a success. The same is true with the Occulus, only the Oculus has far more immersive features.

The price if kept around their proposed three hundred dollar range is unbelievably cheap.

The advances in small screen resolutions make having a 1080 resolution very possible.

A 110* field of view with no borders, have users feeling like they've been dropped into another world

3D, I'm not sold on this yet, but have seen 3D aircraft/cloud scenes that look amazing

Their very low latency 6DOF tracking appears to have address some of the nausea associated with these devices. I used to get a slight case of this when I first used TrackIR, but it quickly went away.

Any flight sim developer would be crazy not to spend three hundred dollars on the current Oculus development kit, as this is the future. They could atleast give the Oculus Rift development team ideas on what they'd like to see in the hardware/software that would best suit their needs in their current or future developments.

A goldfish has better memory than you.

You said TrackIr had an impact on gaming 20 years ago, I said it didn't citing it's commercial availability. And then you clamored at some extraneous "pre-commercial two people may have had the product almost 20 years ago" nonsense. You also were the individual to start on about early adoption.

So, pretty much you're just a cranky pants poopy head because you were wrong on all fronts and have contributed all of nothing other than self-aggrandizing because of your delusional play in TrackIr's "early adoption" based on your own comments.

I walked into their office a couple weeks ago. Got the ole' everyone is unavailable to talk treatment by the receptionist so I didn't get to see a demo. Left my card and a few copies of ROF. So far no attempt to reach out to me, not that I really expected it. Honestly, they already seem to have the big shooter engine folks (Unreal and Crytek etc.) behind it already so I doubt they are going to beat down my door to talk to us simmers. I ordered a developer unit and will send to the team to check out.

What annoying to me is that you could already do all the tracking stuff with TrackIR years ago, but all of the major engine makers laughed when I tried to explain the concept of head tracking in FPS-style games to them. View control separate from the gun etc. Put some good goggles on the idea and they are into it. Back in the day these guys including Gabe Newell told me it was a cheat so they wouldn't support head tracking where you could peek around corners in their engines. Ohwell... I tried.

What's evident by their office location and from what I saw they appear to have some money behind them.

Jason

Looks really promissing.
How would a person control there Hotas/keyboard if eyes are emersed in VR?

the only way is to have AI do all the chores for you, all!

Map everything to the HOTAS?

Maybe a future model will have a camera (or two) on it, activated by a button, so one can look around? I think I read somewhere it was being considered.

i get funny looks just playing the game, wait till i strap that tv to my head

They might come up with a provision to see your Hota/keyboard, but I have most everything I need programmed to my Hota system.

MSFF2 Joystick
Cougar Throttle
Saitek Throttle quadrant
Saitek Pro Rudder Pedals

If I needed more, I would place another button/rotary bay between my Cougar Throttle and Saitek throttle quadrant.

Wait, this hardware also gives you real 3D view?!? I didn't see that!

That puts thing in...
*puts sun glasses*

...a whole different perspective.

YEEAAAAAAAAH!

me too.

Not seeing my keyboard is not a problem.
in fact I find using the keyboard an immersion killer. I prefer switches on my HOTAS.

You would be able see your the cockpit switches/dials in game. It would only be a problem if you've built a home cockpit with device/linked gauges etc. Not being able to see a keyboard would not be a realism killer.

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-the-pilot-run/

Another interesting Blog from the developer of the Oculus Rift.

I would imagine people with full pits would be a very small minority of the genre. That said I'm quite sure all of the pit builders would be able to quickly find all their switches/levers without having to look for them. Using the game gauges would be a small price to pay for the immersion of the RIFT. Clickable cockpits should still work. I doubt many people are currently using touch screens at the moment. Anyway we don't really know how its all going to roll out, but they certainly have the financial backing for a great start, building a product for gamers, built by gamers.

I'm sure that after reading your post they'll scrap the project and develop another one, thinking in the majority of the simmers out there, the ones that have full pits... almost 99% I think...

Seriously dude, you know how the market works, don't you? You don't hope that someone will mass produce something this costly to sell 5k units tops? I'm sorry for you, but I think you'll have to wait until more people have pits or do the project yourself. Anyway, I think you'll lose nothing, because you have a pit for immersion... it's just a trade, or the pit, or the VR set, sooner or later someone will do both, like the "mouse gloves", etc.

What would realistic pit owners think of seeing their arms as point clouds, as seen by some Leap sensors, overlaid on the display and see your hand reach inside the game for that button or switch? The pit should match the game's cockpit and some calibration would be required.

I don't think you will find a full pit user who couldn't quickly, effectively find, and use all their cockpits switches and rotaries in the dark. Pit builders are obviously looking for the most immersion they can find, and if the Rift is as immersive as everyone who's tried it, say it is, then it could be a winner for them aswell. Infact it would cut the cost of their pits, as they wouldn't need working gauges.

Quite. And if they put a (mouse)switch on the tip of their glove, the hand registering on the Leap sensor could toggle buttons and switches in game. Put dummy switches and buttons in the right location... total immersion.

If memory serves, some real WW2 air combat flight training involved blindfolding the pilot so he could get used to quickly and accurately finding all their aircraft switches etc. This is not that difficult.

They didn't do the drill for an exam, they did the drills to make them better pilots.

Your the only one calling it just a test or exam. You've implied that this is just a test/exam for them to get thru flight school, with little to do with real life/or simulated flying. It has everything to do with real life flying, and any simpit flyer/builder could easily find and effectively use their buttons/rotaries blindfolded or using the Oculus Rift. I'm done your arguments always go off in tangents. Go back and reread our posts.

TV on my head, mouse on my gloved finger tip, total immersion...we're going to have to run a few tests on you, just slip your arms in here and......

Difficult question to solve this one as whatever is done to try and incorporate the 'real world' into using the head set is going to affect immersion.
My initial thinking was to have a 'virtual' mouse cursor that you can move onto switches etc. but ofc this is only good for clickable pits.
I guess it's just going to be a case of learning your HOTAS properly and hoping for the best.

Where I can really see this taking hold in a big way is in auto racing sims. I could see this being as close to holy grail territory as you could get while sitting at home on your computer.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/artic...-your-questions

Yes, I can see this taking off with FPS as well. Anything where all the controls are on the wheel or the controller. It will be near useless for modern aircraft sims with full pits. Fumbling for the switches will be a major problem for most realistic pits.

Yes their will be fumbling at the start, but anyone with anytime in a realistic sim pit could easily and quickly find their toggles, levers, and switches in the dark. Mouse clickable cockpits that are already in some modern jet sims would also solve the problem for those without complex Hotas systems. I prefer the complex Hotas systems myself. Yes there are and will be problems with VR systems. Some people preferred the hat switch to Track IR, but Track IR was far more immersive for most people. VR will replace TrackIR, just as TrackIR replaced the Hatswitch for most people.

Perhaps for some with old aircraft with a minimum of switches, but I think a lot of people will hate that aspect of OR. Its not realistic to fly blind at all. In modern fighter simpits it will be completely ridiculous. No one would or could fly a fighter jet completely blind. That's just silly. The realism will be shot for complex pits and I doubt pitbuilders will put everything on their HOTAS for this 3D effect. This thing has some real hurdles to overcome before it will be adopted by serious pitbuilders. However, it will be popular with games and the non realistic pit crowd.

How are you flying blind, you'll even have better peripheral vision with VR, you can see the sims aircraft cockpit and gauges, you can either use a decent Hotas system or clickable clockpits. Their are very few people who have built a realistic pit, and most of those could easily find all their switches without having to look. Even a beer holder can be easily found.

I dont think we know yet how well OR will with flight sims, the idea is great and really interesting though.

Even if OR doesn't quite cut it, maybe the next version or the one after might, i agree with Chivas it IS the future.

I agree it is the future for games and HOTAS only pits, and I am going to get one, but for realistic pitbuilders it is not going to work at all.

I bet the Air Force does not adopt it for their simulators. They won't want to fumble around blind trying to feel where their switches are. Its ridiculous to expect pilots to do that.

You are flying 100% blind of your realistic pit that you have spent thousands of dollars on. A lot of my friends have well over 200+ switches in their pits, its not going to be easy at all to fumble around for them and it will not be realistic at all. Some use Helios which will be even worse for them. You can't feel around a touch screen.

I did not say it would not be popular, it may well be. I only said that it is not good for serious pitbuilders. Its not easy, nor is it realistic to fly by Braille. For airline pits and modern jet pilots it will be a big problem. I will enjoy it putzing around with CoD and RoF (for me HOTAS only sims), and even some of my FPS games etc., but as it stands now, it will not be work for complex realistic pits at all.

Like I said, many times, finding their switches won't be a problem for most builders. They can admire their homemade cockpits before and after the flight.

"Cinemizer,unlike the Oculus, was quite easy to peek above or under the glasses, making it easy to find controller buttons or keyboards – a real must for tactical shooters or combat flight sims." -SimHQ

Perhaps a cross between the better FOV of the superior OR and the peek ability of less immersive Cinemizer would be good for simpits. Otherwise, OR is a wonderful idea for most other situations.

I know in the past real pilots were taught to find and use all their switches, etc in the dark. Not sure if that's still in practice. Some sort of momentary Peek option might work, at the expensive of immersion, but I don't think its necessary with practice. That said options are always good for everyone's playing needs

They could make hatches or removable covers in the 'wall' below the cups, so one could remove them and peek under the rim.

I wear glasses and as I am near-sighted, I tend to peek under the rim when I look at some small text up close on my android phone (S2). That 15mm gap (3/4") is enough to see keyboard and HOTAS.

Having gaps to the outside world might break immersion, but it might also reduce motion sickness? Alternatively, they could make an LCD with on/off switch or a mechanical 2-position flap to cover the gap.

The only thing I still wonder about, is how well the instruments in CloD/IL2:1946 and other sims can be read in the HD version.

Yes, perhaps one of those options would work. I will buy one for the applications that it works well with anyway. Fumbling around blind for hundreds RL switches is an immersion killer and is not an option for serious pitbuilders and impossible for Helios touchscreen users.

OR together with Leap Motion and you'll need a clickable pit not a real pit to sit in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk8guY5W_ww&feature=player_embedded

That would be great, but it is way off in the future. No software to run it properly, apparently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/techno...ed=all&_r=0

http://hothardware.com/News/Kickstarter-...th-Oculus-Rift/

Very interesting combination of Atlas and OR etc, for first person shooters.

When I first heard about the kinect, I said "aha!
the next step is going to be kinect-like functionality
for your next-generation hand-held convergent device:
it will have a sensor that watches where your hands are,
and puts up a virtual keyboard on its screen and displays
your virtual hands tapping on the keys." You put the device
on any tabletop, and perhaps pull out a telescoping stand
with a camera on the end, which stands up 8" or so and
watches the space in front of the device, on the table.
You put your hands on the table, and the device display
shows your virtual hands on screen, hovering over a keyboard.
It provides audio and visual feedback as you move, so
you can type on the tabletop as if it were a keyboard.
further device control will be flipping through screens and
apps by flailing hands in space in the manner of the hackers
in the tv series "Earth - Final Conflict".

Quote from Loft in the BOS forums.

"Back to work now. Pre-alpha stage is now successfully completed and there are a number of new targets that are awaiting our focus. First up is to present the game in Europe at GamesCom 2013 in Cologne, Germany later this month. I hope that all visitors (press mostly) will be able to fly using the Oculus Rift which is now being tuned for optimal compatibility with BOS. Believe me, this is truly and awesome sight."

This huge news. The Oculus Rift will invigorate the flight sim genre like nothing we've ever experienced. This hardware will actually make you feel like your flying, not sitting in a chair infront of a monitor.

John Cormack has joined the Oculus Rift team. I hear the guy can innovate and write descent code.



http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/

Excellent news, looks like Palmer is getting a killer team together...

56142 arrived today. I might find some time on Sunday.

After having walked around in Tuscany a while, I have gone around with the RiftCoaster about 10 times. It's doable if you look where you will go, an extra feeling in your stomach when you look more towards the horizon on the 'big drop'.

Half Life 2 is nice, because the NPCs stand before you and have volume. I had to stop when I came to the top of the winding stairs around the elevator/lift, after leaving the station. I still have to go through the config steps of TeamFortress 2: http://www.roadtovr.com/2013/05/11/how-t...play-video-5730

Strike Suit Zero I played about half an hour until after the 3rd "mission", liberating the platform of "control". First had to muck about with the controller setup to get the Cougar properly set. (Can be even better) I'll try using the pedals for 'roll' and the X-axis for yaw. Too bad the resolution jumps to 720, otherwise I could leave the desktop res alone. SSZ is very good as a rift experience. The jump effect in the cut scenes is not nice and the menus are unnatural linked to the movement. A small movement of the head is amplified in the movement of the menu.

I predict that Track IR will be obsolete after the Rift comes out, but don't throw away our TrackIR's right away as the Rift will be in such demand, it will be hard to procure one.



http://live.wsj.com/...80-855595BB2923

The WSJ link got truncated, Chivas.

hmmmm it did work. Anyway you can also find the Wall Street article at this link

http://www.oculusvr.com/news/

Any glass user here?
How does it work with putting the goggle over the glass? is it comfortable? or does it require contact lens?

I had my Sony HMD-T1 and it was hardly a glass user friendly, also was far from realistic use for flight sim either.
(like focusing system was so sensitive that moving head around often caused a focus lost, and I found HD resolution was not enough for the flightsim)

The Oculus Rift will accommodate eyeglass users. People have had to do some fiddling with different lenses with the current prototypes, but they hope to refine it for the consumer version. The consumer version will also have an HD resolution, but no word yet on what it might be. They're still experimenting. They have been looking at Oled screens, and it will be interesting to see if the consumer version will incorporate a curved or flat screen.

I'd need to measure the width of my glasses, but they are a tight fit.

OK, the widest part is on the temples behind the hinge is 145mm. The Rift should fit glasses with 150mm wide glasses with relative ease. The plastic "goggle" frame flexes and opens up to a width of 160mm, but the pressure will become uncomfortable.

Thankyou Chivas and JAMF, I really appreciate your cooperation.

@Chivas
That explains why they've got some extra lens bundled.
I really hope it also supports astigmatism for the consumer version..

@JAMF
Fortunately mine is only 135mm! yes, the pressure was one of the issue I had with HMD-T1 I had..but I'm now seriously thinking of getting SDK or consumer version.

The only downside I see though is that unlike other HMD, it has to be fully supported by the game.
I see some guys over at official forum, talking about payware driver that force support the game that is not natively supporting the Oculus, but I'm not sure it will work with DCS and BMS the flightsim I mainly fly.

Yep, if they do a pre-order (which they should tbh) then get your order in early otherwise you'll get crushed in the rush once the FPS boys get a sniff of this.
This is once instance where being an early adopter for the final consumer version at least will be a distinct advantage.
Personally I can't wait as I've played around with VR since trying a version in Hong Kong back in the early 90's. The best I acheived at home was with NVidia shutter glasses and IL-2 about 10 years ago but the effect was akin to a 'what the butler saw' type flick projection.

It has been that long since IL2 released, hasn't it? Yeah, I had an nVidia Geforce 2 card and the Elsa Revelator glasses. I didn't have the graphics power to drive the FPS up to 60+ to enjoy gaming with it, but it was really cool to see the cockpit of the IL2 in stereo.

LG has put 2560x1440 on a 5.5" AH-IPS screen. That's nice:

http://gizmodo.com/lg-made-a-5-5-inch-2560-x-1440-smartphone-display-with-1175643002

That would work!

Yep the IL-2 pit in particular looked the best though I found looking out was a blurry mess for some reason so it was only good for joy rides.
I can't remember what card I had, but it was the most powerful that could be bought at the time as I was trying to get to the magical 60Hz which would give me relatively smooth framerates.
Incidently I found the best effect for the shutter glasses was in Operation Flashpoint using the glasses in conjunction with TrackIR. In the forest areas the sense of depth was staggering and I found I was visibly flinching when I was getting hit as the sense of immersion was incredible.
This is why I think the Rift will be so good as I've already opened the door and had a sneak peek in as it were.

There is a company in Cambridge that was developing curved LED screens that were also semi-flexible.Imagine this built into a one piece curved screen that wraps around your face.

The Oled screens are also flexible.

Developers are also making 7" 2560x1440 screens for tablets, so there appear to be a number of very high resolution screens that the OR developers could look into. The OR will have so many uses that they should be able to make huge orders of these type of screens to help cut the price per unit.

Flexible OLED Displays Set for Big Market Growth in 2014, Samsung Leading Charge

http://hothardware.com/News/Flexible-OLE...Leading-Charge/

"Oculus Rift nausea is “an ongoing challenge” that may always be a problem"

http://www.pcgamesn.com/oculus-rift-nausea-ongoing-challenge-may-always-be-problem

If this needs two to three days of nausea to get used to it, this will reduce the clientele to only the hard core. The general public gamers will not put up with that. Thus reducing its sales. They have a big problem here that seems to be persisting.

Despite Oculus improving the hardware and software........ "simulation sickness represents “an ongoing challenge” for the company."

Quote "You may be more susceptible to motion sickness than me, for example. Simulator sickness is the same way. One beautiful thing that’s really important to note is that people to acclimate over time. After playing with the Rift for like two or three days you don’t get simulator sickness any more. Just like sailors getting their sea legs. The community calls it getting your VR legs.”

For those that do experience nausea, it will depend on how good the VR immersion level is to bother fighting thru it. From what I've seen in the forums, the nausea issue hasn't been bad enough to cause doubts about the products future. It will be interesting to see if the consumer version has eased the percentage of people who might experience nausea.

I agree it is unclear if this persistent problem will cause the product to fail. However it is severe in enough people that it is a very big problem for them that they have not corrected despite much effort and will turn off buyers no matter how good the VR effect ends up. It will scare off many too.

I fear that since so many are having this problem, most will not forge on, but the very committed like us. Nearly every reviewer of the kickstarter complains of the nausea. This will end up to be a financial problem for OC if they don't fix it. Only time will tell.

Yes, I read the nausea thread. Its quite funny. Some are prescribing illegal drugs, ginger and travel pills etc.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/199361/a_conversation_with_oculus_vr_.php

Sony coming out with their own version.
http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/sony-taking-on-the-oculrs-rift-with-its-own-vr/

"Oculus Rift users report nausea, motion sickness and similar symptoms. Nate Mitchell, vice president of product at the VR goggles’ developer, has assured that everything’s being done to counter the problem.

In an interview conducted at gamescom by PCGamesN, Mitchell said, “I think that’s one of the biggest challenges.”"

I agree it is their biggest problem.

I remember when TIR first arrived, a few abandoned it due to nausea.
Hopefully OR will workout the issues that cause nausea.
Probably latency is a big factor in that.

From what I read in the reviews, I'm pretty sure the OR nausea issue is a little more widespread and much more severe than that experience with TIR.

Hope they can fix it.

They probably won't be able to fix the nausea issue for some people, but most people who do have a problem initially, should get squared away after a few days of slowly acclimatizing themselves. I also think the acclimatization period won't be a problem either. It only takes a few seconds to see the benefits should far outweigh any initial hurdles. "BUT" time will tell.

Its hard too speculate its success or failure with any accuracy until the consumer version is tested and presented to consumers for review. Atleast the developers who have seen it are busily spending time and money coding its implementation into their sims, which is a very good sign the OC could succeed.

I agree Chivas too early to tell. Its not the ones who get some mild nausea that I worry about, they can overcome it in a reasonable amount of time. However there are quite a few who get severe nausea to the point of nearly hurling (several who have reviewed it). It won't take too many of those cases to turn a lot of potential buyers off from taking the plunge.

We shall see when the final version is released. I hope they get this fixed so it goes well in the mainstream to keep the cost down. If it is just for hardcore or keeners like you and I, it will be expensive. I don't have a wad to throw around.

I think the first consumer version will still be around three hundred dollars, atleast that's the initial price point they hope to achieve to gain a real foothold in the market.

At that reasonable price they had better fix the nausea problem or they won't be around long, because volume sale won't happen the way things are now. They are getting too much bad press about it.

People getting nausea shows that the suspension of reality is very convincing which is a good thing. However I'm sure the sensation is caused where there is a distinct lag between felt movement (via your ear canal balancers) and perceived movement from the displays.

It only takes a very small lag effect to cause your brain to freak out because your balance mechanism is telling your brain one thing and your eyes are displaying something different.
This is why shutting your eyes on a roller coaster is bad, concentrate on a reference point like the horizon and all will be well.

In the early days of Track IR I saw this due to low frame-rate/lag on the rigs of the day, now of course it's not a problem and there's no reason why the same couldn't be true of the Rift.
I'm confident that if they reduce the lag issue to minimal then the nausea will cease to be a problem except in a few individuals.

Personally I think that a single curved OLED screen that is opaque in use but can be set to semi-transparent instantly is the future.
Then at least it gets round the 'blind keyboard' problem while also allowing you to see the dinner Mom dumped in front of you while you were busy with the flag etc.

That would be awesome!

Interesting take on BOS with the Oculus Rift.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/06/best-of-gamescom-il-2-sturmovik-and-oculus-rift/

No question this will be a great experience and a marvel if they can fix the blurry image and the nausea problem.

In the comments:
"The motion sickness is really profound and horrible. I must assume that they’ve fixed the issue now, since these press reports aren’t mentioning it. But if it still exists and it’s just being ignored or carefully managed in press testings, then you can expect a backlash to rival the Xbox One announcement if/when it finally comes out."

You can buy a developers kit for $300.00 (US), but I'm waiting for the commercial vresion, which I hope will be at least 1080p versus the current 720P. It would be good to have 1440P,or higher since the screens are so close to the eyeball (from what I've read, anyway).
Flyby out

4k, maybe?

http://allthingsd.com/20131017/oculus-ri...splay-ceo-says/
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/18/oculus-rift-john-carmack-interview/

but Palmer Luckey replied:

http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1oq43j/john_carmack_confirms_new_dev_kit_incoming/ccuk344

Still, I keep hoping for 21:9, so you get 10.5:9 per eye. That's better than 8:9.

I found one of the latest interviews regarding motion sickness

http://allthingsd.com/20131017/oculus-ri...splay-ceo-says/

Yep once they nail that lag the motion sickness will be history though I doubt if they'll guarantee that no one will get sick as there will always be a small percentage that will get nausea regardless.
The comments about consoles is interesting, trust me once this technology works on consoles PC users will be at the back of the queue trampled in the rush...:D

Looks like these guys could blow the rest of them
out of the water - they've got hot tech and a fearsome
brain trust:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar-the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system

Gene Buckle has been posting about the CastAR in the simpit section.
It looks interesting but I don't see it as an alternative VR to Oculus.

It's different tech come at it from a different angle.

The Cast AR will take a lot of setting up to give true 360 vision and it'll also not fill the peripheral vision.

Don't get me wrong CastAR has huge potential, but not as a VR unit

It doesn't appear that the CastAR has the FOV to compete yet, but that could easily change. Interesting times.

If you watch the vid, and note the designer's comments, the
system has two steps: a small projector mounted near each
eye, and a corner reflective surface to send the two images back
to the wearer's eyes. For interactive tabletops, the reflective
surface is spread out on the table. To convert to a full VR
headset, a pair of reflective surfaces are clipped on in front
of the headpiece, adding a second layer to the "glasses". FOV
is just a matter of playing with the size of this second layer,
which, being a simple plastic sheet, weighs hardly anything,
and with the width of scan the projectors deliver. Considering
how fast this woman has been cranking out prototype improvements,
I would expect this could be optimized very rapidly, mostly a
question of how much development time it gets compared to the
multi-user tabletop.

I did read that. Cilpping on a screen to the front of the glasses needs more work than just hanging a screen out there. It'd need to be an enclosed unit to kill peripheral vision.

I'm still not convinced this has anything to add over the OR for me.

I can see the benefit in other formats for different situations,

Being eaf are you talking in terms of enhancing your kill rate and efficiency, or like me just want the rift for a cool gaming experience for flight sims and other games, just for the novelty value?

