
The First Look at the New Oculus VR Prototype - Impossible
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2014/01/oculus-rift
======
ericd
The Oculus dev kit is absolutely incredible on fast hardware with the right
game
([http://owlchemylabs.com/aaaaaculus/](http://owlchemylabs.com/aaaaaculus/)
for example, is one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had, without much
nausea). I expected to be somewhat lukewarm about it, but it almost
immediately became the most exciting bit of consumer tech in my eyes, whereas
the Glass had the opposite trajectory for me.

Most of the issues I've come across have been from low frame rates with low-
powered hardware (most laptops), and games with jarring transitions (loading
screens where everything freezes are terrible). The dev kit also has very
visible pixels, which gives it a substantial screen door effect, and there's
some blur when turning your head. The biggest issue, though, is that there's
no way that I know of to match what's going on in your inner ear with what's
going on screen in something with a lot of quick acceleration/deceleration
like a driving game.

However, I think that with translation tracking, less motion blur, better
resolution, and games that are well suited to it (maybe not driving), it's
going to be completely transformative. And I think it will open up new fields
outside of games.

If you have a bit of cash you wouldn't mind spending, I would highly recommend
ordering one of the dev kits from their site ($300), even if you don't
immediately plan on developing for it. It will most likely spur a lot of ideas
for you, game related and otherwise.

~~~
User8712
For driving games, there's one solution for simulating turns, and
acceleration/deceleration. That's rotating your seat. When you accelerate, the
chair rotates backwards, and gravity does the work of pushing you back in your
seat. The faster you accelerate, the more the chair leans back. When you brake
quickly, the seat leans forward, and you feel your seat belt pushing into your
chest as it holds you in place. Turn right, chair rotates left, etc.

You're limited to 1G though. This is enough to give the experience of driving
and turning in a fast car, but you're not going to be pulling Formula 1 level
Gs, although I don't think the average person wants to experience that anyway.

Here's a similar simulator. You'd just be using the rift instead of a TV
mounted display.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFCRh-
anfRg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFCRh-anfRg)

Edit: Just noticed the system in the video also does up and down. I imagine
that's an awesome effect when you go down a hill fast, and get that sense of
weightlessness for a brief second.

~~~
doorhammer
Fun article I just read on G forces because I was curious just how many G's an
F1 car put someone through:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/motorsport/7681665/Formu...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/motorsport/7681665/Formula-
One-drivers-feel-the-G-force.html)

~~~
newman314
More impressively, see just how crazy strong F1 driver necks are.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtKSGvVxw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtKSGvVxw8)

------
bcjordan
The first day I hooked the Rift Dev kit up to the Razer Hydra I nearly broke
my monitor trying to juggle virtual balls. It was awesome.

One of the most incredible experiences has been playing as the Team Fortress 2
pyro. Perceiving the 3d-volume of the flame flowing out from the gun was a
serious "wow" moment.

There's a lot to be excited about here. It sounds like the resolution is going
up and the latency is coming down significantly in the next revision.
Carmack's devlog tweets[0] are just fascinating. The team is filled with
incredible devs. I'm cautiously optimistic that believable VR is possible and,
if so, I'm pretty sure Oculus will make the thing that fools your brain first.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack)

------
exDM69
Here's an interesting competitor to Oculus Rift called CastAR that uses a very
different solution. It uses a head mounted mini projectors and a retro
reflecting surface. It's different from Oculus in the sense that it doesn't
block the external world like a head mounted display does. This is an
advantage in gaming because you can actually see the gaming controllers. It
also allows interesting AR solutions.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar-
the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system)

This project was originally Jeri Ellsworth's research project at Valve but the
funding was pulled and these guys are trying to kickstart a new business.

When playing a flight simulator with the Oculus Rift, I had this problem that
I could not see the physical controls. I was using a full HOTAS (hands on
throttle and stick) controller so regular flying wasn't a problem but when I
had to lower the landing gear, I had to peer down my nose under the Rift's
head mounted display to see where the button for the landing gear was.

I'm not going to pick any favorites because I've only tried one and not the
other but I want both of these projects to succeed! This way we can have
competing alternative technologies and whoever prevails will be made better by
the competition.

------
adamesque
I got a chance to play with an Oculus dev kit for 15-20 minutes over the
holidays, and almost everyone who tried it walked away with some pretty gnarly
nausea (experienced gamers and newcomers alike). I'm excited to see so many of
the updates in the new prototype focused around alleviating this discomfort.

It's probably telling that they're couching the updates in language that
addresses this, rather than just touting the technical accomplishments.

~~~
corysama
The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice.
Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to
VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for
the first time!"

The bad news is that while better tech and better design can significantly
reduce motion sickness, I doubt we will ever completely eliminate it.

The really bad news is that nausea is funny. It's great for catchy headlines
and quippy comments. I'm really afraid that the Rift will get a reputation as
a "vomit helmet" and that will lead the masses to dismiss it. That would be a
tragedy.