I couldn't give a toss about kill rates and stats.

I'm in for the immersion factor, I don't see it as a novelty, if it works it'll be to replace my screen

Its all about immersion. Its like being transported from your terraferma gaming room to a cockpit thousands of feet in the air.

Going to be seriously watching how the next version turns out, if its a big improvement and viable for flying, im getting it.
Though i still think it will be version 3 that will be the one to really look at.

I think version one will be just fine, but that's not to say there won't be many versions over the coming years. They currently have 6DOF with no latency, which appears to have fixed the motion sickness problems for most people. The only question now is the resolution and FOV, which has to be higher than 1080P with atleast 110*FOV. There are more of these types of screens to choose from now, and I think the first version will be approx, 1080P per eye, or better. I know I'll be purchasing the first consumer version, and probably a few more after that.

Then i shall be asking for a big review on how it works out in BOS/ROF/CLOD when you get it Chivas!

You won't need a review from me there will be an avalanche of reviews, "IF" the hardware, especially the resolution/screendoor issue is addressed. Most of the other issues seem to be fixed. Except maybe for those that can't find their Hotas/keyboard in the dark. The OR developers are aware of the issue, and are looking at ways to address the issue for the disabled among us.

Unfortunately the Oculus Rift doesn't appear to have much traction with Team Fusion, which will hurt them when the OR tidal wave hits. When most people experienced TrackIR they wouldn't fly without it. The same will happen with the OR, but the immersion, and shift will happen a hundred times faster than what we've seen with TrackIR.

Luckily Loft has seen the light, as Jason has said he would rather use a monitor/TrackIR combo, but I do give him props for supplying the kit to Loft's development crew.

In the near future if you have two equal quality combat flight sims, the one that integrates VR the best will become the most popular.

chivas is this post here because or is being considered by team fusion?

I have no idea if Team Fusion is looking into the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift has been brought up at the ATAG forums a number of times, but no one from the actual TF team has commented. I offered to help buy a Dev Kit for TF but there was no support on the ATAG forums, and no TF response. Not sure if there is no interest at the moment, or they are too busy with other priorities. I believe once Team Fusion sees the OR consumer version game changer in action, they will give the OR a higher priority.

That said Jason/BOS picked up the OR dev/kit, and said he would sooner use a good monitor and Track IR. Although Jason worked for TrackIR before moving on to be a CFS developer. Luckily when he showed the OR Dev/Kit to Loft, he was so impressed he implemented the OR in the BOS game engine in two weeks, in time to show off BOS using the OR at a Russian Game Development Show.

Currently WT has implemented the OR.
BOS is in the process of implementing the OR.
DCS is looking at implementing the OR.
TF not sure if its possible, or if they are interested

I don't care what the company says in its sales pitches, if this is going to be done right, it will be a year away from consumer release.....at least! Likely longer, unless they push out an under developed product with problems. We've had our fill of that scenario! Most Software devs will not fully jump on board until it gets closer to consumer release.

What is that based on?

It is at least a year away from the consumer release. The estimated release for the last year has been around the end of 2014. All the innards of the device are close to being set, which will now allow them to refine the formfactor. The latest prototype, 3D, 6DOF, with a high resolution low latency display, with no motion blur, and no motion sickness, generated another 75 million in investments. The latest prototype must have been very good to generate that kind of money.

The company suggests their latest prototype is even better than they had hoped for. If the first version succeeds, which looks very promising, there will be quite a few further consumer versions in the coming years, with higher specs, and smaller form factors, that will include things like eye tracking,etc.

I had hopes that we'd see something before summer.

Some of the stuff I've been reading across the wonderful web suggests that the HD prototype is ready as a developer release early next year and that will be closely followed by a consumer release. I've not read anything to suggest the consumer version will be Q4 next year.

I've not tried the existing dev prototype but a few of my FPS friends did try it at a London games com in the Autumn and we're blown away by it. Even in it's rough state.

I want one now, waiting another year is going to drive me insane! If it is to be a year then I'll be picking up a HD dev set as soon as they appear.

I wonder if the advent of the CastAR has prompted them
to move up their release schedule. Interesting reading
about the interplay between these two projects, which
I stumbled upon when directed to a thread on the Star
Citizen development web site:
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/68883/castar-an-attempt-to-dispel-the-myths/p3

Both Palmer Luckey and Jeri Ellsworth posted in this thread.

And that led me to this page
http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-creator-palmer-luckey-backs-castar-kickstarter-10000/
wherein we learn that Palmer put up the maximum $10k pledge
to the Kickstarter for the CastAR. This all seems to be the
classic definition of healthy competition.

I don't believe the HD prototype or any other further prototype will be available to general public. They will probably only provide the latest prototypes to some of the bigger game developers that are currently developing sims for the OR. The developer hasn't stated a release date, and all the speculation from people close to the project is still around the holiday season which I assumed is the Christmas holidays. I suppose it could be summer holidays, but they still have the form factor to design, and contracting the required components, not to mention putting those components together. This is going to take considerable time, but there is good chance that product will be ready for Christmas sales.

edit....I forgot to mention the original Dev Kit is still for sale, and will ship within 3 to 5 days of order.

A new prototype of the Oculus Rift has been making the rounds at CES in Las Vegas this week. It has an OLED screen, 6DOF, using internal accelerometers, gyro's etc, along with a TrackIR type camera to give the low latency motion sensing required by the Rift. Motion sickness/motionblur is also much reduced by the "low persistence" solution where they only show a quick pic, and then a black screen. Apparently this solution is working very well. People can now read text, and gauges while their head is moving.

There is no word what the resolution of the OlED screen is, but Lucky suggests the consumer version will probably be even higher. No word on release, but its still assumed to be around the end of this year.

Apparently the screen door effect has been greatly reduced, but still noticeable.

Also the OLED screen produces very dark blacks, combined with the very dark environment of an OR headset, might make spotting dots at-least as easy, or possibly even easier with the Rift, than a monitor. Time will tell.

One user said the only thing missing is their hands, which the developer replied, they are working on a solution.

Theres no internal 6DOF tracking yet (gyros and accelerometers are planned for the consumer version), the "trackIR type camera" that they are using is just a placeholder to show how the 6DOF will work in the final version.

Everything is still a work in progress, as the word "prototype" suggests. The development team has stated the current 6DOF solution is the best created so far using internal gyro's etc, inconjunction with the external camera. There is no word yet on what the final solution will be other than if it turns out to be the best solution, the camera will be included with the Rift kit.

Lucky also mentioned that video screen manufacturers are now working with them to build the type of screen they want for the RIFT as opposed to just using a screen developed for smart-phones etc.

Heres a link to the Oculus forums, with links to a number videos etc regarding the latest OR prototype. https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=5815

like http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/07/testing-the-huge-breakthrough-in-new-oculus-rift-vr-prototype

http://www.roadtovr.com/ces-2014-oculus-...nterview-video/

Sounds quite close to being a viable proposition. The speed this is improving seems to incredible, a real groundswell behind it now.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/...-big-thing.html

I agree especially the motion sickness problem solved. What was going to kill the OR for me was the relatively narrow IPD of the early prototype with only a software adjustment. Luckily the development team is addressing this issue as well, how well, time will tell. Anyway here are two very interesting, informative, and funny developer interviews.

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=5927

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=5918

I'm starting to believe the hype. As you say, there really seems to be a groundswell behind the Oculus Rift and the progress they are making is amazing.

CastAR still seems like it would be a better option for a simpit, but I wonder to what extent they can overcome the lead Oculus is building.

Either option is less expensive and more immersive than a multi-monitor set up.

Exciting times ahead, that's for sure!

The CastAR does look very interesting. They say their product is much better than the OR, and they have shown it to thousands of people at the trade shows. If its as good as they suggest, I'm wondering why there is so little hype from the tech sites that are filled with OR videos and articles. I don't care which one succeeds, and hope they all do, as the more consumer options the better as far as I'm concerned.

CastAR's development is about a year behind OR, but they
are catching up surprisingly fast. OR's Kickstarter ran
to Aug 2012, CastAR's was to Nov 2013. So OR has had
$2.4M to play with for the last year, while CastAR has
$1.1M since November. OR has their retail product mostly
nailed down; at least the physical design style and ergonomics
of the CC look retail-ready, and there are already quotations
about "limiting feature creep"to get the first release out.
CastAR is still building protoypes, at a frantic pace, and a
ways from setting their final feature set, but they have a
schedule that seems to be targetting late spring for freezing
development and shifting to preproduction. It looks like both
products are eyeing xmas 2014 for the big marketing rollout.

already noted, plus some more interesting reading:
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3880692/Re_More_Oculus_Rift_goodness#Post3880692

I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but didn't the CastAR development start in the Valve R&D department, but it got no traction as Valve was also working with the Oculus Rift team? I think Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson ended up leaving Valve to continue the development on their own. Hopefully the competition will drive both projects as well as other to develop better, and cheaper VR products.

More or less; I didn't know about the Valve/OR connection until
recently, but have seen some comments which suggest this was
the case. Jeri had been hired by Valve to create their hardware
division, and assembled the SteamBox team, then concentrated on
potential killer peripherals to make it more appealing. This
led her to VR glasses, and she was quite blindsided to be
suddenly let go when she started pursuing the CastAR idea.
It was however most incredibly gracious of Gabe Newell to
allow her to take the CastAR development with her, free and
clear, when she left.

They've implemented the Oculus HD version in BOS, in update 50.

"Full HD dev version of Oculus Rift tuning was completed last week. Thanks to our programming team, the game is absolutely compatible with this new technology. It’s truly hard to find words worth describing the whole range of emotions: delight, fear, curiosity, admiration, interest - all the feelings born by flying over Stalingrad in virtual reality. Yes, I know that the device is not yet available to users on a true retail level and it will hardly be inexpensive, but trust me: HD Oculus suits BOS as great as cream suits hot borsch A high level of immersion - usually featured by a quality sim game - becomes incredible due to the use of this thing. And yes, I don’t recommend it to faint hearted pilots. Although I don’t think there are a lot of those in our community, is there?"

Sony's looks WAY nicer.

http://gizmodo.com/project-morpheus-sonys-oculus-rift-competitor-looks-i-1546819815

People who have used the Sony prototype say its a good experience, but not perfect, as its hot enough to fog the screen, uncomfortable, motion blur, and the resolution doesn't look as good as the OR latest prototype. That said its a decent start and further work could make PS4 users very happy. Hopefully they will add PC support as some point as well.

I don't know the weight of the Sony. Users of the DK2 OR prototype say its slightly heavier than the DK1, and will need to get lighter. The OR developer stated they will have no problem making the consumer version lighter and smaller, as the prototypes are made larger to easily change out different componants. Personally I really don't care what they look like, its far more about the experience they provide. I'm sure SONY and OCULUS will provide very similar experiences with their consumer version, but I have no interest in consoles and prefer VR hardware made for the more powerful PC's required to run highly complex combat flight sims.

Exactly the opposite of what others have said. Some found the SONY unit uncomfortable and hot enough to fog the display. This is not a concern for any of developments, as their units are just prototypes and the form factor has no yet been finalized.

Don't worry, the Oculus development is thinking way beyond gaming, they are working with the Military, Health, Education, Industry, Tourism, etc etc etc. So far Sony appears to be concentrating on content for the PS4 gaming console. Of course that could easily change if it hasn't already.

The rift would be more immersive. Yet if they don't raise the resolution to 4K the unit will be still born. I won't play my games at less than 1920x1080 and right now the Oculus has a per eye resolution of 640x720 I think. Word is that will increase but so will the cost.

You won't be able to use your controls but the Oculus isn't made for games that you need a bevy of controls.If you watch the trailers it is designed more for FPS or hack and slash a type games. So if you enjoy the tactile feedback of a more expansive physical controller setup you're out of luck.

DK2 uses a low persistence 1080P OLED display split 960 x 1080 Per Eye to provide realistic 3D, eliminate motion blur, and judder, two of the biggest contributors to simulator sickness. Low persistence makes the scene appear visually stable, increasing the potential for "presence". Palmer has said they are working with display manufactures to incorporate a higher resolution display for the consumer release.

The buzz word in VR is "Presence" which has been described as immersion squared or cubed. The keys there being a low persistence display running at at-least 75HZ. Not to be confused with frame rate, but frame rates must also be relatively high and steady, which could be a problem with complex combat flight sims.

There have been few issues with weight with any of the VR units on display at the GDC. The subject is mute as none of these prototypes have been optimized for the consumer versions. Its impossible to say that any particular unit will be too heavy or uncomfortable The OCULUS RIFT prototypes for example have alot of extra space in the unit, to allow easy component change/adjustment. The final product should look much like the artistic drawings we've seen, but that could change, for example, if they find a high quality integrated 3D sound solution.

The OR is perfect for WW2 combat flight sims, in-conjunction with a X55 Rhino type Hotas system. The Hotas has all the inputs you could ever want, and with practice most people should find it easy to find, and use. The same goes for those people with home built cockpits. So far I've only used 15% of the possible inputs on the X55, so even more complex modern jets shouldn't be a problem.

The VR experience should be so addicting that most people will find a way to work around any issues they might initially perceive. Users have talked about not being able to properly describe the experience, saying peeps will have to experience it for themselves, to get it. Luckily Loft quickly seen its potential for BOS, after trying the DK1 prototype. The OR sold 60,000+ DK1's before running out of parts for that particular prototype. Sixteen thousand people ordered the DK2 prototype a few hours after it was announced a couple of days ago, even though the developer said individuals should wait for the improved consumer version which should be "soonish". The DK2 was built for developers to fine tune their software for VR use. The OR appears to be in the pole position in this regard atleast for PC content.

One limitation I do see, is running complex flight sims at 75+ hz, along with high steady frame rates. We will probably have to turn down the eye candy, or buy the best performing system possible, for the best experience.

Yes, I suppose you know better than WT, BOS, and DCS who are currently spending the time and money to incorporate the OR into their sims.

People are overrating the importance of resolution with
head mounted displays. Try one, and you will find that
resolution is less important than you expect; as long as the
display is updating at a good rate, your unsteady head
will result in the display dithering, and filling in
to give the effect of higher resolution. It is similar to
tricks your eye uses to make up for the fact that you
actually have very low visual resolution outside of a
cone of about 15º (3" wide at 12" distance). You could
call it synthetic resolution. A single frame at 700 pixels
on a side will look a bit blocky, but if you view 30
of them a second, each a fraction of a pixel offset from
the last in a random direction, you are getting far more
than 700x700 pixels of information, and your brain knows
and uses that to render the world more clearly.

There has been little doubt that the OR could be useful in almost all industries. You keep saying things like the OR "won't cut it with sims", when sims/gaming were Palmer's first priority until they began to realize just how huge the potential of their new hardware was.

I agree. Its amazing how the brain concentrates on that cone, and fills outside of the cone with clear data, that could be totally wrong.

The resolution could be very important in combat flight sims where we have to see small specs in the sky. Then you think that people lower the resolution to make the dots appear bigger. I do know that users have found backgrounds too fuzzy/blurry in early VR prototypes. It will be interesting to see how it pans out as I think its a bigger issue for flight simmers, than peoples concerns about not seeing their input devices. People will soon find was to use their joysticks etc blindfolded, but it will be much more difficult to adjust the VR hardware to spot the dots.

DCS WORLD wouldn't be spending the time to incorporate the OR in their sim if they didn't think it would work for complex Jet sims. Maybe you should do some research on the OR as Palmer has done plenty of interviews on quite a number of technical and gaming websites, not to mention the blogs on their own website.

The 100 or so people who have built a sim pit that could be too complex for the Oculus Rift probably aren't interested in the feel of flight and the immersion of the Rift anyway. They are more interested in checklist procedures, communication, and navigation. Which won't be a concern for anyone, while they enjoy their passion.

PCWorld review.

"The Oculus Rift is aptly named, because it divides the world into two camps: Those who are stoked for this headset to be the first successful attempt at making virtual reality (VR) mainstream, and those who have to rip away the headset before they barf. With its high-resolution screen, top-of-the-line tracking sensors and lightweight chassis, it’s either the best or worst VR experience you’ve ever had."

I've got my DK2 on order, Christmas in July/August this year!

I had an absolute blast with my Oculus DK1. Yes it was low res, but it's a Dev kit. I've since sold to pay for DK2.

Playing War Thunder with the rift was thrilling. Just the feeling of sitting behind that long nose in a spit, or looking over your shoulder trying to spot the bandit behind you is an experience that can't be described. Although I honestly spent 90% of my time just flying around and experiencing the aircraft. Major letdown that some of the heavies don't have cocpits.

I've never built a sim pit before, but I will for the rift. The nice thing about it is that I don't really need to worry about much more than a HOTAS setup. I don't even really need to paint it much. Just a good seat, some seatbelts (they will actually help hold you in when you're rifting)

It's a new enough tech that I can see some people are hesitant. It is however incredible, and fantastic for flight sims.

Lunar flight has a cool feature where to activate controls; you simply look at them. This could be useful for sims like DCS, where there are tons of switches. You simply look at what you want to toggle, and press the toggle button. Works great.

That quote is regarding the first DK1 prototype. The new DK2 prototypes uses Low Persistence technology, and a higher HZ, higher resolution OLED display that effectively resolves the motion sickness issue for "most" people.

I hear from those who tried DK2 at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, that the field of view has been noticeably reduced.
We will have to wait until July/August to find out if that is true and if your prediction is correct on the nausea factor.

The DK1 used a 7" LCD display with approx a 100* FOV depending on the lenses used. The DK2 uses a 5" OLED display with an approx a 100* FOV using different lenses and optics than the DK1. People are saying the sensation is better with the DK2, saying its more like sticking their head out of a window, while the DK1 felt like viewing a scene thru Binoculars. OR will be introducing a better display and optics in the consumer version, but no word yet what that FOV will be.

Motion Sickness hasn't appeared to be much of an issue since the Crystal Cove prototype that the DK2 prototype is based on. Some people on the OR development crew would immediately feel sick when they put the original DK1 on. They say this hasn't happened since the development of the Crystal Cove prototype introduced at CES 2014 last January. I haven't read of any motion sickness issues since the development of the Crystal Cove or DK2 prototype. Not to say there won't any motion sickness issues, especially under certain fast motion gaming conditions. I suppose if your susceptible to motion sickness in some real world situations, you might have the same susceptibility during some gaming situations. If you are not easily susceptible to motion sickness, the OR shouldn't induce motion sickness, if the game software developers follow the guidelines layed out by the "the OR's best practices PDF" That said, the OR and other VR units are used to help people get over some conditions like motion sickness, among many other issues. eg returning soldiers battle stress. Many DK1 users reported that were able to get over their motion sickness issues with gradual use of the DK1. Anyway the OR developers are well aware the issue has to be addressed for the OR to be successful. It appears they come along way in a short time in that regard.

"DK2 uses a low persistence OLED display to eliminate motion blur and judder, two of the biggest contributors to simulator sickness. Low persistence makes the scene appear visually stable, increasing the potential for presence."

http://www.oculusvr.com/dk2/

Ya, that's what the website says....of course they are hyping as they should, but I will wait and see what users of DK2 say. Not enough people have used the DK2 yet to know. I know a few and they say the FOV is noticeably smaller. Didn't use it long enough to see if they would feel sick....it takes a bit they say.

Anyway we will see in July.

Users have been trying the Crystal Cove prototype for the last three months with no reports yet of motion sickness, which means to me, their new tech incorporated to address the major motion sickness issues has been a success. New private investors also tried the Crystal Cove three months ago and invested 75 million, which also tells me that the issue is under control. You don't invest that kind of money if a large portion of the user base gets sick, not to mention all the negative feedback/advertising that would entail.

Facebook buy Oculus Rift:

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3929932/Facebook_buys_Oculus_Rift_devs#Post3929932



Redtoo.

Facebook certainly wouldn't be my first choice. Hopefully it works out for them. They definitely have the resources to get it done.

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-joins-facebook/

Oculus Joins Facebook

March 25, 2014 - 02:35 PDT by Oculus VR

We started Oculus with a vision of delivering incredible, affordable, and ubiquitous consumer virtual reality to the world. We’ve come a long way in the last 18 months: from foam core prototypes built in a garage to an incredible community of active and talented developers with more than 75,000 development kits ordered. In the process, we’ve defined what consumer virtual reality needs to be and what it’s going to require to deliver it.

A few months ago, Mark, Chris, and Cory from the Facebook team came down to visit our office, see the latest demos, and discuss how we could work together to bring our vision to millions of people. As we talked more, we discovered the two teams shared an even deeper vision of creating a new platform for interaction that allows billions of people to connect in a way never before possible.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve joined forces with Facebook to create the best virtual reality platform in the world.

At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform. But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step.

Most important, Facebook understands the potential for VR. Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate. Facebook is a company that believes that anything is possible with the right group of people, and we couldn’t agree more.

This partnership is one of the most important moments for virtual reality: it gives us the best shot at truly changing the world. It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR.



Over the next 10 years, virtual reality will become ubiquitous, affordable, and transformative, and it begins with a truly next-generation gaming experience. This partnership ensures that the Oculus platform is coming, and that it’s going to change gaming forever.

We’ll see you in the Metaverse!

– Palmer, Brendan, John and the Oculus team

Two Billion dollars. I guess there are some merits too the new VR hardware.

Letter to the Team from Brendan Iribe

March 25, 2014 - 02:35 PDT by Oculus VR



Team,

As you may have heard this morning, Oculus has agreed to join Facebook.

Facebook shares our vision for connecting a billion people through virtual reality with the power of shared presence.

Oculus will continue to operate independently. We’re staying Oculus, we’re still building the Oculus Rift, our email addresses are remain @oculusvr.com, and most importantly, our hoodies will still say Oculus.

By partnering with Facebook, we’ll be able to build a better product with zero compromises and a focus on growth. We’ll also be investing more heavily in made-for-VR content and exploring other opportunities to accelerate our vision.

In broad strokes, here are a few key points to consider for the long-term strategy:

1. We’re able to tap into Facebook’s experience and backend systems for our platform services. As an added bonus, Oculus now has a rock solid, global payments solution.
2. We’ll be able to leverage Facebook’s recruiting infrastructure, including hiring engineers from within Facebook, to supercharge our recruiting.
3. We can afford to always make the decision that is right for virtual reality and our customers in the long term – we don’t have to make short term compromises.
4. We’re going to invest in additional partnerships to build the best product and platform.

I’ll meet with everyone individually over the next few days to discuss what this means in terms of integration. In the meantime, know that things couldn’t be better.

No team, ever, has had a better shot at delivering on the dream of virtual reality. This will be the team that solves the hardest problems and delivers the final platform. We need you now, more than ever, to go out and find the very best engineers in the world to help us deliver the final platform, the Holodeck.

This is a truly special moment. The work we’ve done has captured the world’s attention and changed the perception of the medium forever. This partnership is a huge affirmation of everything we’ve done. Congratulations, guys.

Now, let’s get back to changing the world.

– Brendan

The Future of Virtual Reality

March 25, 2014 - 02:35 PDT by Oculus VR

I’ve always loved games. They’re windows into worlds that let us travel somewhere fantastic. My foray into virtual reality was driven by a desire to enhance my gaming experience; to make my rig more than just a window to these worlds, to actually let me step inside them. As time went on, I realized that VR technology wasn’t just possible, it was almost ready to move into the mainstream. All it needed was the right push.

We started Oculus VR with the vision of making virtual reality affordable and accessible, to allow everyone to experience the impossible. With the help of an incredible community, we’ve received orders for over 75,000 development kits from game developers, content creators, and artists around the world.

When Facebook first approached us about partnering, I was skeptical. As I learned more about the company and its vision and spoke with Mark, the partnership not only made sense, but became the clear and obvious path to delivering virtual reality to everyone. Facebook was founded with the vision of making the world a more connected place. Virtual reality is a medium that allows us to share experiences with others in ways that were never before possible.

Facebook is run in an open way that’s aligned with Oculus’ culture. Over the last decade, Mark and Facebook have been champions of open software and hardware, pushing the envelope of innovation for the entire tech industry. As Facebook has grown, they’ve continued to invest in efforts like with the Open Compute Project, their initiative that aims to drive innovation and reduce the cost of computing infrastructure across the industry. This is a team that’s used to making bold bets on the future.

In the end, I kept coming back to a question we always ask ourselves every day at Oculus: what’s best for the future of virtual reality? Partnering with Mark and the Facebook team is a unique and powerful opportunity. The partnership accelerates our vision, allows us to execute on some of our most creative ideas and take risks that were otherwise impossible. Most importantly, it means a better Oculus Rift with fewer compromises even faster than we anticipated.

Very little changes day-to-day at Oculus, although we’ll have substantially more resources to build the right team. If you want to come work on these hard problems in computer vision, graphics, input, and audio, please apply!

This is a special moment for the gaming industry — Oculus’ somewhat unpredictable future just became crystal clear: virtual reality is coming, and it’s going to change the way we play games forever.

I’m obsessed with VR. I spend every day pushing further, and every night dreaming of where we are going. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined we’d come so far so fast.

I’m proud to be a member of this community — thank you all for carrying virtual reality and gaming forward and trusting in us to deliver. We won’t let you down.

– Palmer Luckey, Founder, Oculus

Chivas, do you work for Oculus? You sure are putting out a lot of effort to copy and paste their web text that we can all read on their website. Starting to look like advertising.

Facebook's deal includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million Facebook shares, valued at $1.6 billion.

Many people are commenting negatively about this deal in gaming comment sections. We will have to see how this pans out. I sense this moving away from where I was hoping it would go. A serious VR headset for high end gaming. I fear FaceRift will ultimately become a virtual shopping device.

I'm sure the OR will become many things too many different people, which is why the market is potentially so huge. Its even more possible now that there will be plenty of funds to build many different versions of the OR if required. That said a high fidelity gaming unit could easily accommodate a number of different uses. I don't believe for one minute that it will hurt, and only enhance the OR gaming unit, as its still Palmer Luckey's primary focus. There are certainly are alot of people negatively overreacting to the news. Time will tell.

http://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-oculus-vr-acquisition-investor-webcast-highlights-breakdown/


Facebook / Oculus VR Acquisition: Investor Webcast Highlights and Breakdown

March 25, 2014 by Paul James —1 Comment



Facebook / Oculus VR Acquisition: Investor Webcast Highlights


Mark Zuckerberg

So, while we were still reeling from Mark Zuckerberg‘s announcement on his own personal Facebook page of their intentions to acquire Oculus for a cool $2 billion dollars, the official press release landed. In that, everyone holding an interest in the deal should pop along via phone or webcast to hear Mark Zuckerberg and Brendan Iribe (amongst others) explain why this deal is in the offing and what their vision is for the collaboration. I grabbed some notes during the conference that seemed of interest and break them down with some thoughts below. These are not direct quotes, but paraphrased statements based on notes I took during the webcast.

Zuckerberg: “We see Oculus as providing one of the long term important Computing Platforms for the future”.


Brendan Iribe, CEO, Oculus VR

The term ‘Computing Platforms’ featured heavily throughout the event. In fact, it was interesting how both Brendan and Zuckerberg were very careful not to paint Oculus as providers of just a pure gaming experience, which of course they’re not. It was clear that the phrases used were designed not to put off the types of people who have and care about the money they have tied up in Facebook. Instead, much emphasis was made of VR’s power to connect people socially in ways hitherto only experienced when those people shared a physical space.

Iribe: “When the Facebook team came to visit and meet with us, we quickly realised that our teams were culturally aligned, we hire the best and brightest”

Again, Oculus’ ability to attract and attain industry leading people to help build the future of VR was highlighted as a key reason for the acquisition. It’s clear Facebook believe that in acquiring Oculus they adopt a ready-made dream team of technologists poised to change the world. In fact, it was put more bluntly later on ..

Zuckerberg: “Oculus are way ahead of everyone … 1 year ahead of the competition”.

Kinda felt like they’d wandered down the “Pre-packaged Technology Company With Bright Future” aisle at the Billion Dollar Best Buy and picked up the shinest product they saw.

Iribe: “We’re thrilled that we’ll be working together.” .. “We believe VR will connect people in ways nobody thought possible” ”..fundamentally change the way we live, share and communicate”

Again, the focus is predictably on social and lifestyle aspects of VR. But this is nothing new, the VR community has been aware of the huge leaps VR could provide to telepresence applications and all those related. It is a stark shift in focus from the previous 2 years of talking up Oculus’ gaming potential. Again, presenting what Oculus can bring to Facebook is the key here as well as not frightening those non tech-savvy millionaire investors.

In truth, there really is an enormous opportunity for both companies to seize their collective resources and push the boundaries of virtual reality in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible without such a partnership in place. Whilst many may hold reservations about big business snapping up our favourite plucky upstart underdog, Facebook’s financial clout really does open some pretty huge doors for VR.

Zuckerberg: ”We’re not a hardware company and we’re not looking to make a profit from Oculus hardware, we see this as more a software and services thing.” .. “Gaming is a start”

This was interesting and on the surface, flies in the face of the public’s view of Oculus, that of a company producing a VR Headset for mass market gaming. However, what Oculus has clearly believed since the beginning is that the Oculus Rift is not just a peripheral or even a display, it’s a platform on which to build great software. Oculus themselves have already made great inroads into carving themselves a software and services niche. In the creation of Oculus Share, they curated the best software developers had to offer them and promoted it to build awareness of the platform and what it had to offer. Recently, Oculus VR announced that they’d be publishing software too, starting with the darling of the VR gaming world, EVE Valkyrie.

So, it’s clear Facebook’s vision for generating revenue from the acquisition aligns broadly with Oculus’ current trajectory anyway. Basically, creating the Rift is a means to an end. The end, is to sell the world awesome VR related software and services. But for those hardcore gamers who are member of the community that has built since the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign began, hearing the marginalisation of gaming may well sadden them somewhat.

–

Here at Road to VR we always believed that virtual reality had a huge future. We’ve watched and reported on the community that has been built around Oculus’ successes. The last 2 years have been a sort of wild west period of lawlessness for VR, and one that many will be sad to see the back of. But, if enthusiasts really do want to see and experience the pinnacle of what their chosen hobby has to offer, Facebook’s move could well provide the hefty push that VR needs to achieve launch velocity. As sad as I am to see the Wild West being tamed, I’m pretty excited about where Oculus and now Facebook might take us next.

"Palmer" doesn't own FaceBlock anymore. He will make what Zuckerberg tells him to make. And "Mark" will do just that. Guaranteed for 2 billion dollars.

Dude enough with the copy and paste spam. It desperate looking.

Its valid information, not the constant negative biased drivel.

Valid info:

"While we don't yet know how the acquisition will influence Oculus Rift or the future of Facebook, you can't really blame people for reacting the way they have. For one, while the move might bring virtual reality to the mainstream, the potential drawbacks of this move might not be worth it, as far some gamers are concerned. People can't help but think about how Facebook handles user data/personal information, how much Facebook loves advertisements, and about its social games—all of which make it hard for some to have faith in how things will turn out for the Oculus."

The OR development should now be able to approach display makers and get the price, quantity, and quality he needs for the best possible VR unit for the next consumer version.

"Valid info" Thats exactly why I posted it. I have no use for Facebook myself, but that doesn't mean they will kill the golden VR goose of the future. They didn't get rich by making bad decisions. People are hardwired to see things as either half empty or half full. No amount of squabbling will change that opinion. Even the half empty types will eventually embrace the new tech. They just have to see it to believe it.

Just more negative drivel.

"The Guardian sought responses from the development community, and caught some of the same disillusionment. "I never would have backed them if I thought this was even a remote possibility," said programmer Chip Collier. "I'm literally sad because I feel like a promising future was really just a hopeless dream. VR has just been set back another 20 - 30 years."

The fear, of course, is this: while Oculus VR seemed genuinely interested in developing a VR platform that would be wonderful and open for developers and innovative for end-users, Facebook may well just be looking for a new way to lock communities into its proprietary social network environment, while feeding adverts directly into their brains. "

"What in hell was the point of Kickstarter if you sell out to a giant company like Facebook?" Michael Cooper wrote on the project's Kickstarter comment page. "This is very disappointing. I will no longer be supporting the Oculus Rift in anyway."

That was just one of many comments criticizing the deal, which will make the world's biggest social network the owner of the hottest virtual-reality headset around.

Other commenters weighed in with similar reactions ranging from mild disappointment to sheer outrage:

"Well, I'm kind of horrified. I'd never have backed this if I'd had an inkling this might happen. Very happy I didn't preorder the second devkit; I'm going to wait and see what competitors might pop up." — Svein Ove Aas

"All I can say with absolute certainty is I absolutely do not like, use, nor trust Facebook as a company. While my funds are yours fair and square, at this moment in time, I regret backing this. I sincerely hope I am wrong." — Brad'li

"Wow I am in shock...VR was soo close... Now I feel we are back in 1993 again. What a setback. I had so much hope for this project. You really need to give us a proper explanation for this move..." — Mathias Hagstrom

"Wow, I misjudged you... sorry to hear I was backing Facebook in the end... thanks for that." — Tim Pettigrew

"I too want my $10 back. I don't want my VR experience in the Facebook mall." — Avram Eisner

"Horrible... HORRIBLE decision. I want my donation back." — Mike Yoo

"I would have NEVER given a single cent of my money to Oculus if I had known you were going to sell out to Facebook. You sold all of us out. I hope this backfires horribly for Oculus and Facebook. I will personally discourage absolutely anyone I know from buying what was once an indie dream and is now a soulless corporate cash cow. God, I want a refund so badly." — John Wolf

All the VR forums are going nuts. The SKY is Falling. LMFAO

Glad you are finally laughing. Its just a toy. Its not that serious. Its funny.

ooooooh.....that Facebook is soooooo scaaaary

It gets worse:

Oculus Rift has become a well-known name among gamers, with many of us waiting to get our hands on the virtual reality headset. But when it finally does arrive, it may no longer carry that name.

The reason for that is a company called Oculu, which has recently filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Oculus Rift claiming “false designation of origin, trademark dilution and unfair competition.”

The OR hasn't been released yet, and they could change the name for the release product anyway. The Lawyers will deal with the problem. Worst case scenario they call it something else like "The Rift", "Crystal-Cove", "FBVR", or "WhoCaresVR" Its the quality of the product that will make the name famous, not the other way around. The name will have little effect on the quality and popularity of the product. FB will have tons of money to fight the lawsuit, or a media blitz with a new name for the product.

Never leave home again: Facebook gobbles Oculus VR for $2bn, reveals dystopian dream

Gaming goggle-maker to wire humans into Zuck's Matrix

By Jack Clark, 25 Mar 2014

Facebook has bought startup Oculus VR, which makes the much-hyped virtual-reality Rift headsets, for $2bn.

The acquisition comes as people spend more time with their pals in digital worlds rather than the physical realm, and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wants to tap into that shift.


The acquisition of Oculus VR Inc was announced on Tuesday – and will see the West's largest social network acquire a technologically sophisticated upstart dedicated to persuading people to escape their real lives.

"Virtual reality technology is a strong candidate to emerge as the next social and communications platform," Facebook wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. "Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas."

Oculus VR will be bought for about $2bn – $1.6bn in 23.1m shares of Facebook common stock and the possibility of $300m extra "on the achievement of certain milestones."

"Oculus's mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences," gushed Zuckerberg this afternoon, US West Coast time.

"Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won't be changing and we hope to accelerate."

Then, revealing perhaps he has watched The Matrix a few too many times, Zuck continued: "But this is just the start. After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face - just by putting on goggles in your home."

Over at Oculus, co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe added: "We are excited to work with Mark and the Facebook team to deliver the very best virtual reality platform in the world.

"We believe virtual reality will be heavily defined by social experiences that connect people in magical, new ways. It is a transformative and disruptive technology, that enables the world to experience the impossible, and it’s only just the beginning."

Doom creator John Carmack recently left ID Software to take up the chief technology officer role at Oculus VR to help the company fix some of its tech issues, such as the vomit-inducing visual "smearing" that can occur when you move your head too fast. The graphics-programming genius is now, technically, a Facebook employee.

The upstart's VR goggles have also received support from gaming behemoth Valve Software, which is testing support for Oculus Rift in its Steam gaming platform via a service named SteamVR.

Today's acquisition follows Facebook's eye-watering $19bn buy of chat app WhatsApp – another pricey purchase that saw the social network decisively dish out dosh to give it access to a technology that threatened its core business of owning all data pertaining to your online social life. In the short term, WhatsApp's international cheap messaging tech posed a threat to FB as people become ever-more connected across borders.

In the long-term, perhaps Facebook worries that it could be eclipsed by a social network forged in virtual reality, much like the digital worlds predicted by the cyberpunk sci-fi authors Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.

The transaction should close by the second quarter of 2014. Oculus will keep its HQ in Irvine, CA, and will carry on developing the Oculus Rift goggles, which recently saw their second major release: the Dev Kit 2. ®

Facebook taints everything it touches. This is not a positive move forward for me as an anti Facebook individual and gamer. But it might give Oculus a bit more weight in the world, get it more exposure outside of the geek world of gamers and improve sales and future features.

You will have to login to Facebook to use it. There will be advertising. Its the Facebook way for everything they own. Everyone knows this. That is why there is such huge negative reaction. The OR team are now working for Zuckerberg. PERIOD! The new name should be FaceBlock LOL

Facebook mention how mobile is the new and main platform whilst talking about the Rift..

"Wall Street doesn’t like what it sees. Facebook’s stock price (NASDAQ:FB) is dropping in after-hours trading after the company announced its purchase of virtual reality startup Oculus Rift. The stock, which closed up on the day, is now under its open price of $64.25, resulting in a loss of $1.5 – $1.8 billion market cap."

Oculus Founder on Facebook Buyout: ‘It lets us greatly lower the price of the Rift’

http://www.roadtovr.com/

"Palmer Luckey has been open and communicative with the VR community since founding Oculus VR Inc. Tonight he spent time responding to questions and concerns regarding Facebook’s acquisition of the company. Among other bits of info, Luckey confirmed that the deal could significantly lower the price of the Oculus Rift.

Responding in Reddit’s Oculus section to the question, “How is this what’s best for VR technology?”, Luckey said that, “This deal specifically lets us greatly lower the price of the Rift.”

Oculus has stated previously that their target price for a consumer virtual reality headset would around $300. With the Oculus Rift DK2 going on sale last week for $350, it can be assumed that Luckey’s comment applies to the forthcoming consumer version of the Oculus Rift. If the company could bring the cost down to $100 per headset, it would surely go a long way toward widespread adoption of VR.

Luckey has been battling negative reactions to the news that the company would be purchased by Facebook for $2 billion in cash and stocks. His comments, which have been generally well supported by the community, have received largely negative reactions following the news.

Among his responses to criticism has been some hinting at exciting forthcoming announcements:
“

We have not gotten into all the details yet, but a lot of the news is coming. The key points:

1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon.

2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects.

3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon.

Luckey is insistent that the deal was the right move for the long term future of VR and that Oculus now has more freedom than over to deliver on their vision:
“

I am sorry that you are disappointed. To be honest, if I were you, I would probably have a similar initial impression! There are a lot of reasons why this is a good thing, many of which are not yet public. A lot of people obviously feel the same way you do, so I definitely want to address your points:

The appeal of Oculus (as compared to Sony, for example) is because it is on a PC platform, and thus allows us, the developers, freedom over what we want to do with it.

None of that will change. Oculus continues to operate independently! We are going to remain as indie/developer/enthusiast friendly as we have always been, if not more so. This deal lets us dedicate a lot of resources to developer relations, technical help, engine optimizations, and our content investment/publishing/sales platform. We are not going to track you, flash ads at you, or do anything invasive.

The Rift is absolutely targeted towards the gaming population, which tends to be teenage to early 20s/30s, which is the exact population that Facebook is currently losing. By partnering with Facebook, you are gaining access to a massive userbase of people that the rift is not targeted towards, which people might feel is a very bad move.

Almost everyone at Oculus is a gamer, and virtual reality will certainly be led by the games industry, largely because it is the only industry that already has the talent and tools required to build awesome interactive 3D environments. In the long run, though, there are going to be a lot of other industries that use VR in huge ways, ways that are not exclusive to gamers; the current focus on gaming is a reflection of the current state of VR, not the long term potential. Education, communication, training, rehabilitation, gaming and film are all going to be major drivers for VR, and they will reach a very wide audience. We are not targeting social media users, we are targeting everyone who has a reason to use VR.

What we fear is not that Oculus will be partnering with Facebook, but that you are selling out the company to Facebook and no longer retain control over Oculus. I can say that I, personally, support Oculus because I believed in the goals and visions that you had.

This acquisition/partnership gives us more control of our destiny, not less! We don’t have to compromise on anything, and can afford to make decisions that are right for the future of virtual reality, not our current revenue. Keep in mind that we already have great partners who invested heavily in Oculus and got us to where we are, so we have not had full control of our destiny for some time. Facebook believes in our long term vision, and they want us to continue executing on our own roadmap, not control what we do. I would never have done this deal if it meant changing our direction, and Facebook has a good track record of letting companies work independently post-acquisition.

There is a lot of related good news on the way. I am swamped right now, but I do plan on addressing everyone’s concerns. I think everyone will see why this is so incredible when the big picture is clear.

Facebook Stock Slides In After-Hours Trading Following Acquisition Of Oculus Rift
Posted 18 hours ago by Matt Burns


Wall Street doesn’t like what it sees. Facebook’s stock price (NASDAQ:FB) is dropping in after-hours trading after the company announced its purchase of virtual reality startup Oculus Rift. The stock, which closed up on the day, is now under its open price of $64.25, resulting in a loss of $1.5 – $1.8 billion market cap.

The stock price slid considerably more following Facebook’s announcement that it was buying WhatsApp.

About an hour-and-a-half after the stock market close today, Facebook took to the wire to announce plans to purchase Oculus Rift for $2 billion in cash and stock. Citing a goal to make the world more open and connected, Facebook notes that it is now in a position to start focusing on next-generation platforms. Oculus Rift is at the forefront of virtual reality, which could become the next generation.

Facebook was slow to adopt mobile technology. It doesn’t want to miss out on VR if it becomes a big thing.

Microsoft Should Have Acquired Oculus Rift, Not Facebook

I’m worried about the Facebook acquisition of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

Sure, getting in on the rising tide of VR technology may have long-term benefits for Facebook.


But I’m more concerned with what this means for video games—not just the type of video games we can expect on the Oculus now that a large social media company owns the technology, but also whether games will even be a priority on the device when all is said and done.

Facebook, after all, is not a video game company. Just read the press release put out by Oculus VR today:

At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform. But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step.

Most important, Facebook understands the potential for VR. Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate. Facebook is a company that believes that anything is possible with the right group of people, and we couldn’t agree more.

OculusRift1

On reddit, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey expands on this enthusiasm:

In the end, I kept coming back to a question we always ask ourselves every day at Oculus: what’s best for the future of virtual reality? Partnering with Mark and the Facebook team is a unique and powerful opportunity. The partnership accelerates our vision, allows us to execute on some of our most creative ideas and take risks that were otherwise impossible. Most importantly, it means a better Oculus Rift with fewer compromises even faster than we anticipated.


And Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg gives his own take:

After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.

This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.

Connecting the world, open communication, sharing “unbounded spaces” with people in your life: These are all very noble buzzwords, but what do they really mean? Is this the future of status updates?

And how closely linked to the Facebook social media platform will the Oculus Rift become?

To be fair, Zuckerberg goes out of his way to reassure gamers that the Oculus Rift will, at least in the beginning, remain devoted to video games:

Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate. The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there’s a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We’re going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this.

I never suspected that the Oculus Rift would remain solely in the realm of video games. Virtual reality has too many obvious (and less obvious) applications to be wed forever to games, even if games are at the heart of this particular innovation.

Sure, the partnership “opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content” but it also places the Oculus Rift squarely in the hands of Facebook, and there’s something disconcerting about a device like this landing in the hands of a company with almost no experience in gaming hardware or software—not to mention Facebook’s shaky relationship with user privacy, something that could have implications down the road for online VR applications.


A more sensible partnership—if not ideal—would have been with Microsoft MSFT -1.46%.

Admittedly, that firm has its own privacy issues, but at least Microsoft has an established hardware business and is a major player in both video games, with its Xbox brand, and PC gaming. Say what you will about Microsoft, they have a firm grasp on video games and merging video game technology with other uses.

Microsoft has expressed interest in getting into the virtual reality space, a technology that seems like a perfect fit for its motion/voice Kinect sensor. For $2 billion (or so) the tech giant could have acquired an established technology, edging them much closer to Sony's own Project Morpheus.

This is to say nothing of how this impacts Kickstarter backers. No doubt all the reward promises are more than secure, but that promise of a grassroots, innovative gaming product has been subsumed by the promise of a “connected world.” (Certainly one backer, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson, is unhappy with the deal.)

A big acquisition like this will certainly help the Rift become a reality, but will it be the video game device we expected or something else entirely?

Naturally, one can hardly blame the Oculus team for making this deal. $2 billion is a lot of money, especially for a technology that is currently promising but not market tested. We have a lot of hype, some very impressive tech demos, and no guarantee that virtual reality will actually be the hit so many think it will be.

I imagine what they want to use it for is 3D communication on their social media website..

There are never solid guarantees with anything, but the sky isn't falling. The only effect I can see with the OR in combat flight sims after the partnership with FB, is a better consumer version, sooner, still under the three hundred dollar price point. DCS, BOS, WT, etc combat flight sim users will probably see a FB splash screen, but thats it. The OR development team and other Indies will still make and publish sims for the OR with little interference from Facebook. FB will be selling their own content for the OR.

If your using the OR for FB content/games/social media you will probably have to sign in. Most of us could care less about that content, and never see it.

Oculus was the future of gaming. Now it’s the future of Facebook.
Dean Putney at 7:02 pm Tue, Mar 25, 2014

Facebook is buying VR headset company Oculus for $2 billion. The paycheck gets the founders a massive payday, but leaves a bitter taste for its Kickstarter backers, not least the indie game developers who thought they could be a bigger part of that future.

For decades, the idea of living inside a virtual reality has captivated developers' imaginations. People inspired by the dream have literally devoted their lives to making virtual reality a reality. It's a simple pursuit with a glorious promise: escape from this world, and into another designed just for you. But there's always been a dark cloud over that endeavor: The possibility that these virtual worlds might become tainted or be misused. It's a major concern, a warning regularly beaten into the minds of those who believed.

At long last, a hero emerged. Oculus made it possible to dip your head into the simplest of these worlds, to really feel like you had escaped our shared reality into another. The poetry written about its promise flowed deep and strong. Rabid fans clamored to throw their support and money at the project. They crowded around booths at trade shows to catch a glimpse, and built complicated software programs for the new platform-- sometimes without even being able to try it out themselves. Suddenly, users were booting up and creating any virtual world they wanted, and that power made them think they might be able to influence the real world a bit. Hopes were high! Oculus seemed untouchable; the white knight of VR.

Well, #%&*$# it. Facebook just bought the thing.

The problem with the acquisition isn't that it's surprising Facebook would want to buy a computer strapped to your face.

The problem isn't that the Oculus guys got rich--most fans were hoping to make them rich anyway.

The problem isn't that Facebook is going ruin Oculus, by plastering it with ads and making it a pain in the ass like everything else they've shat all over. Although that wouldn't be a surprise.

The problem is that this was an opportunity for something different. And it just died.

I am shocked and hurt that when people stood up as fast and hard as they could, screaming for something, throwing their money in the air and hoping that this mattered enough that they could ignore the jaded past where everyone else sold out by now, all it did was raise their acquisition payout to exactly the guys we were hoping to avoid.

The problem with this deal is that Oculus' crowdfunded background and public support made it feel like the next big thing in tech could maybe, possibly be a movement powered by enthusiasts and hobbyists instead of venture capitalists and giant corporations. It would have been DEEPLY satisfying for a beloved Kickstarter to IPO and the best chance we've seen at that just vanished.

Personally, I wasn't even heavily into Oculus, like some of my peers. I managed to borrow a friend's Oculus for a week. My experience was limited, but holy #%&*$#, it was awesome, and it made me feel like everyone should see this. I can't imagine the kick in the teeth today's news must be for the people who bought development units, spent weeks programming, and genuinely thought they could be a driving influence in making new worlds.

Case in point: Notch, the developer of Minecraft, who donated $10k to the Kickstarter, was planning on building an Oculus version of his game. Notch just cancelled the deal.

Oculus held out the opportunity to fully experience a new world in a virtual sense. They never promised to change the business world, but it seemed that their independence and radical approach might give us that chance too.

Now we're back where we started, no matter how desperately we try not to wake up.

The OR hardware will be just like Intel hardware. Intel doesn't say you have to use an MS Operating System, or any other software. If you buy FB software like media networking, for use with the OR, you might have to jump thru hoops. If you buy Indie Software like, BOS, DCS, Eve Valkyrie, etc etc, then you'll probably get no more than an FB flash screen like the UBI or IC flash screen.

http://www.roadtovr.com/12-oculus-dk2-rift-dev-kit-2-reactions-gdc-2014-video/

Includes 12 reactions to the DK2 prototype at GDC, mainly with the space game Eve Valkyrie on Youtube.

Facebook's $2 Billion Purchase Of Oculus Is Just Crazy
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Okay, I’ll come right out and say it: Mark Zuckerberg is nuts.

Even with all the froth in the M&A and IPO markets, this one overflows with suds. Facebook, Inc. is paying $2 billion for Oculus VR, a company with no revenue, no product on the market, and unproven technology. At least, WhatsApp has real users. All Oculus has managed to do is put out a prototype virtual-reality headset. The company’s a 21-year-old founder, aptly named Palmer Luckey, first showed the headset in the summer of 2012.


Before Zuck gave the green light for this one, his diligence appears to have consisted of a few days of mulling it over. After all, there were hardly any operations to check out.

Upon trying out the headset, he thought he was seeing the future and decided to buy the company. Antonio Rodriguez, an early Oculus funder from Matrix Partners, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying “At a gut level, within 30 seconds, you know you’re looking at the future.” He decided to invest immediately. So, that was 30 seconds of diligence for one funding source.

I first saw the Oculus VR goggles at an Advanced Micro Devices AMD 0% (AMD) developer summit in November 2013, where I tried them on and played around with the demo software. I found the experience rather disorienting and had to remove the goggles fairly quickly to get rid of the nausea they caused.

They were again featured, along with the Virtuix’s Omni virtual-reality interface, at Dell World in Austin in December 2013. The Omni consists of a curved surface on which the user “walks” and a surrounding barrier that keeps him or her from having a bad encounter with actual reality.

Check out this video of the Hydra Cover Shooter by Teddy Lipowitz to get an idea of what the experience is like. Note how wacko he looks stalking around in his lab with all these wires trailing off of him.

While it’s clear that heavy-duty gamers like this technology, it’s not obvious that norms are going to want to hop around and make fools of themselves all geared up in front of their peers this way. But let’s just say that ultimately Facebook manages to sell a million headsets at $300 each (somewhat below the price of the developer kits now available). That’s $300 million in revenues or about 20% of Oculus’s purchase price. And that’s years from now, since product isn’t expected on the market until late 2014 or 2015.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about how Facebook has no experience in hardware manufacture, distribution, and service. This is a company that you can’t reach by telephone.


Zuck has promised to integrate the technology into other areas of experience, things like virtual tours of historic or scenic places. But, in order for this expansion to happen, ordinary people are going to have to decide to don the goggles. And I ain’t convinced.

My conclusion on the Oculus deal: I guess we have to expect arbitrariness from Masters of the Universe.

Facebook’s purchase of Oculus is like Zeus killing a few random people with a lightning bolt; it’s just something to do on a Tuesday afternoon.

Why Is Facebook Acquiring The Maker Of A Virtual Reality Headset You Can't Even Buy Yet?
1 comments, 1 called-out
The news that Facebook will spend about $2 billion to buy Oculus VR, the maker of a prototype virtual-reality headset, no doubt will cause most people, from the social network’s users to its investors, to scratch their heads and wonder if CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone off the deep end.

After all: $2 billion in cash and stock, plus a possible $300 million earn-out for a company that hasn’t even produced a commercial product, can’t promise when it will, and faces daunting competition from the likes of Sony ? It almost seems quaintly inexpensive compared with Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, but still, what can a social network do with immersive virtual-reality goggles?


I’ve got a couple of ideas, but first, let’s hear from Zuckerberg himself in a blog post (and you can hear more from him on this afternoon’s webcast):

I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology.

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we’re in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.

This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you’re actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives.

Oculus’s mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences.

Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate. The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there’s a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We’re going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this.

But this is just the start. After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.

This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.

These are just some of the potential uses. By working with developers and partners across the industry, together we can build many more. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.

Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together. I can’t wait to start working with the whole team at Oculus to bring this future to the world, and to unlock new worlds for all of us.

There’s no reason to doubt Zuckerberg’s sincerity. Virtual reality, despite its long gestation and many setbacks, could indeed become a new communications platform. No doubt he feels Facebook can’t afford to risk getting stuck in the fairly flat text-photo-and-video communications platform it is still in the process of creating.


Anna Bashmakova and Oculus Rift
Anna Bashmakova and Oculus Rift (Photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin)

But since Facebook has shown it can build a huge business atop its own communications platform, I don’t think it’s too early to speculate that he, or at least his executives, surely have another reason for scooping up Oculus: There could be a huge advertising business in there as well. Marketers constantly tout the relatively immersive experience television offers for their continuing to put most of their dollars into TV instead of online. But you can’t get much more immersive, short of Star Trek‘s holodecks, than today’s and especially tomorrow’s virtual reality headsets.

VR advertising, properly done, could really do a number on television as an ad medium–especially if it can be done in a more social way. Indeed, Zuckerberg said on the conference call, “There might be advertising in the world, but we have to figure it out down the line.” He also mentioned possible e-commerce applications.

But remember, it’s “down the line,” meaning years away. “There is no near-term financial model that will drive the $2bn valuation,” Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter wrote in a note to clients, nor any way to tell if this will be seen as “the deal of the century” or a lost bet. For his part, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser told clients that all the applications mentioned by Zuckerberg “fall a fair degree away from social media and even further away from ad sales, at least so far as we can envision the medium today.” While he’s sanguine about the acquisition, he adds, “If we have concerns, it is that $2bn seems like a significant amount of money for a problem that has yet to emerge.”

Other executives whose companies brush up against virtual reality not surprisingly said the deal would help their business. “This is great news for the AR and VR space,” Ambarish Mitra, CEO and cofounder of augmented-reality firm Blippar, told me in an email. However, he thinks Oculus sold too early “when the real renaissance period of augmented and virtual reality is about to commence. The AR and VR platforms will be even bigger than the Internet itself inside next decade and selling the company now is like selling the keys to the Internet without exploring its true potential.”

But I also think there’s another, at once more cosmic and more prosaic reason for Zuckerberg’s interest that goes beyond an immediate business model. Bolstered by IPO money and a booming business and his own outsized ambitions and vision of what’s coming next in technology, Zuckerberg can afford to borrow a page, as it were, from Google GOOG -2.31% CEO Larry Page. He can plow money into promising new technologies that today have only a glancing relation to its current business–such as, say, Google Glass, which Oculus Rift has a small potential to compete with. Like Page, Zuckerberg seems determined to beat the Innovator’s Dilemma. That’s the notion that companies eventually lose relevance and stop growing because they quite logically choose to serve their existing customers well, in the process ignoring new technologies that don’t serve that immediate task. It’s telling that one Oculus investor compares this acquisition to Google’s purchase of the mobile operating system Android in 2005.

There’s no guarantee Oculus, or WhatsApp for that matter, will help Zuckerberg avoid the Innovator’s Dilemma. Already, some folks are unhappy about Facebook acquiring Oculus. More immediately, he still needs to stave off a slow decline in its appeal at least to younger people. But it’s pretty clear that the young CEO’s ambitions are even more sweeping than we thought. And he won’t stop at much of anything–not its own wary investors, not early Oculus fans on Kickstarter now angry their baby sold out–to make sure he fulfills them.

Everyone knows what is coming (except a few in denial). No way will it be just like an INTEL product.

[–]monkeybuttscratcher 17 points 4 hours ago*
I don't think It's about facebook buying Oculas Rift per se'. I think it's about where gaming is in general now.
I heard someone comment on mobile gaming recently and they said "We no longer have a mobile gaming community but a mobile scamming community." The click and wait style games like Clash of clans or Farmville etc etc where you are forced to buy extra coins or gems or whatever to advance are ruining gaming in general and are being pushed by social media companies like Facebook and google+.
Now it's starting to bleed onto other platforms such as consoles. Now you get games that are shortened only to offer more levels and weapons etc as DLC. What used to cost $59.99 for a full game now ends up costing over $100 to get the same amount of content. And it all circles back around to "social media!"
It just seems like gaming in general is being destroyed by the likes of Facebook and now that they have the Oculas Rift people can only imagine how they will destroy it as well.
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[–]iytrix 3 points 3 hours ago
This is exactly why I don't play games on my phone. Nothing against it, but it's so hard to find good games.
If anyone has more simple games to recommend that would be great.
I've found some good 3d ones made to be impressive, like deus ex, but I don't like the battery drain or how you need to get insanely focused. Oh and the room is good. But the top 100 list for paid or not, new or not, it's pretty much these scam games, that even if purely free, don't seem too fun or unique to me.
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[–]monkeybuttscratcher 4 points 3 hours ago
I play some of these games but the enjoyment is short lived once you get to where you can no longer advance without buying gems or coins, then I get bored and delete them.
But it makes me resent these types of games. I'm starting to see this crap on the consoles now. it will reach a breaking point soon I imagine. People will just stop buying consoles and stop downloading these games as they are just simply getting too expensive. I've noticed I have started losing interest in gaming in general because of it. maybe I'm wrong though and upon reflection I guess I am. If people weren't spending money on all these stupid in game purchases these companies wouldn't continue shoving it down our throats.
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[–]Voyager316 2 points 3 hours ago
OK, I've got a couple minute bus ride each day to uni and those quick games like bejeweled and stuff are fantastic. I -don't- want a game that will take long or be complex. I just need a time killer. That "short lived" literally takes a month or two to get to at 20 minutes a day.
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[–]dag 9 points 4 hours ago
Damn it - they should just admit it.
Mark: "OK, Ok, you got us - we really just paid 2 billion dollars to ruin VR and make a lot of geeks unhappy - that's just how we roll."
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[–]larsie001 3 points 5 hours ago
Nothing wrong with integration with Facebook for such an awesome technology, but I don´t want something like `You need to login to your Facebook-account to use this Rift so we can share every little detail of your gaming habits and life'.
I don't think they're going to ruin it, but so-called 'integration' can get too overwhelming. It would be nice to see something without Facebook for a change.
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[–]DJSundog[S] 1 point 5 hours ago
I don't see any advantage to Facebook to try and integrate the two very different properties.
And from what I've see, Zuckerberg is smarter than I am.
I'm not a big Instagram user, and I've never touched WhatsApp. Have they gone awry since being acquired by Facebook?
Now, I could see a VR world via subscription/ad-supported models that would let you display your Instagram photos in a 3D art gallery, or an in-world communications device that uses WhatsApp as a back end. Maybe Facebook is working on what keeps them relevant as a corporate entity 10 years from now.
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[–]azrael6947 5 points 4 hours ago
The only thing I could see going wrong is if they lock down the system. Forcing games to use a specific software or pay a price to use the system's API in order to develop for it.
If Oculus delivers their product, unhindered by proprietary software, then everything will be fine. But once Facebook begins to force Oculus to make changes to the hardware to suit them and their business plans. That is when the future of VR will be in doubt.
Even if we don't like it, this deal guarantees Oculus will be successful, it might not be the enthusiasts that use it in the future, but the Facebook herd will want to give it a go.
Unfortunate that Facebook did buy the company, most people who are not so tuned in will think the product is the Oculus Rift made by Facebook.
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[–]DJSundog[S] 2 points 4 hours ago
If they cripple the device, either spec-wise or API-wise, they'd just be limiting the potential size of their market.
Remember, this is a company that glorifies 'hacking' to almost religious proportions. They regularly open-source both software and hardware projects. And they like to believe they're thinking big, like bringing the Internet to the third world.
What better way to think big than by building worlds?
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[–]josephmcasey 4 points 5 hours ago
You are underestimating the value of consumer information in advertisement. Data is king.
That said, I doubt Facebook would spend $2B without intentions of making it an investment more than $4B
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[–]DJSundog[S] 1 point 4 hours ago
Oh, I agree that data acquisition, sorting, and analysis is the name of a lot of different games, including the one that is Facebook's current line of business. But they also understand that you inherently get the most data by owning the platform as completely as possible.
Right now, they make their money by telling advertisers what people like and allowing them to buy ad real estate to target us based on those likes (and our connections, etc).
How much more is it worth for them to be able to use VR real estate instead?
And yes, at least as much toward further developments would be in line with my expectations as well - why buy a sports car and use cheap gas?

Isn't this the part of the social network movie where the kickstarter backers sue Facebook lol! Then we find out the occulous rift guy claims zucker lied to him and made him sign his work over to him through a scam and then Justin Timberlake shows up snorting coke and power hungry lol. Coming soon to a theater near you the social network 2 we #%&*$# backed the zucker!

they need to stop lying

If you listen to their shareholders meeting.

it clearly states their agenda for the Oculus Rift & mentions that they will be adding digital goods to the Headset & integrate Facebook/Social Media into it, straight from the mouth of Mark Zuckerberg


Companies always say they have "no plans" to do something they know people are mad about. It doesn't stop them from doing it later though.

"Oculus Rift creator Luckey says he's hearing more positive feedback than negative" From seeing everyones reactions on multiple websites, even the kickstarters themselves, I'm wondering who the hell hes listening to...

Shareholders conference call informative:

OR started with focusing on gaming....now focus on teaming with Facebook.
With no consumer product even promised yet.....the form of that product will now conform to Facebook's needs.

Started in gaming......now realize the potential of social aspect.
Consumer product is about to morph.

OR/Facebook buisiness model.....repurposing phone parts to build the Rift cheaply.....no profit in the hardware.....profit is in the networking and advertising.......

No way will this be without advertising and login to Facebook.

The OR hardware can't be confused with the software being developed for it.
For the OR to succeed, they have to develop the best hardware possible for all uses in all possible markets.
If the OR only concentrated on developing hardware for lightweight FB content it will fail. FB knows that. OR knows that.

OR now knows they are relegated to using repurposed phone parts, by the new owners own words, to make their hardware, Facebook admits in their shareholder meeting that there is no profit in hardware sales. The only thing the new owners care about is networking and advertising revenue.

Of course a Facebook investors meeting that had primarily invested in social networking would concentrate on how the OR could advance social networking. That doesn't mean that gaming will be left high and dry, using old leftover smartphone displays.


Mark Zuckerberg

Founder and CEO at Facebook
http://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-buys-oculus-vr-inc-2-billion/

"Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won't be changing and we hope to accelerate. The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there's a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We're going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this."


Palmer Luckey
Oculus Founder

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-facebook-buyout-reduce-price-oculus-rift/

"1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon.

2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects.

3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon."

It means the future of OR is using repurposed phone parts for saving money. Mark said that at the stockholders meeting. He also said they are focused on using the OR for primarily advertising and networking revenues because there is no money in the hardware. Palmner Luckey doesn't own Oculus VR anymore. He can say what he likes, Mark Zuckerberger will do as he pleases. What you are quoting is for public consumption (marketing hype). What they say to the stockholders is closer to the truth. Besides, wouldn't be the first time Zuckerberg said one thing in public and did another thing for shareholders.

To Mark Zuckerberger, gaming is mobile app gaming.

No its about supplying a very good product, cheap, so that everyone can afford it, and making money on all the software. Think printers and ink. Luckey Palmer said a year ago that they would like to sell their product very cheap by combining the sale with software. Three hundred dollars was the best they could hope for before, now they can afford to take a bigger initial hit. It makes absolutely no sense to sell an inferior product, and lose the market, to their competitors.

No one said anything about inferior product. You are making stuff up again.

Repurposed means not custom made parts, which was OR original promise. That has now changed. More changes to come. Most people don't trust Zuckerberger for many reasons, they trusted Luckey. Luckey is not the boss anymore. He is an employee of Oculus VR and a shareholder of Facebook. Not as good as it was before.

You got it wrong again. The OR had to use displays built for smartphones, now with FB's partnership, more resources, and clout they can have the display built to the specs they require.

Sorry dude, I did not get it wrong. You are not arguing with me, you are arguing with Zuckerberg. They are using repurposed telephone parts is what he said to keep the cost down. No custom parts. Its what he said. You just don't like what Zuckerberg said. Thats fine.

I am not going to argue about what he said, if you don't want to believe it, go right ahead believe your fantasy. I do agree that custom was what OR was intending before the sale to FB, but Zuckerberg has other ideas as he stated to the stockholders.


Oh and its not a partnership. Facebook owns Oculus VR outright, the entire company, not just the Rift.

I've not read anything from Zuckerburg, or seen a link from you quoting Zuckerburg saying that the OR will not use custom hardware. Zuckerburg has only said the Oculus development will carry on with their vision unchanged.

Here's a quote from Luckey Palmer still the head of Oculus VR after the FB announcement that suggest the OR will have custom hardware. He hasn't retracted that statement nor has Zuckerburg countered it.

"We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon."

So you haven't listened to the shareholders conference call meeting. That is why you are repeating old statements that are no longer valid.

In the call, Zuckerberg clearly states their agenda for the Oculus Rift and mentions that they will be adding digital goods to the Headset and integrate Facebook/Social Media into it, straight from the mouth of Mark Zuckerberg. He also assures shareholders that they will be using repurposed parts from phones to save money, since there is no profit in the hardware sales.

Here's a link to Facebook shareholders conference call.

http://www.shareholder.com/visitors/event/build3/stage/stage.cfm?mediaid=63723&mediauserid=0

They talked about how the best and brightest minds on the Oculus Team are leading in the VR race, and have accomplished it rather cheaply by re-purposing smartphone parts. They said nothing about not making custom parts, which Oculus has already done, or not having display manufactures make custom displays for the consumer version OR.

Something they can now afford to do with FB's help according to a Palmer Luckey report. Linked in an earlier post.

The VR dream will continue with the Oculus Team. FB will just make the job much easier to accomplish.

Listen too the conference call, and draw your own conclusions. It sounded very positive to me, with nothing, worth scare mongering over.

In the call, Zuckerberg clearly states their agenda for the Oculus Rift and mentions that they will be adding digital goods to the Headset and integrate Facebook/Social Media into it, straight from the mouth of Mark Zuckerberg. He also assures shareholders that they will be using repurposed parts from phones to save money, since there is no profit in the hardware sales.


"We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon." Your own quote from Luckey disputes your statement that they have already used custom parts.

Not sure how it is positive that there is a disconnect between the press releases Luckey is sending out and what Zuckerberg is saying to shareholders. That is not an opinion that we share. This disconnect will need to be bridged and we know it will not be Luckey that will be correcting Zuckerberg. Anyway, you are not going to accept any facts that are negative toward OR, so its a waste participating in this discussion. Enjoy your denial.

What does the Oculus Rift backlash tell us? Facebook just isn't cool
Facebook's buyout of the virtual reality company has been greeted with derision, and not just among the Kickstarter backers
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Steven Poole
Steven Poole
theguardian.com, Thursday 27 March 2014 16.46 GMT
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US-IT-CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW-CES
Attendees at the International CES wear Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
The news that Facebook has splurged $2bn (£1.2bn) on buying Oculus Rift, the world's first really viable virtual reality headset, has set off waves of plaintive snark in the world of videogames. Virtual reality headsets were supposed to be about totally immersive space battles or sword fighting simulations, not about peer-through simulacra of distant relatives' new kitchen windows. I mean, it's bad enough when Facebook friends have children and instantly change their profile picture to a baby photo, as though having regressed to mewling and puking infancy themselves. Imagine seeing that appalling phenomenon in the future Faceworld.

Facebook will probably not have reassured many observers with the despair-inducing management jargon of its announcement, wherein we learn excitedly that "Facebook plans to extend Oculus' existing advantage in gaming to new verticals including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas." Pretty sure one of those other "verticals" is going to be advertising that is literally in your face.

Videogame players the world over who were so excited about the headset's promise of "surround sense" ultraviolence are now declaring as one: "Oculus Rift is dead to me." Markus Persson, creator of world-beating world-builder Minecraft, has announced that he is cancelling the version of that game he had planned to make for the headset. "Facebook creeps me out," he declared, via the medium of Twitter, the other giant social media corporation that funds itself with adverts. With commendable alacrity, meanwhile, the developers at art-game co-operative KOOPmode have already released a downloadable satire on how Facebook might work in 3D, graced with the irresistible tagline: "Scroll Facebook … with your face".

The problem is that Facebook is just not cool. And it seems to have a reverse Midas touch – or, according to the version of the myth related by Aristotle, a standard Midas touch (everything the king touched turned to gold, including his food, so he starved to death, apparently lacking the wit to engage a serving wench to spoonfeed him). When Facebook paid a knee-trembling $19bn last month for the messaging service WhatsApp – worth it, according to one plausible theory, because it lets Facebook peer into your phone contacts – a chorus of WhatsApp users immediately announced they were switching to rival products.

So why is Facebook on this buying spree? The media theorist Nathan Jurgenson reads it as "conspicuous acquisition", after Thorstein Verblen's notion of conspicuous consumption. "A conspicuous acquisition," Jurgenson writes, "doesn't exist to make money but is rather a luxury prop to demonstrate a certain type of corporate status." Facebook wants to be seen to appreciate cool stuff, and thus to acquire a cool reputation. Google has Glass; Facebook now has Oculus. We'll see if that makes people think Facebook is cool. In the meantime the announcement looks like very good news for Sony, who have recently announced its own virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 called Project Morpheus. (Named, I hope, after Laurence Fishburne's character in The Matrix rather than the Greek god of sleep, unless Sony plans to market it as an anti-insomnia therapy.)

The other story here is what the acquisition might mean for Kickstarter, which is where Oculus Rift got its original funding and dedicated fanbase. Kickstarter is supposed to be about hip indie projects that The Man won't fund, so if they are eventually sold to The Man after all, that is going to leave a sour taste and perhaps even exert a chilling effect on future projects. With this deal, Kickstarter might have lost its anti-corporate innocence.

Meanwhile, there seems to be an obvious question of economic justice here. The original Kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift might not have been explicitly granted shares in the company, but the company wouldn't exist without their initial contribution. About 10,000 people gave Oculus $2.5m between them. I for one am struggling to think of a good reason why each of them shouldn't get a proportional share of that $2bn sale.

The promise of being able one day to crouch drooling in a corner with goggles glued to your face while you repeatedly jab your "Like" finger into the eerily yielding faces of 3D virtual babies, doesn't seem like such a good deal by comparison.

A perfectly balanced article with hte good and the bad. Not all good not all bad.

What Facebook's Oculus Rift buy means for PC gamers

Hayden Dingman
@haydencd Mar 27, 2014 3:00 AMprint
So you've heard that Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion, and right now maybe you're feeling angry, depressed, or like there's an enormous knife sticking out between your shoulder blades. "Et tu, Oculus?" you ask, disbelieving.

But wait! Before you try lounging in a computer chair with a knife in your back, let's run down what Facebook's acquisition of Oculus could really mean for you, enthusiastic PC gamer. And nope, it's not all bad

The good

In fact, because there's been a lot of negativity about the deal out there, let's start with what potentially could go right with this endeavor.

Facebook has money, and money means the Oculus of your dreams
If Oculus's $2 billion price tag didn't already alert you, Facebook has money. A lot of money. Money which it could ostensibly throw into virtual reality research.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has been out on Reddit evangelizing this aspect of the partnership, and with good reason. It takes cash to scale up hardware, and Oculus has been burning through venture capital dollars for months now. A solid backer with ridiculous money to throw at VR? That's just what Oculus needs.

Cheaper, more powerful consumer Rift
Speaking of which, Luckey claims Facebook's money will help produce a cheaper, more powerful Rift when released to consumers.

oculus rift dev kit 2 assembly
Underneath the hood of the second-generation Oculus Rift dev kit.

"We have the resources to create custom hardware now, not just rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry," wrote Luckey on Reddit. "This deal is going to immediately accelerate a lot of plans that were languishing on our wishlist, and the resulting hardware will be better AND cheaper."

If Oculus had stuck to its original Kickstarter funding money, any consumer-grade Rift would've been hobbled by market realities.

More partnerships with developers
I'll admit I was excited when Oculus secured EVE: Valkyrie as an exclusive launch title. It made the Rift feel like a viable platform with an actual release date in mind—like something that would come to market sooner rather than later. With the new deal, Oculus potentially has more money to throw at developers and convince them to make great titles.


An EVE: Valkyrie trailer

"We're going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games," wrote Zuckerberg in a statement post-acquisition. Virtual reality needs more games of the same quality and polish as EVE: Valkyrie. Incentivizing developers to create those experiences could be a huge boon for the Facebook-funded Rift.

No change in plans—theoretically
All we can do is take Facebook at its word here. Both Facebook and Oculus claim this agreement will not affect Oculus moving forward—that all the milestones, the development timeline, everything will stay the same, only with more funding.

"Oculus already has big plans [for gaming] that won't be changing and we hope to accelerate," wrote Zuckerberg. "Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this." It's essentially the same line Zuckerberg used after purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp.

The bad
badfacebook
But let's not kid ourselves: There's a huge backlash against this deal for a reason. Despite the fact that Facebook still reigns as the largest social network, it's more from lock-in and a lack of options at this point than any real fondness for Zuckerberg and Co. To be honest, it hurts the heart to see Facebook, the faceless corporation, buy out a company as passionate and community-friendly as Oculus.

The deal is only a day old, as far as the public is concerned, so anything listed in this section is just a possibility, not a certainty. With that said, here's the major negatives that could come crawling out of the acquisition.

Facebook's history of privacy issues, data-mining, and ad-ridden content
Here's a big one: Why don't people like Facebook? Maybe because Facebook doesn't respect them. Facebook's privacy settings are a mess, they've shown a reckless disregard toward even allowing you any semblance of privacy, and it's all headed up by a person who has repeatedly stuck his foot in his mouth when discussing these very same issues.

On top of that, there's the whole "If you're not buying the product, you are the product" philosophy—Facebook data-mines your info and sells it wholesale to advertisers. What kind of ad-integration (if any) will we see on the Rift? What kind of data will Facebook take away from our play-sessions?

facebook
It all sounds so tin-foil hat, and yet considering Facebook's history, it's not surprising people are worried.

Loss of community support
Within minutes of the announcement, the Oculus community went into full Internet-riot mode. The community, both consumers and developers, are deeply unhappy.

Markus "Notch" Persson already announced he's canceling a planned Oculus version of Minecraft because Facebook is "creepy," and a number of other developers spewed similar sentiments on Twitter. In these early days of virtual reality, Oculus has thrived in large part because of its developer support. So many people have been making demos for the Rift for free, just to experiment and help contribute to the start of a new medium. If developers abandon the Rift in droves for a competitor, that's a huge problem for Oculus.

Similarly, if Oculus can't win back the gaming community, it has just as big of an issue. There's a healthy portion of that community that just hates Facebook on principle.

oculus kickstarter
A smaller subset feels betrayed because they contributed to Oculus via Kickstarter and now don't like the way the company is headed. My fellow writer Brad Chacos thinks the Kickstarter campaign was actually a success: It allowed Oculus to turn an amazing, but untested product into a reality when nobody else was willing to take the chance. But the community feels it put dollars down and Oculus violated some unspoken "spirit of Kickstarter" with this acquisition.

And really it doesn't matter whether the community was betrayed—it's all about perceptions. Just look at how hard Microsoft has struggled to regain trust after last year's disastrous Xbox One reveal, and still the PlayStation 4 is outstripping Microsoft's console in sales every month. Oculus might release a stronger consumer Rift than originally planned, only to find the market has turned away out of spite.

Partnership with Valve?
Earlier this year, Valve and Oculus stood united to announce another, far better-received partnership: Valve, with its infinite, Steam-funded war chest, would handle VR research and then pass on the fruits of that labor free of charge to Oculus to include in the consumer Rift.

What happens to that deal now that Facebook has entered the picture? If Valve cuts off Oculus, what does Valve do next? Does it partner with yet another company? Make its own headset? This merger doesn't just affect Facebook and Oculus—it leaves some other major VR players twisting in the wind.

Patents stifling the competition
Speaking of other VR players, the piece of the Oculus buyout news with perhaps the most far-reaching consequences is that Facebook now owns the Oculus trove of patents.

morpheus developer
Sony's Project Morpheus prototype VR headset for the PlayStation 4, on display at GDC 2014.

Now, I want to stress again that we have no idea how any of this acquisition will play out, and Facebook isn't known for raising a ruckus in the courtroom. But what if Facebook does decide to be a corporation and go after the other VR competitors with legal threats? Up until now, the VR community has been remarkably collaborative: Competitors in name only, with many companies helping each other out and trying to develop cross-platform standards for the good of the medium as a whole.

Will the Facebook acquisition squash that spirit? Will the VR space start to look like the cell-phone space, with companies suing and cross-suing and suing themselves and all sorts of craziness? If so, that'd be a damn shame.

We just don't know what will happen
Now, we wait and see. Facebook could prove to be the most benevolent of dictators, or everything could go up in flames tomorrow. Or the world could end and we'll never even see a consumer-release Rift. Who knows?

But virtual reality is the future even if the Facebook-led Oculus falters, and it cannot be stopped just because the lead horse went down with a cramp. None of the VR competitors I saw at GDC this year match the Oculus Rift's quality, but that will change. The market wants VR, and companies are listening, investing, and building. Whether I'm wearing an Oculus Rift or Sony's Project Morpheus or a Nintendo Virtual Boy V2 or a Valve Superfly (name entirely invented by me) or whatever in two years—well, does it really matter? It's not like I can see the branding when it's over my eyes anyway.

“And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.”

His last point seems to be the shared opinion between original Oculus backers, with the word ‘betrayal’ making regular appearances online. The comments section on the Oculus Kickstarter page, which is usually a welcoming and friendly marketplace of VR ideas, has turned into the wedding guestbook from hell, with hundreds of backers treating it like the only toilet at a festival.

One backer said: “You selling out to Facebook is a disgrace. It damages not only your reputation, but the whole of crowdfunding. I cannot put into words how betrayed I feel by this.”

Another complained: “I feel cheated.”

Even casual observers on Reddit were quick to fire off a few sarcasm shots. One redditor paraphrased Zuckerberg’s thoughts by posting: “We’re becoming less relevant as time passes. Quick, buy something cool and new.”

Another summarised the tone of thread rather well by commenting: “Just goes to show that any act of good faith in business will be punished mercilessly.”

But, perhaps, the most obvious reason for the hate is the fact that the kind of people who back a project like the Oculus Rift, aren’t the type of people who frequent Facebook several times a day. If, say, Valve had bought Oculus VR, we may not have seen this level of backlash. But because Facebook is synonymous with bad social network games, unbridled narcissism, and adverts about becoming a mormon, gamers are terrified that this will happen to the Rift.

And maybe it will. Maybe, instead of watching people paper over the cracks of their relationship with endless status updates about how much they love each other, we’ll get to actually snuggle up on the sofa and watch Prison Break with them. Maybe instead of watching someone’s twenty year look-back, we’ll get to relive it in virtual reality and laugh with them about that time they got splashed by a passing car. Oh the good times.

On reflection, that does sound pretty grim. Nice one, Zuckerberg.

The internet thinks Facebook just killed the Oculus Rift
By Joel Hruska on March 26, 2014 at 7:08 am2 Comments
Zombie horde outside Facebook
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As announcements go, this one hit everybody way out of left field. From the halls of GTC to the echoing environs of Reddit, when Facebook excitedly announced that it had purchased Oculus VR — the manufacturers behind the much-desired Oculus Rift — the collective internet was dazzled with a brief moment of total WTF. A few hopefuls tentatively theorized that it might have been an early April Fool’s joke.

When it became clear that it wasn’t, the collective internet generally lost its mind. Reddit’s comments were… well, Redditish, but they weren’t alone. Notch promptly cancelled his plans to bring Minecraft to the Rift. The comments aimed at Palmer Luckey have been absolutely vitriolic. And among all the rage, some very genuine concerns and valuable perceptions have just been aired. (Read: Oculus Rift DK2 goes on sale for $350, features low-latency 1080p displays, more polished appearance.)

First, there’s this: If Mark Zuckerberg labored under the illusion that his company was trusted or seen, in any way, as having its finger on the future of gaming, those illusions should be shattered. Those of us who have been gaming since the 80286 was a hot ticket have generally watched the growth of Flash-based Facebook games with a mixture of skepticism and dismissal. Companies like Zynga may have gotten rich off Facebook engagement, but the kinds of games on Facebook are exactly what hardcore gamers and the Rift’s target audience don’t want.

Second, there’s the fact that many of us resent — deeply — having been turned into commoditized products. People may use Facebook, but that doesn’t automatically mean they like it. Zuckerberg has built a reputation for ignoring privacy, changing features on a whim, and relentlessly searching for more aspects of users’ lives that he can crunch into monetized kibble.

Oculus Rift DK2: Lower persistence displays
The Oculus Rift DK2 will sport low-persistence displays, which will reduce the nausea-inducing motion blur produced by fast-paced games
The Snowden leaks and blowback over the always-on Kinect 2.0 should have been a sign to Zuckerberg that his company’s intrusion into the living room via 3D headsets isn’t welcome. There is no way Facebook’s entry into this space would be taken as anything but a cynical attempt to grab more user data, because that’s the reputation Facebook has built for itself. Meanwhile, Zuck’s utterly tone-deaf monologue about buying Oculus Rift because it was the future of social networking couldn’t have sounded worse to people who bought into Rift because it was the future of gaming.

“Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever,” Zuckerberg said, “and change the way we work, play and communicate.”

Newsflash, Zucky. Nobody bought a Rift because they want to be part of your social network. Nobody. And so, when you decide to hype your purchase by talking about features that literally nobody wants or paid for, it’s not surprising that people get a little cranky about the whole thing. The solution to this is to reaffirm your fundamental commitment to the original mission the Oculus Rift set out to achieve, talk about your plans for getting that project off the ground, emphasize that no, you won’t be using the Rift to tie people to Facebook, push Facebook, integrate Facebook, or attempting, in any way, to make anyone use Facebook.

The broader context

HALbox Kinect
Consumers are generally pretty wary of having some kind of always-on, corporately-controlled gadget in the living room.
I think the explosion of fury over Oculus is actually more interesting than just some angry nerds because it reveals how deep the distrust goes between the corporations that monetize data and their customer bases. We live in an age when research has proven that most “anonymous” data isn’t anonymous at all. We’re tracked when we step outside, we’re tracked online. Microsoft’s Kinect plans for the original Xbox One raised serious privacy issues in the wake of the Snowden revelations precisely because it made people ask if Microsoft was even in control of its own technology. When the NSA is willing to hack private data links between Google and Yahoo servers, there’s no guarantee that Facebook’s data will stay private, no matter what the company says.

Pushing John Carmack to step up and make some comments about the state of the Oculus Rift would help, because Carmack is a voice that hardcore gamers trust, but I don’t think anyone is going to trust this technology in Zuckerberg’s hands, no matter what he says. Facebook is a company with the motto “Move fast and break things.” It has a history of dictating changes to its users and customers. It doesn’t have a stellar reputation for feedback or strong user engagement, unless “We pretend to listen, then do it anyway” actually counts as a feedback strategy.

It may not be the wrong company to launch a peripheral like the Rift, but it sure as hell looks like it. If the company continues to make grand promises of social engagement as opposed to focusing on the game-centric strategy that the Oculus’ existing sponsors actually want, the result could be the fastest plunge from hero to unwanted garbage in product history.

I'd like to think that FB buying OR is a good thing, but I can't shake this bad feeling that had I supported OR at kickstarter stage, which I didn't as I was late to get on the bandwaggon, I would be feeling incredibly cheated and betrayed.

The bottom line is that OR wouldn't have been in a position to be sold on if it wasn't for the people who backed their hard cash early on, so ethically I agree with Sentinel that all those people 'should' get their original money back plus a percentage bonus.

The product they/we bought into has changed and whatever Zuckerberg says now about FB infulence could and undoubtedly will change in the future and not for greater good in my opinion.

Still looking on the bright side, maybe we will get a better Rift unit, with a better custom built screen and quicker to boot, but I for one will be looking for ways of hacking FB out of the firmware and I'm sure I won't be alone.

As the last Lemming go over the cliff, the Sky not fallen, and cooler heads have prevailed. Oculus VR will continue to repurpose smartphone parts, modify parts, build custom parts, and source out other parts to build a very immersive VR unit. They didn't hire the brightest people possible just to put cell phone parts together.

Indies will continue to build sims for the OR. FB will develop software for social networking. Many other industries will see if they can incorporate the Rift. If you want to network you'll probably have to login to FB networking. If your using Indie sim software on the OR, you will probably have to deal with nothing more than a FB splash screen, or worst case, login as we do with Steam to run COD. Steam does advertise their products, which I seldom bother to look at, and its not a problem.

Tempest in a Teapot

Oculus VR

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/introducing-michael-abrash-oculus-chief-scientist/

"Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist

March 28, 2014 - 10:11 PDT by Oculus VR

The Path to the Metaverse

I'm tremendously excited to join Oculus, and when I think back, it's astonishing how unlikely the path to this moment is. I've told most of the parts of this story before, but never all together, and the narrative, now spanning twenty years, just keeps getting more remarkable.

Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime. Around the same time, I saw the first leaked alpha version of Doom. I knew John Carmack from exchanges on the M&T bulletin board a couple of years earlier, when both John and I were learning how to write 3D graphics code, so I sent him mail saying how blown away I was.

John replied that his mother lived in Seattle, and maybe we could get together next time he was in town. Eventually he came by to visit, and we had a good conversation, in the course of which he asked if I'd like to come work at Id; being in the middle of shipping the first couple of versions of Windows NT, I politely declined.

In late 1994 or early 1995, John let me know he was going to be back in town, and asked if I wanted to have dinner. We met at Thai Chef in Bellevue. I knew he was going to try to hire me, and I knew I was going to say no. But he didn't get around to doing that until after he had talked for a good two hours about how he was going to build cyberspace, and by that time it was hard for me to imagine doing anything else. John was as good as his word, and Quake was the start of a world of connected gaming that thrives to this day.

Quake was seminal and high-impact – it's amazing what a team of ten mostly untrained twenty-somethings in the Black Cube in Mesquite, Texas, managed to accomplish – but it wasn't the Metaverse. It was still, in the end, images on a screen, not Hiro Protagonist literally fencing for his life. And so John and I went our separate ways, John to continue to refine what he had created, and me to wander through a series of interesting projects that, in the end, always left me wishing for the pure focus, intensity, and impact of those two years working with John.

Fast-forward fourteen years. I'm at Valve – which started its existence by licensing the Quake source code – looking for the next big platform shift, and I conclude that it's augmented reality. Thanks to Valve's unique structure, I'm able to start working on that, along with several other interested people, including Atman Binstock, who I recruited over coffee at St. James Espresso in Kirkland; Atman is thinking about moving to Paris and writing a debugger, but finally decides to join up. John, meanwhile, is poking at virtual reality, seeing if it's finally feasible. He sends me mail on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Quake's release, saying that he has a feeling that something really big is just around the corner, something bigger than anything that's happened so far. He's talking about VR.

Then two things happen at about the same time. On one path, Palmer develops his first VR prototype, John and Palmer Luckey connect, Oculus forms and its Kickstarter is wildly successful, DK1 ships, and John becomes Oculus CTO. Meanwhile, I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR. We switch over to working on VR just as Palmer's homebrew project is morphing into Oculus.

From that point, both VR paths have been pretty well documented, Oculus's in this blog, in the press, and all over the Internet, and Valve's in my blog and talks. The end result, a year and a half later, is a VR system that can create a sense of presence – the feeling, below the conscious level, that you really are someplace. This is an experience that no one except a few researchers using awkward, hugely expensive equipment had ever had, but within the next couple of years it should be available in a comfortable form factor at a consumer price. In the space of two years, a relative handful of people at two companies, none of them VR experts at the start, somehow managed to resurrect VR from the trash heap of technologies-that-never-were and make it the most exciting technology around.


That wouldn't have happened if Palmer hadn't developed his prototype. If John hadn't been investigating VR at the right time. If they hadn't run into each other. If I hadn't been looking for a new platform. If Palmer hadn't met up with the right people to form Oculus and build DK1. If the community hadn't been so overwhelmingly supportive of VR and the Kickstarter. If Atman had decided to go do a debugger instead. If a team hadn't assembled at Valve, done a bunch of hard work to show that low persistence, excellent tracking, and a well-calibrated and well-tuned system enabled presence, and shared that knowledge with Oculus. If I hadn't come across Ready Player One at the right time. Heck, if I hadn't come across Snow Crash all those years ago, or the Doom alpha, or known John from the M&T bulletin board, or if I hadn't known Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington from my days at Microsoft, in which case I would have had no reason to help them license the Quake source code…

You get the idea. We're on the cusp of what I think is not The Next Big Platform, but rather simply The Final Platform – the platform to end all platforms – and the path here has been so improbable that I can only shake my head.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on Tuesday. A lot of what it will take to make VR great is well understood at this point, so it's engineering, not research; hard engineering, to be sure, but clearly within reach. For example, there are half a dozen things that could be done to display panels that would make them better for VR, none of them pie in the sky. However, it's expensive engineering. And, of course, there's also a huge amount of research to do once we reach the limits of current technology, and that's not only expensive, it also requires time and patience – fully tapping the potential of VR will take decades. That's why I've written before that VR wouldn't become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware – and that it wouldn't be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff.

That worry is now gone. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.

It's great to be working with John again after all these years, and with that comes a sense of deja vu. It feels like it did when I went to Id, but on steroids – this time we're working on technology that will change not just computer gaming, but potentially how all of us interact with computers, information, and each other every day. I think it's going to be the biggest game-changer I've ever seen – and I've seen quite a lot over the last 57 years.

I can't wait to see how far we can take it."

- Michael

"If I ever need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift, I'm done. You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift.
If I ever see Facebook branding on anything that's not optional, I'm done. Not really reasonable in a literal sense, but I get your drift.
If I ever see ads on anything that I've already paid for, I'm done. That is a developer decision, not our decision. If someone wants to sell a game with built-in ads, they will have to deal with the natural consequences."

-Palmer Luckey
In case you didn't notice, Palmer, you sold your company- your willingness to be "done" has no bearing on whether or not Facebook does something.

Facebook + Palmer = Facepalm

I hope you're right Chivas, as you know I'vs actively supported Oculus from day one as I've felt that VR is the last part of the flight sim jigsaw to finally realise a more realistic experience. The first time I tried VR was in hong kong in 1993, the scenario was a red baron sim and though primitive to say the least it gave a glimpse of good things to come.
Fast forward to OR and finally it looked as if VR for the masses was about to be realised, except that FB wanted to join crash the party in spectacular, crass fashion.
I can see how FB 'could' benefit Oculus with the extra resources, however I can't help being left with a slighly uneasy feeling which I can't quite put my finger on.
Much like the same uneasy feeling I had earlier in the week when I heard that Cyberdyne had perfected their fiirst ekoskelton...

I was uneasy aswell when the Facebook acquisition/partnership was announced. The people involved with Oculus were going to become millionaires anyway, the partnership just removed the risk, and improved the odds for even better hardware, with the resources that FB could bring to the table. I doubt that the Oculus team, consisting of mostly gamers would have considered FB at all if they thought the partnership would kill their dream, even under the pressure of some of their own major investors. Of course Zuckerberg could be lying, there are no guarantees, but its certainly not in the best interests of FB to screw this up and let the competition control huge future markets.

"If I ever need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift, I'm done. You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift.
If I ever see Facebook branding on anything that's not optional, I'm done. Not really reasonable in a literal sense, but I get your drift.
If I ever see ads on anything that I've already paid for, I'm done. That is a developer decision, not our decision. If someone wants to sell a game with built-in ads, they will have to deal with the natural consequences."

-Palmer Luckey

If Palmer Luckey keeps trash talking the company he works for.....he will get fired. Its not a partnership, Facebook owns Oculus VR outright. Luckey no longer is the boss of Oculus. Zuckerberg is the boss. If Luckey doesn't do what Zuckerberg wants, he will be out.

You should let people know that the first part of each sentence is a question on the forums, and the second half is Luckey's answer. It could be confusing for some, especially after your trash talking comment. Personally I think your deliberately confusing people, or your misinterpreting alot of what you read.

"You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift".
"Not really reasonable in a literal sense, but I get your drift".
"That is a developer decision, not our decision. If someone wants to sell a game with built-in ads, they will have to deal with the natural consequences."

I don't see any trash talking in those three answers.

Perhaps you should stop misleading people that it is a partnership and talking like you are an employee with inside knowledge. Luckey is now Zuckerbergs employee. PERIOD.

What is with your obsessive denial about anything that is not great with OR anyway? Too weird. You just can't take hearing anything negative even when it is true and you must counter every criticism with spin and one sided opinions.

It was fun at first, but it is getting too sad to watch anymore.

So let me get this straight. Your allowed to counter everything I post, with something negative, but its wrong for me to counter your negative speculation with something positive. LMFAO

It was all a joke dude. Just to watch you flip out. And you did.

Very interesting article from Time.com Well worth a read.

http://time.com/#39577/facebook-oculus-vr-inside-story/

The Navy testing ways to incorporate cheap VR.

http://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-navys-oculus-rift-and-it-showed-me-the-fut-1526723869

LMAO, the obsessive spam continues.

Spam?...this is a thread I started about the Oculus Rift to include info from the developer, other sources like the RoadtoVR, and speculation. Your speculative contributions to the thread are usually uninformed, obvious misinterpretations, or using out of date blogs on old prototypes to try to prove your point. You have two rants, one that motion sickness will kill the Oculus, which is being proven wrong, and the other that Facebook will kill the Oculus. Which hasn't been proven wrong yet, but I'm sure it will be. But please continue, as it is entertaining.

It was all for a laugh dude. Just to watch you go nuts when someone posts a negative on OR. And you do go ape. And you talk as if everything you say is 100% right all the time. Never wrong. Your obsession with countering everything negative that is said about OR is just plain weird dude. Notice no one on here countered my posts except you. Too weird. Seriously consider being a little balanced for a change.

You don't need to reply, as I will not read it. Just consider what I said. Its for your own good.

Please carry on, as it will be interesting to see how long it takes before you grow up.

Thats very interesting and looks to be one of the better VR units, of the dozens that have come out of the woodwork lately. I'm not a fan of the on-board camera where multiple dots on the walls are required for tracking, but they say it has two on-board cameras, so it may require only one external dot.

I'm not so sure that these small companies can compete with Oculus VR now that they have combined forces with FB.

Oculus VR has:

Almost unlimited resources: in Money, Tech Support, R&D to build custom parts, already hired most of the brightest and best VR minds, and have the clout to source the best possible custom or off the shelf display. Not to mention they have already made major efforts to support, produce, and publish the software required for any VR hardware to succeed.

Another kick in the teeth to any competitor "if" the OR and FB stay with their plan to offer their VR hardware as a lose-leader. Selling the OR at only one hundred dollars, which is at-most a third of the actual cost of the hardware. Very difficult if not impossible for a small company to compete with that, unless their product is superior. I wish all of them luck, as I just want the best VR possible and will pay hundreds of dollars for it.

Sorry to be the realist here, but attractive as 100 dollars/100 pounds is, it will undoubtedly have other costs to compensate, i.e. with some sort of FB/advertising tie-in. Bottom line is that FB have so far invested 2 billion in OR and they will want their money's worth.
Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as the benevolent type so it's certainly not for the greater good of humanity that he's bought into OR.

It still remains to be seen which VR unit will have the best features, both are still in development. I like some of the features that Totem has, and hopefully they have features to address "the elephant in the room" "motion sickness". Since they have been developing their unit for nine years, we have to assume it has or they are in the process of addressing the issue. Valve, and OculusVR have been very open in the factors that cause, and cure the issue, so that should help.

As far as the "kick in the teeth" issue, that unfortunately is the nature of most businesses. Oculus has alway been somewhat help-full with its competition. FB probably not so much.

I totally agree, but FB should have no problem garnering a huge amount of profit if they corner the social networking VR market. Not to mention special VR units designed and sold to the industrial, medical, and military markets. FB will likely get into the light gaming software aswell, but I highly doubt that we will see to much input from FB to ruin the experience of niche, and Indie developed sim software for Rift use.

I would trust his former partners more with this thing...just saying he is a bit like that MS guy BG

Like I said in an early post, I wish them luck, and will buy the best VR unit possible, thats being supported by the sims I fly. Its hard to tell how advanced the Totem hardware prototypes are yet. I like many of its features, but there is no mention of some critical features, and their prototypes haven't been tested by the gaming community yet. They've done a commendable job keeping the project secret, and have now mentioned their project to take advantage of the sudden outrage at the FB acquisition. I think we will no more during the E3 exposition, where it can be compared with all the other competitors.

I also had an uneasy feeling when the FB acquisition was announced, but still don't think Zuck will cut Palmer loose, as he and his team are some of the brightest minds in the VR business. I also doubt Abrash would have recently left Valve to join the Oculus team if he thought for a minute that it would be cut. The project still has plans to continue developing VR hardware for many years, up to and including the realization of the Holodeck holy-grail. That said like any other business, if things start going wrong, all bets are off.

I'm well aware you didn't mean now. What I'm saying is the competition in VR isn't going to end with the first consumer version, or the next ten after that. The people in the Oculus Rift development will probably keep their jobs as long as they want, as long as the VR product they produce is better than their competitions. The competition even with a slightly better VR product could still have difficulty with software developers implementing their new hardware once the first VR winner has been established.

And what is that exactly? 3D youtube inserts in facebook pages? Or are you imagining some sort of 3D skyping,
with everyone getting dual camera systems and turning their computer desks into 3d video recording platforms?
If the current social media trend is toward mobile devices, what will this look like - mobile devices aren't
going to lend themselves to 3D VR, unless we imagine a 3d video selfie via a pair of cameras held out on
the end of a stick. Alternately, I suppose it might be 3d VR views of the world as recorded by mobile
users, which seems to suggest a huge market for dual camera widgets mounted like a pair of glasses.

I'm not sure that a "social networking VR market" is something which could easily come into being,
and I'd love to hear what anyone might conceive it to be.


I think that the CastAR AR scheme will lend itself much better to commercial-industrial show-and-tell applications,
where the world not being shut out by the headset will be a considerable advantage. It was the first thing which
occurred to me when I heard of CastAR, not to mention the already demonstrated ability of the CastAR software
system to present virtual objects simultaneously to multiple observers looking on from all directions, while the
real world remains in view, rather like the Star Wars "Obiwan Kenobi, you're our only hope" scene.

I doubt FB spent two billion just to get into the VR gaming space. They understand that VR is the future. The Social Network market is huge, and I'm quite sure they have a number of ideas, with other ideas still yet to be thought of that could be exploited with VR. AR, and VR will have a huge number of applications in all markets. The military, Medical, Industrial, Tourism, applications should be obvious.

Well either way I'm getting a VR headset when the technology seems to be mature enough to get the most from it.
Wether that is going to be a FB unit or someone else who has joined the party late will have to be taken on it's own merits when I'm ready to buy.
Much like Luckey said if I have to start logging into FB to get the headset to work then that's something I'm not buying into; it's bad enough having to log into Steam to get CLoD fired up...

Actually Luckey did not say that. You may have gotten that idea from one of Sentinels posts earlier in the thread, where he made it appear that Luckey said that. The actual quote is below.

A question was asked on the VR forums...."If I ever need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift, I'm done.
Luckey answered...."You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift."

I do agree about using the best VR, but we will also have to lobby the software creators to implement which ever VR hardware we decide to use in their game. That said it should eventually happen if the VR hardware is good and relatively easy to implement.

Carmack Speaks: Blindsided By Facebook Deal But Oculus Needed To Partner

http://hothardware.com/News/Carmack-Speaks-Blindsided-By-Facebook-Deal-But-Oculus-Needed-To-Partner/

Here is the actual content of John Carmack's
blog discussion with Peter Berkman:
http://peterberkman.tumblr.com/post/80827337212/wrong-and-right-reasons-to-be-upset-about-oculus

Interesting Icarus! I have no product loyalty TBH, whichever one gives me the best experience for my money, gets my money.

Microsoft Targets Enterprise Virtual Reality with Business Oriented VR Headset

http://www.roadtovr.com/microsoft-enterprise-virtual-reality-business-vr-headset/

I received a DCS P51 key a few months ago, but hadn't flown it until now. The only reason I fired it up was to setup my controls to get ready for the next DCS patch. The patch will include Oculus Rift support, and against my better judgment, I've preordered the Oculus Rift DK2 prototype due in July. Normally I would wait for a consumer product, and reviews, but at my age, patience can be a liability. I'm hoping VR will rekindle my interest in flight sims, and negate the need to buy an ultralight, when it hurts to much to play golf. That said, the ultralight may be the best option, as my eyes, nor VR will have to be good enough to spot the DOT.

As an alternative to the microlight consider a motorised Paraglider; cheaper and it packs in the trunk. Takes off in a few yards, power upto a few thousand feet, kill the motor and have fun gliding finding some thermals.

The para-glider looks like it might be safer than the ultralight aswell. Although I kind of like stopping for a coffee, after crashing my 109, rather than the more realistic outcome.

Easy, just get up a few thousand feet, turn off the motor, crack open the thermos flask, enjoy a refreshing coffee before you get under 500 feet then just power back up to altitude....

Palmer Luckey Explains Why Facebook's Oculus Acquisition Is.....

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADB36Esss94&list=UUBWlVdMjubd2k5NwS_F8TnQ&feature=player_detailpage

I don't believe Mark said they were "going" to use cheaper phone parts. If I recall correctly, he was telling their shareholders that Oculus has gotten this far, by using readily available smartphone parts. VR has to go well beyond smartphone parts to make a successful consumer version. Mark and Luckey are well aware of that, and its one of the reasons Luckey went with a partner that could make that happen.
edit... in other words I don't think Mark said they would be limited to only cheaper phone parts going forward.

There are certainly a few more VR candidates surfacing, like Totem, GameFace Labs. GameFace labs even has a 2.5 K display, but I think its an LCD display which might not have the necessary switching time for good VR.

The competition is going to force FB to provide the best possible support for Luckey and the Oculus Rift if they want a piece of the huge potential market. That said I don't think FB had any plans to hobble the product, which many are worried about.

PAX East 2014: Interview With Oculus VR Founder Palmer Luckey [Video]

http://www.maximumpc.com/pax_east_2014_interview_oculus_vr_founder_palmer_luckey_video

I agree, competition is the best thing that could happen for the consumer, but we will have to be careful which one we buy. Buying the one with the best specs might not be the best one to buy if few game developers are making software for that particular hardware. Hopefully they will have a standardized implementation process. The Oculus has already published an SDK, and has software developers working with their product. It may be a good idea for the Totem to utilize the Oculus SDK so that any software developed for the Oculus could be used by the Totem. That said I have no idea whats required to standardize implementations of different software/hardware combinations.

The Oculus development released a new SDK today. Heres a RoadtoVR review. It appears that it might be possible for other VR units to use the SDK in some form.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-sdk-v0-3-1-preview-distortion-john-carmack-timewarp/

Yep look at the video format wars of the 90's; Sony brought in the technology with the best format Betamax, but manufacturers had to pay massive royalties to Sony to use the technology so video players were luxury items for the well-heeled only.
Cue JVC with the VHS format which was clearly inferior, but JVC gave the technology effectively for free with no royalties and the rest is history.
An industry wide standard must be decided otherwise the whole technology will be a confusing mess with each declaring their products 'the best'.
Superiority should be decided through capability inside the standard much like we have with modern GPU's where we have healthy competition and it's the consumer that ultimately makes the decision which brand to go for.

HipHopGamer has another interview with Palmer Lucky. You can't get more enthusiastic than HHG :), and he always asks some great questions.

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=7893#p108176

With all the VR units coming out of the woodwork, its probably a very good idea for Oculus to keep their cards close to their chest. Selling their hardware at cost will certainly put pressure on their competitors. There are billions of dollars at stake for the hardware unit that dominates the market.

I was hoping to see something new at E3 in June, but now that the development can afford to design, develop, build, and contract out the best custom hardware, it may have added additional time before we hear more on what features will make the first CV1 unit.

Maybe buying the DK2 wasn't such a bad idea after all if the CV1 is delayed, and then sold at cost.

As far as Montreal Virtual Reality meet goes, I would have nothing to add but more speculation, so no I won't be participating.

I still can not imagine wearing that on my head while flying a air combat sim...sorry, I don't get all the excitement lol

Well I guess it's what you get out of the flying experience. Personally I've been on a journey which started with Tomahawk on the Atari 800 and is still ongoing.

Part of that experience is for better graphics, better flight fidelity etc. and with VR in whatever guise we finally get the final part of the puzzle which is a believable suspension of reality. I know just from my experiences with a monitor/TIR that when I eventually get a VR setup then I 'will be there' sitting in that cockpit just because my eyes are telling my brain that is so.

Ok so I know there's no g's, there's no vibration, but and this is a big but, we are by nature visual beasts with something like 70-80% of your sensory input as a primary means of information coming from your eyes.
In short our brains 'trust' what our eyes are feeding them and ignore/adapt other sensory inputs to match what our eyes are reading.

I've seen people with Rift units literally cacking themselves because they're in a game looking down from height and they 'believe' that they will fall if they step forward.

These are rational people who know that they're wearing a headset that is simulating a lethal drop, but such is the compelling nature of what they are seeing that they cannot move and are acting for all intentions as if they are on top of that building.

It's a primal instinct that you have as much control over as flinching from a hot surface.

And all this from essentially a prototype low resolution display, trust me VR is going to as big a revolution to the World as when TV was introduced to the masses in the 50's... I can't wait

There will always be people with absolutely no interest in VR, and rightfully so, but I think they will be in the minority. I'm looking forward to VR with combat flight sims. My brain will be tricked into feeling like I'm actually in a fighter cockpit, flying thru clouds, at 5000ft, with far more realistic 3D than a TV/Monitor can provide.

VR transports you to another place, many people don't get that until they try it. Sitting in a chair infront of a monitor can be an immersive experience, but you can still see the room around you, so your not transported anywhere near the degree that VR provides. Most people will prefer the VR experience, as long as the motion sickness issue has been successfully addressed, which appears to be the case.

You won't have to walk around in public with a VR headset, so being self-conscious about our cool quotient will hardly an issue. That said the general public aren't shy about lining up around the block for hours for a chance to try the prototypes in "public" at tech shows.

I have no idea how it will work with social media. I'm sure the FB people will have some good ideas, but FB doesn't need VR to be successful with social media. Establishing a position in the next huge Tech market is the big deal. As big a gaming will be, it will be less than ten percent of total VR use in the military, medical, industrial, entertainment, and tourism industries, just to mention a few off the top of my head. To think VR won't be huge shows no imagination of the possibilities. There is a reason that business's are throwing billions of dollars at VR as we speak, and companies are racing to establish a strong position in the market.

There is no comparison between weak 3D on a less than immersive TV, and stronger 3D on a totally immersive VR headset.

If you want to know which way to go. Follow the money, not the guy who says the world is flat.

Careful here, may cause insanity

I'm highly sceptical of this article. If the OR caused insanity, Fox news would have endorsed the product.

its an opinion article written by a psychiatrist

Well, maybe if you belive all hype and "want to belive" .. i have lots of time with oculos rift dv kit and it's nice but i still won't forget that i sit in office chair. Sense of depth is nice anyway but still my butt tells me that im not there..

Maybe teen's and child can get really immersed and forgot that they just play to game..

There is a huge difference between the DK1 you've spent lots of time in, and the DK2. The DK2 has far more "presence" than the DK1. That said, I would hope anyone would still realize they are in a game. The point is, the effect is real enough for people to not want to take a step forward when the Oculus has them standing on the edge of a cliff. People sitting infront of a computer would have no problem making the figure on the screen make the step, but its a totally different story while in the Rift.

edit...we are still dealing with prototypes. As good as the DK2 is over the DK1, the CV1,2,3,4,5 should continue to improve the product.

The Sulon appears to be great for mobility. The current Oculus prototype would be very dangerous in that respect. That said I don't think that using are own smartphones as a display is a great idea. Its very cost effective, but not sure how well it would work with all the tech required to create "presence" and alleviate motion sickness issues, not to mention users smartphone resolutions.

Sulon says they will be selling a consumer version by the end of the year for five hundred dollars, but I'm not so sure their prototypes are far enough along for that. If they do release a product at the end of the year, it will probably beat the OR to the market. Hopefully their consumer version will be good enough to interest the market, and not hurt it. Although I think VR tech will finally break thru no matter how Sulon does in the market. The software/hardware tech is good enough now to create VR with a resolution higher than 1080P, without motion sickness, and with enough gaming software to kick off the VR revolution.

A few more interesting articles.

http://www.oculusvr.com/news/

http://www.roadtovr.com/zenimax-vs-oculus-vr-gloves-come-oculus-responds-zenimax-ip-theft-claims/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/06/...ield_simulator/

I disagree. First off, if things go to plan VR units won't be that pricey. Atleast I don't think a price point of less than five hundred dollars to be pricey. VR units will be cheaper, far more immersive, with a better implementation of 3D than their 3D TV counterparts.

Second, getting mainstream consumers to buy into the idea of strapping on a VR unit will be easy compared to building a VR unit good enough for consumers to want to keep strapping it on.

http://hothardware.com/News/Funktastic-B...-Like-An-Eagle/

Icarus, sorry if I missed it earlier in the threads,

Have you tried a DK1? It's nowhere near perfect, but it's like a peek into a world that is full of possibilities. I don't disagree with you that not everyone wants to strap one of these things to their face.

However, if we look further down the road, let's say they become the size of regular sunglasses? Contact lenses? That sort of thing.

For now, in my opinion if you're a simmer, or a proper gamer, you had better be excited about this tech because it's going to blow people away. The first person that recreates the battle of Trafalgar in 3d for one of these will be my hero

I very much doubt the experience will wear thin quickly "IF" the experience is as immersive with the sense of "presence" that the new VR unit makers are claiming, and independent users are currently verifying. Most will forget they have a headset on, and could give a rats ass what they look like in the privacy of their own home. Anyone stupid enough to walk the streets wearing the headset will in all likely-hood be quickly culled from the population. lol

The attraction of the CastAR, IF it can be delivered as described, is
that in VR mode (with a shade in front to shut out the world passing
through the semi-transparent lenses), it is already a pair of glasses
with a target weight under 100g (3 1/2 oz); a bit heavy for glasses,
but much better than the OR DK2 @ 16oz.

CastAR and a couple of other VR units look very interesting, and I'm looking forward to see what these developments show at E3 in June.

http://hothardware.com/News/Parrot-Bebop-Drone-Lets-You-Experience-Flight-With-Oculus-Rift/

http://www.roadtovr.com/antvr-universal-...egins-may-14th/

It would be an amazing arcade concept in a national park lodge... imagine in a much better graphic engine (crytech/frostbyte/etc...) to fly like a bird of prey and hunt for games....

If Google plays its cards right they can include air conditioning

its possible

Note that if there is any first person POV game out there,
for any scenario, it is already fully 3D-VR capable. You
can put on a VR headset and get a full 3D VR experience from
a flight sim published in 1999. The 3D renderers DirectX and
OpenGL provide all the information necessary, and 3D interface
software such as the nVidia stereo vision drivers, and iZ3D
driver can extract the necessary information for stereo view
and pass it to the headset, providing a full 3D experience.

The only caveat is that some titles might not be capable of
delivering a view compatible with current high display resolutions,
so you may be stuck with a max 1280x1024 display. However,
many don't have that limitation.

Hello? Is this sunglasses size or not?
http://technicalillusions.com/

Yes they are, however CastAR is a different technology to Oculus so it's not really comparable.

http://hothardware.com/News/Lead-Enginee...s-And-Facebook/

Oculus has added another top notch tech engineer to their team. If people think the huge money being spent will only interest, and cater to a few geeks in their basement, they are in for a rude awakening. The first VR consumer versions will probably be not much bigger than ski goggles that people will quickly forget they have on. There "may" be some discomfort after wearing the head gear for sometime, but the VR experience should make any discomfort a non factor, in their decision to buy, or continue to use VR hardware.

http://www.roadtovr.com/news-bits-castar-unveils-new-prototype-maker-faire-2014/

People have used goggles all day long in a number of activities with little discomfort or worry of being social outcasts. Wearing goggles won't be a factor in VR's acceptance. The quality of the experience will decide its fate. Tempest in a teapot.

All very conceptual but when are they coming out with a version that supports 3D pronography that will do my signature the proper justice :P

Google glasses.....I take one up the arse before you get me to wear one of those.

There is little doubt that pornography will be a big driver of VR sales. It will also make fitness alot less boring using VR with our indoor fitness machines to walk, run, bike around the popular tourist destination of the world.

Another SVVR Con panel discussion, this time exploring various non-game applications for consumer VR in areas such as entertainment, storytelling, cinema, tourism, health & wellness, fitness, CAD, 3D modeling, scanning and printing, education. http://www.roadtovr.com/svvr-con-non-game-applications-enabled-vr-livestream-4pm-pdt/

Out in the fresh air and sun shine is best for staying in shape and good health...porn, well get a real out door type woman, simulation needs personal boundaries

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/


http://www.wired.com/2014/05/editors-note-22-06/

Its amazing the companies that are currently using the OR prototypes to show their products. Real-estate comes to mind where you could tour homes etc before deciding on a short list of properties to personally visit. Architects could tour and fine tune the designs of their projects before building them. VR possibilities are endless.

I can't wait to try on that pizza sauce, booger, and lice covered headset!

http://www.roadtovr.com/survios-announces-4m-venture-capitalist-funding/

And in unrelated news, a head-lice/pinkeye epidemic sweeps the nation.

Exclusive: GameFace Mark 5 Prototype Heading to E3 With New Form-factor, Front Facing Depth Camera, Ports, and Custom Lenses http://www.roadtovr.com/gameface-mark-5-prototype-e3/

The custom lenses with a physical IPD adjustment caught my eye.

Oculus Rift VR coming to Chuck E. Cheese's birthday parties

http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/20/5734192/oculus-rift-chuck-e-cheese

Oculus Rift Coming to Chuck E. Cheese
BY CHLOE ALBANESIUS MAY 20, 2014 01:01PM EST0 COMMENTS

You know what sounds like a good idea? Stuff your kid full of Chuck E. Cheese pizza and then strap them to the nausea-inducing Oculus Rift!

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458309,00.asp

Oculus boss: True virtual reality is 'a decade or two' away http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/oculus_boss_true_virtual_reality_is_a_decade_or_two_away/

The circus is revving up:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/22/samsung-vr-headset/

Go Show Kickstarter Launches to Bring Virtual Cinemas, YouTube, Hulu, and More to Smartphone VR Headsets

http://www.roadtovr.com/go-show-kickstarter-virtual-cinema-youtube-hulu-smartphone-vr-headsets

His comments on using VR on long air flights was interesting. I've been very uncomfortable shoe horned into a few long flights to Europe and Australia/NZ with a little claustrophobia thrown in. Feeling the open spaces of a good VR movie could have made those long flights much more comfortable.

"I am particularly excited about Go Show as it is a perfect case study for mobile based VR. Latency is not an issue as the user does not need to move his or her head very fast; it utilizes content people already like (by virtue that it is already on the user’s phone) and has great potential for shared experiences over the mobile networks, something I am sure Facebook would be keen to investigate. Expect invites to watch a movie trailer in a fantasy environment from your friends soon!"

I'm not sure how popular VR will be with social media, but this guy has thought of one for social media use. There will be many others that haven't be thought of yet. I'm sure Facebook has a large team of bright individuals brainstorming the issue.

http://www.roadtovr.com/go-show-kickstarter-virtual-cinema-youtube-hulu-smartphone-vr-headsets

Only time will tell, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Samsung is working with Oculus on a media-focused VR headset http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/samsu...m_reader=feedly

News Bits: Samsung Partners with Oculus on New ‘Media Focussed’ VR Headset?
http://www.roadtovr.com/news-bits-samsung-partners-oculus-new-media-focussed-vr-headset/

OR wants a display not phone parts. Samsung wants VR software. This limited partnership is still a rumour that hasn't been verified by OR or Samsung. If its true it could be very good for OR to access the latest in screen tech.

Samsung makes displays for all kinds of hardware, not just phones. If the OR wants to have a custom display made for their specific use they can afford to have it made. If Samsung or some other manufacturer is already making a display for phones that meets all the requirements for OR use, then they can afford to buy it. Samsung has never said they will, or won't make a display, custom or otherwise for the OR.

That isn't what Zuckerberg said, its how you interpreted what he said. The OR will have all kinds of custom parts that are required to alleviate motion sickness, improve 6DOF, Optics, and latency issues etc. Again you misinterpret that I somehow said a Samsung display is bad thing, off course it isn't. What I said was the OR development could afford to have Samsung build a display more suited to the VR experience "if" required now or in the future.

If the OR just used smartphone parts, it would fail miserably.

News Bits: New Valve VR Headset Makes an Appearance at Boston VR Bender http://www.roadtovr.com/new-bits-new-valve-vr-headset-makes-appearance-boston-vr-bender/

Finally seen a couple of forum reports from ITEC in Germany where people were able to try the DK2 with DCS. The immersion was very good, but some report a more noticeable screen door effect than even the DK1 HD model. This appears to be a function of the 1080P OLED display. If true, hopefully the 1440P OLED display still rumoured for the consumer version will alleviate that issue. There is also talk that OlED screens aren't great for long distance views even at high resolutions.

The rumour that Samsung is working with the OR team may be true according to IGN, where Samsung could provide Oculus with early access to its next-gen OLED screens.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/06/02/samsung-working-with-oculus-on-a-vr-headset

This is funny, and could explain peoples resistance to VR.
ha ha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdmz...layer_embedded

This is funny, and could explain peoples resistance to VR.
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: E4 Virtual Head Bucket
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qdmzMUAXBys
if the link doesn't work google
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: E4 Virtual Head Bucket

IMHO the biggest hurdle for the acceptance of VR will not be the quality of the VR hardware or the price of the hardware. They have the technology, and the capability of building the required parts, and the incentive to keep VR hardware at a low price point. The problem will be highend system requirements and gaming software optimized to run at the highest possible framerates. eg. Combat flight sims are notorious for their demand on systems.

Intel has been working hard with the Oculus team to have their hardware optimized for VR, atleast according to this article.

"Two Reasons You Will Want to Buy a New Gaming Rig for the Oculus Rift CV1" http://www.roadtovr.com/

Jason Holtman, New Hires, Lucky’s Tale, and E3
http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/jason-holtman-new-hires-luckys-tale-and-e3/

Yes, the Rift development has said for sometime their current hardware is best suited for games where your sitting. I would imagine custom parts are being developed to alleviate motion sickness in fps type games, but who knows if it will make the first consumer version. Anything that would make you feel sick in real life will be almost impossible to remove with hardware or software. I felt very sick after an hour in a CF104 Starfighter {dual seat}, but that would disappear after more experience. Most people who experienced motion sickness with the DK1 adjusted. One Rift developer who experienced immediate motion sickness everytime with the DK1, experienced no motion sickness with the DK2. Everyone is different, most will adjust, some won't.

I posted basically the same comment in the DCS Oculus forums, but people who have used the DK1 with DCS did so with less than top of the line computers with no problem. I found this hard to believe, but I will find out for myself next month. I will probably update my 580 to 780Ti gpu or wait for the 800 series. I'm waiting for the next Intel update broadwell?, and DDR4 before I upgrade my whole system again.

Why do you keep posting irrelevant 3 month old news items?
Either keep current, or keep silent. This is old news,
and has already been beaten to death here.

Icarus1 just likes to play devils advocate, and sometimes its difficult to find articles to support his position. I imagine he hopes some people fail to notice the dates of some of his posted articles that are based on old prototypes.

Had one sentence that mentioned OR in a list, and in the
article title as chosen by that website, but other than that,
had absolutely nothing to say about OR or VR in general,
rather was a drift on E3 and console games. So, not
relevant to this thread.


This guy is just explaining why he would prefer a CastAR unit,
only he doesn't realize it.

Well, I must apologize. How odd. That video and the paragraph attached
to it didn't show up for me when I read that page yesterday, and I
looked all through it for OR related material. I couldn't figure out
why OR was in the article title. I can't explain it, as it is quite
easy to see today, but yesterday the article seemed to go directly from
Halo5 to Arkham Knight. Either the browser/page glitched, or I'm
blind. I suppose these days either is equally possible.

Anyway, thanks for the link, it was quite informative.

Funny the article says: "Though not outright confirmed, the use of DK2 heavily
suggests that the title will feature support for the new device’s positional tracking"
I guess games writers who don't do flight sims don't realize that all flight sim
titles come TrackIR-compatible, and any VR headset uses the TIR interface for
integrated headtracking if it has that built in. I've never had to do anything
to get tracking to work on a headset, other than turn on the TIR output of the sim.

Oculus Rift Hands On Impressions E3 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XEDdOFTN6P4

E3 2014: First Look GameFace Labs Mark 5 Prototype, VR Never Looked So Good http://www.roadtovr.com/e3-2014-gameface-labs-mark-5-prototype/

Oculus founder tells Stuff: we're going to sell Rift at cost price

http://www.stuff.tv/oculus/oculus-founder-tells-stuff-were-going-sell-rift-cost-price/news

Still shaking from the pant-ruining terror of playing Alien Isolation on the Oculus Rift, we sat down with Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey, to discuss what's next for the field-leading VR company. And while Luckey remained tight-lipped on a release date for Oculus as a finished consumer gadget, he did reveal that Oculus doesn't plan to make any money from selling it.

"Whatever it costs us to make, that is what we’re going to sell it for"

"The next six months is going to be crazy," says Oculus's 21-year-old founder. "We’ve got a lot of stuff going on." Read what you like into that, speculation fans, but Luckey and his team are definitely working flat-out to create the consumer version of their already revolutionary virtual reality headset. "The first consumer version will be a lot better than DK2 [the current developer kit] - a lot better. There’s a lot of unannounced things we can’t talk about, but it’s going to be a lot smaller, a lot lighter, cheaper, wider field of view, higher resolution and higher framerate. DK2 wasn’t designed to be the thinnest or lightest thing we could make, or the cheapest for that matter: it was meant to be something we could get out quickly, that did all the functions we needed it to, very reliably. But it is a developer tool. We reused a lot of the same parts for DK2 that we used for DK2, because that allowed us to move a lot faster. But for the consumer version we’re making every piece from the ground up. There isn’t a single piece from DK1 or DK2 that will go into it, so we’re able to design it from the beginning to be a perfectly integrated, minimal piece of hardware."This sounds expensive - we must be looking at a rather low margin on this thing. "We’re going to be selling it at cost," Luckey tells us. "Whatever it costs us to make, that is what we’re going to sell it for. That’s one of the things the Facebook deal has allowed us to do: because we already have these resources behind us, we don’t have to worry about making money from our customers right away. If we were running purely on our own and trying to make money just from hardware, we would need to make enough profit from each unit to pay for running the company for several years, until we launched the next one."

[And that, folks, is why you only get a new console once every 5-7 years.]

"With Facebook, now we have that financial backing, we have the confidence that we’re going to be around for a long time and we can afford to make the right decisions to make VR happen in a big way."

Oculus is also spending money on multiple first-party games studios: “we’re going to have teams based in Dallas, Irvine, Seattle and Menlo Park. A lot of people. And we’re going to be publishing other studios’ content. So when will we see the first demos from Oculus’s home-grown studios? “You’ll definitely see some demos from our studios by next E3,” Luckey tells us.

One of the signs you’re doing something right is that everyone starts copying you, and this is especially true of Oculus. Surprisingly, Luckey is pleased that other companies are getting into VR.

"It’s good to see other people in the VR market. It lets people know that VR isn’t just this thing that one crazy company believes in, it’s something that a lot of companies, even really big companies, believe in," he says. But while he's happy to see Sony joining in, Luckey isn't so happy about lower-end companies. “Sony’s hardware isn’t up to where it needs to be, and neither is ours, but even though neither of us have a consumer product yet, we understand the problems and we know what we need to do to fix them. Other companies either don’t understand the problems, or choose to ignore them, and I think that’s dangerous. I don’t want people to try VR and think it’s garbage. It’s not hard to release a consumer product - people release garbage consumer products all the time. ANTVR - they’re saying Oculus doesn’t have a consumer product yet, but out dev kit better than what they’re selling to consumers. Just saying it’s for consumers doesn’t make it a good product."

Oculus glass

Does he see it replacing people’s TVs? "Yes. I think that VR has the capability to replace almost all the screens we use on a daily basis. Even phones - let’s go way into the future and imagine it’s built into something that just looks like a normal pair of glasses. Why would you have a phone instead of that?"

"I really don’t care if people want it sooner"

Since the moment John Carmack strapped on a prototype Rift at E3 two years ago, there have been millions of impatient gamers who want to buy one, right now. The temptation to rush it out must be enormous. "Sure," says Luckey with the kind of laugh only a 21-year-old millionaire can muster, "but too bad! What’s more important - getting them something a little earlier, or making virtual reality stick and hold this time, instead of falling over. I just really don’t care if people want it sooner, because we have to do it right, not soon."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=92L3kuXtsRc

Not too farfetched, when you've been using one
for five years or so, and more and more stuff
supports it, so you use your pc monitor less and
less, and it's like a pair of shades, comfortable
and familiar. Once you get in the habit of using
it instead of the pc monitor, and especially when
every brand has a means of doing see-through like
CastAR, you will see your PC environment as a
world around you which has the real world, plus
added virtual objects, which will be 3D viewports,
- think 8pi steradian "desktop". Then communications
is just another port to open, and you've got 3D
vision of the person at the other end. The net,
of course, will be needing petabytes of bandwith
to deliver this. Stereo Gopros will be huge, and
the first person to figure out how to hoist a stereo
HD camera to provide your image for 3D comms on demand,
as fast as you answer the phone, will be a trillionaire..

E3 2014: War Thunder Soars With Oculus Rift
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/E3-2014-War-Thunder-Soars-With-Oculus-Rift-64634.html

Apparently DCS has technical issues thru the first two days of E3. Hopefully something positive will come out of day 3.

News Bits: UK Army Uses Oculus Rift to Help Train Medics

I particularly found the comment about tanks interesting. Giving men in button down tanks easy 360* visibility would make them far more effective.


http://www.roadtovr.com/news-bits-uk-army-uses-oculus-rift-train-medics/

Project Morpheus vs. Oculus Rift: VR gaming gets very real at E3 2014

http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-project-morpheus-vs-oculus-rift-at-e3-2014-vr-gaming-gets-very-real/

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/0...__lsa=080d-37e8

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/a...t-morpheus.aspx

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/06/12/confessions-of-a-vr-virgin-oculus-rift-and-project-morpheus/

Personally I have no interest in the Morpheus, as its currently only designed for their console games. That could change. The Morpheus does include some wands to track the hands. I believe the OR will include another external camera mounted in the same unit as the positional head unit tracking camera to track our hands etc. I do like the external idea, as it transfers some of the weight away from the head unit. Its impossible to say who will end up having the better hardware, or even if they will end up being competitors, as the final hardware is still along way off.

Palmer has definitely said they aren't going to rush their product out the door, but I doubt the first release will be delayed until 2016, unless there is a major setback, which is always a possibility. If things go relatively smooth, I'd estimate a Christmas 2015 release, which makes my DK2 purchase more palatable. Although they now have the monies to develop, and build all the custom parts required to make a very good first consumer version even better. Also they might be thinking they will need a very good input device for the first consumer version which will also take more time. I know they are still experimenting with a number of different input device options.

Personally I really dislike the look of the Sony product. Basic black works best for me. That and the size of ski goggles which should be relatively easy to accomplish, considering the DK2 shell has alot of unused space to allow easy component changes during its development. Prototype format size isn't a major concern during development, but it certainly will be for the consumer version.

Ah, deceived again, that was the 2013 E3.

Personally I think they should try and keep to the late 2014/early 2015 timescale for the CV1. Pushing it back to late 2015 will cool off the market and allow many more pretenders a crack at the crown.
As long as the CV1 is half decent, people will vote with their wallets and upgrade to the CV2 18 months afterwards and so it begins again.

Any significent delay will be disasterous for OR's credibility imo.

It could be days, or 11months and 29 days, so I'm not sure what your clapping about.

Interesting interview

How Oculus VR is starting to change the direction of gaming (interview)

http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/14/how-oc...ng-interview/5/

E3 2014: Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=E2J0ldN2zNs

Title is a click-bait lie, article is recycled from
March.

Errf.

"Fiona Bruce was captured delivering the news via cameras that captured the studio in its entirety."

Here I thought they had a news story filmed in 3D
stereo. I wonder if the 360 view of the studio is
even filmed in stereo. And who wants the ability
to look around a studio when you're listening to
a talking head newsreader? Learning the pertinent
uses for 3D is apparently going to take a while...

No not market BS, just a typical misinterpretation of what the VR developers are saying. VR can "eventually" be used for almost anything, some uses haven't been even thought of yet. VR developers haven't said this is going to happen right away, and have stated repeatedly that they are concentrating on gaming now because the current tech and software make it possible for it to succeed. Like everything else VR will evolve over many years.

There will be a future where VR type tech can be more pervasive than cellphones. Instead of carrying your phone around in your pocket, you'll have a pair of VR transition cell/sound glasses that will do way more than a cell phone can do more conveniently. Thankfully there are always people willing to take the challenge, fail, and continute no matter how many people say it can't be done.

Enjoyed the article, Icarus1. Thanks.

WOW!

No, this is just an example of failing to grasp the concept.
As I said, I thought it would be about a news story filmed
in 3D. That would be cool, interesting.

There are multiple things going on here: you can use a VR headset
to watch content filmed in 3D, or you can use the headtracker
feature to look around in a virtual environment, and if the latter
has enough data, you can see it in 3D, as well. You won't see a live
360º environment in 3D if it is being filmed with single cameras,
and if it being filmed with stereo pairs, the bandwidth required
to provide all the possible viewing choices is quite simply insane.

However, it is perfectly reasonable to think of news content being
recorded with stereo camera pairs, and I imagine a stereo GoPro will
be on the market any day, if it isn't already. GoPro is currently
providing a kit to hack a pair of Hero2s together already:

http://provideocoalition.com/pvcexclusive/story/stereo_3d_with_the_gopro_hero2

Ooop, update, there's one for the Hero3 now:

http://gopro.com/camera-accessories/dual-hero-system

You may expect that in two years, your new laptop will have a stereo pair
of built in cameras for Skyping. Probably a good time to buy shares in
fibre optic networks.

Now, in 20 years, you can imagine multiple camera balls, posts with
a gadget mounted on them, with tiny cameras all over like a mirror ball,
so that you can move your head, and the software selects the appropriate
camera pair to provide you with a stereo view for the viewing angle you
have chosen; click a button and you shift to a ball on a neighbouring
post, or even another at a different height on the same post. Data rates
will be in the zettaBps. New prefixes will be being coined at a disturbing
rate.

(NottaBytes? DettaBytes? Theres is a campaign already for HellaBytes, but
what value should it represent?)

\\

The future is VR/AR, Cellphones will eventually be history. Sunglasses will be the new smartphone, VR, AR, even adjust for reading or distance.

Its your misunderstanding, nowhere have I said VR/AR are the same thing. People are working on AR glasses that are quite small. There is no reason in the future where a sunglass form factor couldn't do VR/AR/Smartphone/ etc etc functions that would render current Smartphone form factors obsolete.

When a person types AR/VR it doesn't mean they are the same thing. I'm sure it doesn't have to be spelled out for most people.
edit with an example of an CastAR AR/VR unit...CastAR-production mock-up with VR add-on 1 http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/CastAR-production-mock-up-with-VR-add-on-1,0101-421597-0-2-3-1-jpg-.html

Maybe you should read some of your links on CastAR, but I doubt it would make a difference.

Wow, you can't see it even when its shoved in your face. Its pointless having any kind of discussion where your concerned. I'm sure you will write CastAR and tell them their AR/VR working prototypes are just a figment of their imagination.

Alert: Horizon V ’4K VR Headset’ May Not Be Legitimate, InfinitEye Team Deny Involvement

http://www.roadtovr.com/horizon-v-4k-vr-headset-210-degree-field-of-view-shipping-january-2015/

You seem to have a very hard time grasping the fact that CastAR
is a system with three modes of operation: first, the projectors
illuminate a retroreflective sheet mounted in the room, and
3D imagery appears only in the line of sight between the user and
the sheet. In the second mode, transparent retroreflector is interposed
in the viewer's sight by a clip-on, which also contains a lens-prism
widget which directs the projector's image onto the transparent
retroreflector, providing a 3D image through which the world
continues to be visible. In the third mode, another plate flips
down over the clip-on, blocking out the world, and transforming
the view into full VR. All in one package not much heavier than a
pair of prescription glass sunglasses.

+1

100% agree. It will likely pan out to be generally VR for gamers and AR for social media.

At this early stage, I really don't care one way, or the other, regarding AR. VR seems to be on the fast track with more companies developing hardware prototypes, adapting, and creating software that I could use with combat flight sims relatively soon. Your the one who can't support one version of reality tech, without misrepresenting the other.

This won't load, seems to want me to subscribe

This looks like a mono version of what I described
above, but it doesn't have the camera density to
do stereo pairs, so the "photoreal" effect it's
going for will be severely limited - I can't see how
software can make up for the correct interocular
distance for stereo vision.

Don’t like the idea of virtual reality? Doesn’t matter — your kids will

http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/24/dont-l...your-kids-will/

Virtual reality is on the rise http://www.youtubeunblocker.org/permalink.php?url=d5D4zsG3n1yrwOe1CfU%2FGgpOMVqlAOKvGJhJyUWKE0%2BGPwiw2PZ0vLm2Ggf6dTzwfjG3cnT5%2FL3L1n%2F0OXSJpJ2giZy0dVCLYlnIPdGOyAlRa098yGmJ5HS5hG7ETndF

CastAR AR/VR Headset Anticipates Delays, Hints at Two-camera Tracking Solution
http://www.roadtovr.com/castar-arvr-headset-anticipates-delays-two-camera-tracking-solution/

Anyone who has ever built anything new, or has any imagination at all, would understand there are "always" delays. The only surprise is that someone would be surprised when there are delays. Oculus has been able to make their July DK2 release, for a portion of its orders, with atleast 10,000 units having already left the manufacturing centre for the distribution centers. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for all 45,000+ DK2 orders to be met. That said there was no July commitment made for all 45,000, just a first ordered first served general policy, atleast for the general public, with big game developers obviously getting a higher priority.

I decided to buy the DK2 rather than wait for the first consumer version with the knowledge that Oculus had the cash to develop better parts for the first consumer version, and the extra time that would take. That said I still think there is pressure to have the consumer version out before Christmas of 2015. Although they could delay the release for a better unit "if" their competition doesn't look to be a threat to beat them to the market.

So far I haven't seen any competition demoed that looks to be ready for release. Hardware like the cardboard Google offering may hurt more than support VR, as there is no anti-motion sickness feature with these units. Motion Sickness can leave a nasty and lingering impression.

There's a shop chain in the UK called CEX (Computer Exchange)
They specialise in used Console games and phones, my kids use it to keep their PS4 entertaining.
Buy games from CEX and then sell it back when they've had enough and use the cash to buy more,
It's a good concept and I find myself dragged down there with them more often than not. It's a chore for me really as I have no real interest in consoles or phones.

However last weekend we went and in the display window out front, in pride of place was a OR DK1.

How surprising to walk down the high street and see an OR in a shop window.

I was tempted to pull the trigger on it, but I'm really after a DK2 and will wait for that I think.

Still it was a buzz to see a OR on display

For good reason the Oculus development have avoided giving a consumer release version from "day one". No surprise there. Infact Lucky since the Facebook acquisition has stated he's in no hurry to give a release date for the Oculus.

There are way to many variables and pitfalls for even the developers themselves to give an accurate release date at this time, not to mention the bad publicity generated making an announcement, and missing that date.

We on the other hand are under have no restrictions at all to make an educated or otherwise guess.
If all goes well, its my opinion that a release date before Christmas of 2015 is still possible.

Interesting read

Why Virtual Reality Technology Will Blow Your Mind in 5 Years

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/why-virtual-reality-technology-will-blow-your-mind-in-5-years/

I really don't care which is more popular than the other. One wont make the other obsolete. At this point they are separate in the fact that one keeps you in the real world, while the other blocks out the real world. For my personal entertainment I prefer the one that blocks out the real world, and immerses me in another. In the end AR could change my mind but I haven't seen anything yet that really interests me.

Eventually it will probably be one piece of hardware the size of sunglasses doing both VR and AR.

Sunglasses can easily be designed to block out any outside view, without being obtrusive.

You are using old tech to support your position. The curved sunglasses will only need to be slightly larger than regular sunglasses, and won't require black out padding. The glasses can also be entirely clear, or tinted and only display when turned on. There are prototype smartphones being made now which are totally clear, that look like a piece of clear glass, until turned on.

Yes, "some" people are ticked off, but its probably better than "everyone" being ticked off, if they received the DK2, and it was still unusable with no SDK. Lesser of two evils.

Did I say anything that disagreed with what you said. "Developers that do not use SDK and have demos upcoming are ticked off." They are only a small part of those receiving the DK2. Hence my use of the word "some".

Future VR size sunglasses won't have to "completely" block out the outside world. Our brains will do that. There are sunglass form factors out today that allow little if anything to be viewed around the frame. I'm quite sure the design can be tweaked comfortably.

Your brain will block it out, especially when there is very little to see around the edges of properly fitted glasses. The brain mainly focuses on the center of the eyes vision, and fills in the peripheral vision with data that that fits their perceived situation, and it may not be whats actually there. There have been many studies that have tested this phenomenon.

I don't think anyone knows for sure what "true" VR will end up looking like, and your certainly not the one anyone would look to for that definition.

Il-2 CloD (a abandonware) will work with this Oculus Rift?



Sokol1

You obviously lost the initial bases of the argument, or you've decided it just doesn't suit your argument anymore. We were discussing the "future" of AR/VR which isn't solely defined by what it looks like next year.

No, the short answer is sure. I have a couple of sets of 3D headset,
several years old, and I can use them to see stereo 3D in any program
that creates a 3D world using D3D. And for head tracking, I simply enable
the TIR socket in the program (all flight sims since about 2002 have that).
The headsets use 3D interface drivers such as the nVida stereo driver for
nVidia cards, or the IZ3D driver, which works for any video card that
comprehends DirectX (or maybe even just OpenGL).

This has been the case since SimHQ reviewed the Emagin Z800 in 2006
http://www.simhq.com/_technology2/technology_080a.html

[quote=Icarus1Whatever makes you feel better and stop arguing. [/quote]

My bad, I didn't realize I was the only one arguing in our discussions. LMFAO

By bad, I got dragged down to your level, to counter your personal insults.

You started the insults, and against my better judgment, I returned them in kind. You seem to have no problem insulting people, but cry like a baby when treated the same way.

OK...it's over.
Next one gets banned.

Thank you,
Murphy.

Surprise!

I don't FearlessFrog has it, it's a shot from beardowner at from reddit's r/oculus - unless FearlessFrog is beardowner...

People are starting to receive emails telling them their orders are being processed, and a tracking number will be emailed when order shipped.

The new 4.0 SDK has been released, and ready for download. Also my order has changed from PENDING to PROCESSING, so it could be shipped soon. Order made at 11.54 of the first day.

Mine's shipped!! Oh gosh I can't wait...

My DK2 has shipped. A user of the DK2 with DCS has reported the 1080P OLED screen still isn't good enough for competitive flight simming, but excellent for just flying around. The good news is that the Oculus team still has access to higher resolution Samsung displays for the consumer version. As speculated for sometime, competitive combat flight simmers should wait for the consumer version. That said if your competitive flying includes icons, which is the case for the majority of competitive flight simmer, it may not be a problem.

DCS P51-D with the Oculus Rift DK2 posted on reedit


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zc3h43GCNbw

The re purposed 1080P OLED screens used in the latest prototype still aren't good enough. There was no need to build specialized prototype displays for game developers. I very much doubt that Zuckerberg would demand that the Oculus team use a re-purposed display for the consumer version, if the Oculus should require a display with different features. The VR market will be worth billions, for the developer/publisher/investors who do it right. That said no one would have a problem with future re-purposed displays if they meet the requirements for a good VR experience. Not to mention the fact the DK2 prototype hardware had been finalized before the start and completion of the buy out.

Looks like a Google cardboard and Samsung phone might be pretty good after all.

Economies of scale. Regardless of the resources available to you, it's easier to keep prices down if you are using parts which are already being manufactured on a massive scale.

Wow. You post links to about twelve second hand reports
about the ifixit teardown, instead of simply posting
one for the ifixit article itself, which you decline to
link at all. What the hell.

It is well known that the DK2 is the Crystal Cove. No one in the the Oculus development ever said that the DK2 would be a significant improvement over the Crystal Cove. The Crystal Cove was shown at GDC, when Oculus announced the DK2 which would be based on their in-house Crystal Cove prototype. This re-purposed display hardware for the DK2 prototype was finalized before the Facebook buyout. The Oculus developers already had the necessary funds to create a VR product with re-purposed parts, and signed the deal partly because Facebook had the same dream for VR, and had the funds to make it happen.

The Samsung deal gave Samsung access to Oculus Software they needed for their VR hardware, and gave the Oculus access to future Samsung displays, and if necessary, Samsung's ability to create custom displays with features that would allow for the best possible VR experience. A win/win/win partnerships. Facebook has money and expertise, Oculus has some of the best VR minds in the business, and Samsung the ability to create some of the best possible displays.

This tech is very interesting, especially if it effectively increases the resolution, without much cost to the cpu/gpu resources, which is one of the main stumbling blocks to the mass consumer VR market.

I had seen it before I read your first post. I thought it said
all that needed to be said about the subject.

I have a simple understandable bias in favour of
original sources, and seeing them get credit.

Oculus may do great VR, but they know f**k all about product fulfillment.

g.

Oculus shipped 20K in July. I suppose they could have waited until all 60K orders had been filled, and product made, but they wanted to have as many units in developers hands as soon as possible. There was no point in having the consumer version of the Rift for sale without enough software content.

Interesting use of rudder pedals by a military software developer. There is also rumours that the company will enable support for the Oculus Rift. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsEGcJummEw

"I guess you could almost say its done". http://vrfocus.com/archives/6339/oculus-creator-consumer-version-know-shipping/

The article doesn't suggest when the consumer version will be released, but it appears they have finalized the consumer versions components. They may still have to design a small comfortable form factor for those components, and have the components built, but that could suggest that a release by the end of 2015 may still be possible.

There is also talk that they will sell the Rift from their website instead of retail stores. I was concerned that finding one at a retailer in my area could have been difficult, so a website preorder works well for me.

I've had the DK2 for sometime, but its fixed IPD doesn't work for me. I haven't been able to give the unit a fair assessment. so I'm now considering modifying the unit, or selling it on ebay, to wait for the adjustable consumer version.

Fixed IPD? You set the IPD in the manager software, or at least that's what I did.

g.

No amount of manager software is going to adequately adjust the IPD. A physical adjustment is necessary for many of us, consequently I modded my Rift to suit. Now I'm looking thru the middle of the lens and experiencing far less nausea.

I am waiting for the VRVANA that seem to have a better head tracking unit and stereoscopic camera for agumented reality.

Me too. I think this will be the niche market awesome gear and Oculus is going to be the Facebook everymans gear. Jack of all master of none.

I will be watching their progress with interest as well, but not sure if they will be able to compete with an Oculus funded by Facebook, and partnered with Samsungs displays, while selling the Rift at cost. Not to mention some of the best minds in the industry are now employed by Oculus.

I'm just not sure they will be able to compete even in the spec department as they haven't shown their prototypes publicly yet. I see VRVANA like Oculus is using a 1080P OLED display in their latest prototype, and I'm sure they realize its far from good enough. Will they be able to acquire a display good enough for a consumer version at the price point Oculus will, considering their partnership with Samsung. Time will tell, but I think they will have to partner with some heavy hitters to succeed.

That said I will buy their product if their specs are better even if it cost a few hundred more, but how many people will buy at the higher price-point. Which begs the question on how many developers will develop, and adjust their software for this particular hardware if thats required.

Plenty of room for more than Oculus Rift in the niche market. Sure Oculus will likely make the most money, because it will be built for Facebook social media and will be a mainstream product. Not my cup of tea though.

There are no VR units being built exclusively for Facebook social media. Initially most VR units will be used primarily for gaming because thats where "most" of the software is coming from. VR hardware will evolve and many other industries will start seeing an increase in the software required. Eventually Social media will be only one of many uses for VR units. We'll be able to take our none flying/non-gaming mates on a mission, especially in dual seat aircraft like bombers to see what are combat flight sim hobby is all about.

Who said it was being built exclusively for Facebook social media? I have not read anything like that. OR will be made to be used with Facebook though. I want something that has nothing to do with Facebook. VRvana looks like it will be a better product in the long run for serious gamers and sims.

Any of these VR hardware units could be used for Social Media. If you don't want to use Facebook, with your VR unit, then don't. It will have nothing to do with the hardware. VRvana prototype does have better specs than the DK2 prototype, but I doubt this will hold true with the consumer version. I really don't care which unit is better, as I will buy the one that supports combat flight simming the best. I just believe VRvana will have a very difficult time competing against an Oculus supported by Facebook, and Samsung, selling units just as good at cost.

VRvana has a camera setup that can be used for agumented reality.
That alone is a featue one might like to have.

Yep. VRvana is going to be superior for simming, especially for pits. I much prefer the direction they are they are going compared to Oculus.

I also love that you can plug it into any HDMI port and it works. PC, XBox, PlayStation, you name it. Very versitle. It also works with any software that works with any other VR headset. Looking very good indeed.

"OR will be made to be used with Facebook though."

[citation needed]

g.

My opinion that eventually Facebook will have a negative effect on OR. Even if it doesn't, VRvana is still a better gamer/simmer design anyway.

Very difficult to say for sure which VR hardware will be better for simming, as both are unfinished prototypes with many features, and hardware components yet to be added and/or refined. If VRvana can get the support they need from kickstarter and other private investors they have a chance. The OR should have a considerable advantage, as its already hugely funded, has a very large highly skilled core group, they support most of the VR software developers with cash, and expertise, while gaining a variety of expertise from their partners like Samsung, and Facebook. Any reasonable person would have to give the edge to the OR development.

I'm sure each developer will build their versions of each others VR breakthroughs, like VRvana version of "low persistence" in their hardware. That said, the monies in the software not the hardware, and part of the reason the Oculus Team is strongly invested in the VR software market, and supporting other VR HMD's companies with internal software powered Oculus.

OR will make more money, yes, but I care less about that. VRvana is a better sim product so far with its AR option and better specs. I like it better.

Most people won't be put off by Facebook owning Oculus. The ones that will are irrelevant anyway.

I've got a DK2. It works perfectly for my needs - especially with Prepar3D.

The VRVana device may be better, but for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist as an end-user product - only as a pre-product prototype. I don't worry about what's coming or might be coming, I pay attention to what is here NOW.

g.

Game Informer: "The clarity was impressive, rivalling some of the best experiences I’ve had with a Rift or Morpheus."

The Totem is a premium Virtual Reality (VR) headset with features that have never been seen before. It connects to any HDMI source (computer, console, Blu-ray, tablet, etc.) that plays Side-by-Side (SbS) 3D video or games, making it an investment compatible with more than one single platform. What makes the Totem so exciting, aside from its no compromise full HD resolution OLED display and wide field-of-view, is its outstanding user experience, onboard cameras and built-in acceleration.

XBox, Playstaion, Apple, Windows, Linux compatible. Very versatile.

VRvana is going to be way better for sims. It is no longer just a prototype. DK1 is on the way.

Finally someone who has actually tried the VRvana....remember its still a prototype.....with unfinished features

http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2gvwpj/vrvanas_totem_is_it_vaporware_my_impression_after/

You did not read my post from someone who tested it.

Game Informer: "The clarity was impressive, rivalling some of the best experiences I’ve had with a Rift or Morpheus."

And that was just the prototype. Wait until DK1 is out.

VRvana is making DK1 now. Won't be long. Its going to be better for simming than OR because of its better options like being able to see through with AR options. VRvana has had to overcome false smears from OR fanboys on other sites that it is vapourware and does not exist. It is a shame those types of people are so fanatical and blind to the fact there are legitimate and serious alternatives to OR.

Your statement that the VRvana will be better because of its options is quite frankly ridiculous because nobody knows yet what final specs will be of any of these hardware units.

The Oculus team are presenting a new prototype at the Connect conference called Cresent Bay. No word yet on the specs other than it has a higher res, higher FOV, integrated sound, etc. They are also stressing this latest prototype specs are still no where near ready for a consumer release. Users are stating a huge increase in presence over the DK2. I know I won't be buying any of the consumer units unless it has a physical IPD adjustment.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/7271/oculus-reveals-crescent-bay-prototype-oculus-rift/

First Hands-on: Oculus Rift Crescent Bay is Incredible

http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-oculus-rift-crescent-bay-prototype/

Awesome and VRvana will be even better with its AR capabilities.

Calling my opinions ridiculous shows immaturity and irritability. We all know you hate it when anyone disagrees with you, but you could please keep it civil.

There are a few VR hardware units besides VRvana working on AR, including the OR team. The Oculus Team have mentioned a combined AR/VR unit the size of sunglasses in the future. That said I still haven't gotten my head around the use of AR in combat flight sims. I don't see it happening for years. Combining and integrating a cockpit with tactile feedback with the complexities of the fighting world outside the cockpit seems very complicated, and very hard on computer resources that are already stretched to the limit with VR. Not to mention the resistance applied by levers etc. Right now I would prefer the real feel of my HOTA's system, but I'm very open to change when they eventually get AR and tactile feedback right.

Agree, but one of the downfalls of VR for combat sims is that you cannot see the real world. That is very important in combat sims, especially in realistic cockpits. It is unrealistic (but possibly convenient) to map everything to the HOTAS. The Air Force will not use VR at this point for flight training, because hey want realistic cockpits and they do not want their trainees fumbling for switches blindly, since it is so unrealistic compared to a real cockpit.

I agree most won't care since most are not serious simmers. Serious simmers however (especially those with pits), will want a resolution to this shortcoming, whether it be AR or some other answer to this problem.

Right mow VRvana is the best serious gear that has a solution to this problem.

BTW, Cresent Bay is only a prototype. DK3 is a ways off yet.

The VRvana solution is no better than any other VR hardware unit's pass thru solutions. VRvana solution is still a work in progress, and not implemented yet, so its anyones guess. Not sure I'm a fan of any type of pass thru solution, as its very likely to break "presence"...., usually not a good thing in VR.

Its obvious the Cresent Bay is a prototype, one in a long line of prototypes that will continue until they feel their latest prototype is ready to be converted to a consumer version.

Decent AR is a very long way off, until there is tactile, haptic feedback, and movement that would require even more accurate positional tracking, at a cheap enough price point. That said I'm sure there will be VR/AR units available, and the AR content entertaining, but no where near good enough for combat flight sim implementation.

Interesting video,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=By-IcNblqRo

VRvana will be better than OR for sims. Patience will be rewarded with a better product.

Totem, an indie Oculus Rift competitor, promises better virtual reality.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/21/678479...gmented-reality

Problem with the Totem is they are using a 1080p display,

and we already know it's not sufficient for flight sims.

It appears that VRvana has reached is initial funding in Kickstarter and will have its first Developers kit available in April 2015. Hopefully some of their claims will hold true, and developers will start making software for the device.

Vrvana: There is ‘enough space on the market for more than 2 gaming VR headsets’

http://vrfocus.com/archives/7338/vrvana-enough-space-market-2-gaming-vr-headsets/

So do they know it. It is just a prototype. That will change.

I seem to have spoke too soon on VRvana Kickstarter success. They've garnered around 100,000 dollars immediately, and are now at around 139,000 of the 350,000 they need. I'm not so sure they will make it, even if they did, 350,000 is no where near the money they will need. They will need to far surpass the 350,000 goal, or their next prototype will need to be good enough to garner a large sum from private investors.

VRvana hasn't promised better VR than Oculus yet, but when asked "what sets the Totem VR experience apart from competitors such as the Occulus Rift", they answered " We put attention to little details : individual focus for each eye so that you don't need to wear your glasses, onboard audio and positional tracking, passthru vision and hardware acceleration."

The latest OR prototype has an even higher res display mostly eliminating any SDE. Audio, and 360* positional tracking are no longer issues. Passthru vision is something that both will eventually have, but we have no idea which will be better implemented, if there is a difference. Internal hardware acceleration may or may not be needed, but if it is needed it should be fairly easy to implement cheaply. I really like VRvana's adjustable focus, but OR has said they're lenses are very much a work in progress also. The OR team say they have a number of other changes/features they aren't talking about, and I'm sure VRvana has as-well.

It will be interesting to see how the developments fair, as it will be in our best interest that more than one hardcore VR company survives to push each other, and push the price down. Unfortunately I believe VRvana has already lost, unless they can pull a rabbit out of the hat. The rabbit maybe AR, but many people believe decent AR still has too many problems yet to be solved, consequently AR may be too far down the road to save their current business model. As I've said before, the elephant in the room is OR's plan to sell the their hardware at cost, while investing heavily in content, where the money will be made. Only very well funded competitive hardware developers will be able to survive that kind of tactic.

We shall see. It will be a better VR kit than OR for simming if it makes it. $141,000 and counting............

VRVana has pulled their Kickstarter offering with five days left, as it obviously wasn't going to reach its goal. They suggested that part of the problem were some of the yet nonworking prototype features. They are now accepting preorders at their website. Unfortunately they are still talking about using a 1080P OLED screen, with a 90FOV for their next prototype, that the OR has proved just isn't good enough. I believe VRVana next prototype should offer a higher FOV and Resolution if they hope to garner enough interest to further fund their project.

I will say this: low resolution in a flight sim with a detailed, clickable cockpit is an immersion breaker. 1080p is not sufficient, especially at wide FOV with halved horizontal resolution per eye.

No AR passthrough is going to fix that unless you've got thousands of dollars and a whole room to blow on your own custom cockpit, which most likely only fits a single aircraft.

Meanwhile, I've been messing about with old DOS games and a set of Virtual i-O i-glasses to see what works with the head-tracking and stereo 3D. Like the other VR headsets of the 1990s, the resolution is pitifully low, not even a full 320x240. I hope you like seeing subpixels!

Gives me more appreciation for the post-Oculus state of VR, at any rate. I'm still holding out for a good consumer-ready headset with all the software support and such in place.

Same res as OR prototypes. Vrvana is aware this will not be sufficient for the consumer release.

Oculus haven't declared what display their latest Cresent Bay prototype was running, but users have strongly suggested that its higher than 1080P, and probably 1440P. I would suggest the Totems next prototype should be atleast 1440P if it wants to generate enough hype to secure enough preorders, or generate more private funding. Not to mention having the features they've been talking about actually working in a prototype.

You know the only way to do that is use Samsung phones parts lke OR uses and Vrvana uses the superior RGB sub-pixel structure as opposed to the pentile structure seen on the Rift DK2. So that won't happen until later prototype, as was the case for OR. In the long run Vrvana will be a better product unless OR adopts all Totem's features.

Maybe, but highly unlikely. Bringing up the pixel structure of an old prototype has little to do with whats happening today. 1080P with any type of pixel structure simply isn't good enough. Vrvana will have to leap frog or atleast compete with some of the features the latest Oculus Prototype Cresent Bay has already brought to the table to gain the support they need. Vrvana hasn't shown any working prototypes with the features that you think will make them better. When that happens they might garner the investors, and hire the people required to have any hope of competing with Oculus. I know I will support them when they do, but I haven't see anything yet to suggest its imminent. For the moment it appears that their only supporters are the ones that lost their minds when Facebook became involved with Oculus.

I'm all for underdogs, but I just don't like the odds of ten fellow Canadians, with no funding, competing against Facebooks billions/manpower, Samsungs R&D display technology, and Oculus's work force of over a hundred of the brightest minds in the industry, selling their product at cost. Vrvana will need to have some secret VR tech with an exclusive patent to have any hope of succeeding. That said there are rumours that another company "Magic Leap" is coming out with something that could change everything. http://www.roadtovr.com/ Reportedly on the Verge of a $500m Investment, Here’s What We Know About Magic Leap

Not so unlikely. Vrvana will be a better product unless OR adopts Totem's extra features. Vrvana will have better res in later prototypes. They are just using the 1080p like Oculus did for their early prototypes.

Vrvana doesn't have any extra features working yet, and Oculus has discussed, and are looking at all the options Vrvana has talked about implementing, and more, long before anyone ever heard of Vrvana.

Vrvana has several features OR does not have that are working.

One feature that OR does not have and Vrvana does have, is 3D passthrough vision so you can see your real world space without having to take off the headset and its working. More compatability than OR with HDMI, and several other on board features and that is working. There are more.

Vrvana will ultimately be the premium product unless OR adopts Totem's extra features.

The Totems doesn't have a pass thru camera working yet, and the Oculus team has talked about using that option long before anyone heard about the Totem. The totem also talks about using their forward facing cameras for their 6DOF option, but that would entail placing markers on the wall around the room. I'm not so sure the onboard cameras are the best idea, as they add weight, make the HMD larger, require perfect scaling/latencies to coordinate arm/hand movements with what you see in the camera, and having to place stickers on the wall. Those are probably just a few of the reason Oculus hasn't implemented that option, and are testing other ideas.

The added features especially pass through and the better compatibility with HDMI of Vrvana will ultimately be the premium product unless OR adopts Totem's extra features.

I'd say there is about a 5% chance of that happening? Its far more likely that it will have the same outcome as your assertion that VR will never succeed due to the motion sickness issue. Edit

You are resorting to name calling and lies about me yet again, please stop.

Edit;
Yes, I agree, 'please stop'.
Lets just be adults here, no sense in dropping down a level.
Keep the focus on the subject matter, not personal jabs.

Thanks,
Murphy.

Further correction of a false statement.

I said if they don't fix the nausea in OR, it will reduce sales.
I never said VR will never succeed, because of nausea.

I don't know how much experience you guys had with various hardware, but from my experience with the OR DK1, android based VR (ColorCross HMD with a Note 3) and the OR DK2 (which I own), so far the most crucial feature for an immersive and nausea free experience has been low latency positional tracking, and the DK2 nailed that.

Seriously, until you get to test and compare different tracking methods you probably won't realise how important that is. For me the lack of clarity about the positional tracking in the Totem was the thing that I found the most concerning and alarming, because I don't think that this is a feature where things should be left to be determined later.

Regarding nausea, I think the OR DK2 is already doing an amazing job. I had no nausea until I tried games which relied on third party drivers to use stereoscopic 3D with no positional tracking. Even more surprising was the fact that my wife felt no nausea while she easily gets motion sickness while watching a monitor or TV - I expected her to throw up (even had a bucked nearby!) with the DK2 and instead she enjoyed it and was wowed by the level of immersion it provides.

All in all, all I can say is that my mind is still blown away by the potential for sims - I have a very hard time going back to sims using a monitor (I play DCS with DK2 and plan to try the 3rd party support for Prepar3d soon). I just wish that RoF was supported, it would be such an ideal fit for the DK2 experience.

You still haven't grown up I see.

My problem with the DK2 besides its resolution, is the average IPD setting is around 63, and it can't be physically adjusted to my IPD of 73. There is a software adjustment, but it doesn't help much. The consumer version will need a physical IPD adjustment, or lenses with a wider/narrower IPD range, to be useful for those outside the average. I know the development is aware of the problem, and are looking at solutions, and I believe the Cresent Bay has wider lenses, but not sure what IPD's are in its range.

There is a myriad of issues to solve before the consumer release, but if they get it right it could be a real boone for the flight sim genre.

Please stop with the personal insults. You don't seem to be able to stay civil. Dredging up 7 month old comment to justify todays unprovoked insults? I've moved on. You should too.

I think you are right. And the added features especially pass through and the better compatibility with HDMI of Vrvana will ultimately be the premium product unless OR also adopts Totem's extra features.

Your the one playing games, and irrationally negative regarding anything Oculus.

Chivas, yes with an IPD of 73 the DK2 isn't ideally designed for your eyes and it's a pity that there aren't alternative mounting plates or an adjustment mechanism for the IPD. There are 3rd party adapters going up to 69.5 though, so not that far (see http://www.shapeways.com/model/2451736/69-5mm-widest-lens-separators-oculus-rift-dk2.html) but my guess is that CV1, which aims is to be suitable for mass market, will have a more accomodating design (I agree, some level of mechanical adjustment would really be welcome - it's not really a challenging problem neither). I'm lucky, my IPD is 62.5, so the DK2 lenses are a perfect fit for me.
I'm going to test Prepar3d with the DK2 this week when I can finally find some time.

"With Real World View, you'll be able to see the world around you without taking off Totem. Also in the works, positional tracking. And eventually, AR. Performance is important and every millisecond counts. We do pre-lens distortion and sensor fusion in hardware. What does that mean? We offload work from your computer so you won't have to buy a new one to play your games in VR. We convert surround sound to stereo while keeping spatial awareness ("binaural HRTF" for you sound geeks) and output it to 3.5 mm jacks for use with your own headphones. It helps to know those gunshots are coming from right behind you, slightly to your left! Each lens can be adjusted individually for myopia and hyperopia (from -7 to +3 diopters). No need to wear contact lenses or have your glasses uncomfortably squeezed against your eyelashes. Three dedicated buttons to interact with Totem through menus and switch to Real world view. Beautiful, crisp text not just in the center. These lenses were custom designed and built for Totem."

Vrvana sounds like the best option for VR simming for sure.

FlyingMonkey: You will LOVE Prepar3D using the DCOC plugin! I've been flying the Maule a lot and it's a hoot.

Sentinal50: Do you own an Oculus Rift DK2?

g.

No, my friend has one and I have used it quite a bit. I'm getting the Vrvana Totem.

Yes, I've looked at shapeways, but have made my own mod to fit my IPD, it works but I think any type of this kind of mod for wider IPD's makes the FOV appear even smaller.

Vrvana aims to use an RGB sub-pixel structure, which will be better than the pentile structure that the Rift DK2 and Gear VR have to offer. No more screen door and better resolution. Yay!

That could be true for Vrvana, if they find the funding required to actually complete a working prototype, and have access to the necessary displays. Their Kickstarter funding failed so they are now accepting preorder monies, with the hopes it will provide the necessary cash, if anyones interested in helping out.

Hopefully Vrvana finds the necessary funding, and their product is good enough competition to drive the other VR developers to be better. That would be a win/win for us all. I believe the latest Oculus Cresent Bay prototype has already removed most of the SDE issue, and have access to the latest Samsung prototype displays that should make SDE a non issue for the OR consumer version.

I have tried it many times it is a good prototype to show the potential ofVR. My friend got the DK2 and I am getting the Totem because of the added features especially pass through and the better compatibility with HDMI of Vrvana will ultimately be the premium product. Also because Vrvana aims to use an RGB sub-pixel structure, which will be better than the pentile structure that the Rift DK2 and Gear VR have to offer. No more screen door effect.

Well you *hope* Vrvana will be the premium product. It may or may not. Until they're shipping to developers, it's nothing more than marketing-powered smoke and mirrors.

The visible pixel structure in the DK2 has zero effect on the usability of the device. The only time you notice it is when you're actively looking for it.

g.

My friend and I see it all the time unfortunately, as do many others. Text is hard to read and has a big effect on usability.

Sentinal....if you don't mind me asking, what have you actually seen regarding the Vrvana Totem because the majority of what you are stating in your posts are direct quotes lifted off their website!

You seem very keen to dismiss Oculus whilst maintaining that Vrvana already has it beaten. Admittedly it does look very good, but then every company 'bigs up' their own products and this one doesn't even look like the first prototypes will be in the hands of developers until October 2015! That says to me that the technology they are using is still very immature so I'm not convinced how you can be sure that this already has pushed Oculus into second place.

I have an Oculus myself, it's impressive technology but as we're all aware there are still several areas that need improving before this can go anywhere near retail. The promising thing is the speed of their progress and the reports from the people (outside of Oculus) who have used Crescent Bay and claimed that from their own l use it is another big jump. I can't wait for all these devices to be part of our gaming/simming but not really convinced how you can be so impressed with something that is completely unproven.

I agree with most of you say, except I did not say they have already got OR beaten. They are two different products. OR is going for mass market and Vrvana is a premium niche product. I am impressed with the pass through AR and their screen technology (which I have seen elsewhere) that does not have screen door effect, a major annoyance to me and others. OR will be fine for those who do not want pass through or wide compatibility of HDMI. I really want AR pass through..

That's fair enough....the pass through is definitely something Oculus need to think about but one other thing that got my attention on their website was that it does say the Vrvana is 1080p - I don't know if this is just for the prototype but I think regardless of pen-tile or RGB the Oculus DK2 has proven that with the screen so close to your eyes it simply doesn't offer enough detail at that resolution.

Even if the Oculus didn't have the screen door effect, and like 'Chivas' has already said once you're in a good and immersive virtual world it's not something that you notice as much (if at all), however the resolution means the image for me anyway, is just not detailed enough hence why 1440p has to be the minimum for gaming.

I think that 1080p is prototype res like OR used for their early prototype. I read they already know 1080 is not enough for consumer.

As for screen door, many including myself notice it all the time. It also messes up text which is a big negative. They need to fix that just ass Vrvana needs more than 1080. Perhaps Samsung can start producing high res RGB sub-pixel structure, that would be awesome. With pass through as well, I would be an Oculus convert.

I don't think anyone should need converting to anything just yet, I'm certain we're going to see some excellent improvements over the next 12 months....it's just that Oculus look likely to be first to get there and will probably get a large chunk of the developer support.

Yep, though I would think if they are going for the mass sales, which I think they are, HDMI comparability would be better for them.

Surprisingly in a recent Palmer interview, he stated that the 2.4 million kickstarter funds were not enough to fund their DK1 prototype made in China, because of cost overruns etc. This could be a huge problem for Vrvana, if they don't find a partner with deep pockets soon. Leap Motion AR have been very quite publicly about their new project, but just attracted over 500 million from Google.