It's really important PR for VR to get the word out: If you feel sick, stop.
Don't try to push through, you'll make it really bad. Try again much later.
With practice, it will get better and better. When you get over VR sickness,
all kinds of awesomeness awaits!

~~~
exDM69
> The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with
> practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that
> warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can
> read in the car for the first time!"

I think this is might be correct, I remember getting motion sickness from
playing Doom on a big monitor the first time. And several years later I was
playing a lot of FPS games with no ill effects at all.

But it takes a person with strong willpower to practice! I got pretty bad
motion sickness from the Rift, and it left me completely incapacitated for
hours afterwards. Not only did I feel like puking but I couldn't do any work
because my eyes couldn't focus on "2d" text on a monitor (we have a Rift
devkit at the office, I made the mistake of using it in the middle of the
day).

And I'm not a person with particularly bad motion sickness problems. There are
sensitive people who will definitely not touch any VR helmet after the first
time they've tried it and become sick for the rest of the day.

There will have to be improvements to the Rift hardware itself, the driver and
peripheral software and the games that support it. And more games will have to
be concerned about the physical correctness of movement, because it seems to
be a factor in VR sickness.

Here's an interesting "competitor" to Oculus Rift with an alternative
approach:
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar-
the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system)

------
rwmj
No front-facing camera yet? That would give you some of the advantages of
augmented reality, cost next to nothing, and allow gamers who are physically
sitting together to interact more.

~~~
krisgee
Camera latency + processing latency + display latency = vomit machine.

Not saying it's impossible just that it's a bit harder than slapping a camera
on the Rift.

~~~
Zigurd
Your vision has some latency. I think it's a good bet that variable amounts of
latency can be accommodated by your perception of reality.

------
cookiecaper
I got my dev kit last fall and had high expectations. I was somewhat
disappointed in it. No doubt it's awesome tech, but it is true dev hardware;
the screen is very pixelated and the software is buggy. I got sick almost
immediately, and the nausea and disorientation lasted for almost 24 hours. I
expected to play Oculus games for all weekend when I got it, and ended up
using it very sparsely. All in all I've probably not spent any more than 2
hours in the Rift.

It's a cool, mind-expanding demo that shows how VR is the future, and of
course sufficient if you're developing a game that depends on it, but it's not
quite the experience many developers will expect. I'm glad they're iterating.

------
daemonk
I understand that simulation/motion sickness is a biological response to
discrepancy between what you see and your sense of balance.

I've always wondered how much of the simulation sickness is psychological.
What if someone made a game where you play a paraplegic in a wheel chair. You
are allowed to move your head and look around via the oculus rift, but you
move with a joystick on the wheel chair via the controller. So will
psychologically disabling natural movement make a person less sick?

~~~
GuiA
I have a Rift SDK.

Motion sickness is very present (for me) in games like Minecraft; however, in
a demo like Titans of Space, where your character is stationery in a spaceship
(and only the spaceship moves, but you can look around of course) I don't get
motion sickness at all.

I hear that positional tracking could improve the motion sickness situation.

------
prawn
Any word on whether they've managed to remove the cable between the headset
and the base, or if that's possible/planned? Would wireless make the latency
issue too problematic? Looks like it's still there in the picture and it can
be a bit annoying in practice.

(I have a Rift dev kit lying idle in South Australia if anyone is keen to try
it out or buy it cheap. It's very interesting but I'm not a game developer so
not in a position to do more than muck around with demos!)

~~~
Tepix
You can use an Asus WAVI to eliminate the wires between your PC and the Rift.
It does both HDMI (1080p) and USB with very low latency.

~~~
prawn
If it's possible, then hopefully they can somehow include it in a future
release of the device.

------
drak0n1c
I wonder if the already amazing 110 degree FOV could be bumped up even more
with curved, wider eye-displays that wrap around to the wearer's temples?

Such a setup might benefit not only peripheral vision but also 3D perspective.
Are there downsides I am not considering? (assuming that curved display tech
is/becomes performant enough for Oculus' purposes)

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Are there downsides I am not considering?

Since total resolution is (for all intents and purposes) capped, there's a 1:1
tradeoff between FOV and PPI. Some people already think Oculus has gone too
far, and would be better with a narrower FOV and higher PPI.

------
lowglow
If people are truly interested in wearables and externals like this, we need
some feedback on our next hackathon: [http://www.techendo.co/posts/hackendo-
san-francisco-wearable...](http://www.techendo.co/posts/hackendo-san-
francisco-wearables-externals-expo-and-hackathon)

~~~
blhack
Cool, there is also a wearables hackathon happening in Phoenix next week by
#hackphx: [http://hackphx.com/](http://hackphx.com/)

They've done some really awesome hackathons in the last year or so.

(Full disclosure: this happens at a hackerspace I'm very active in [heatsync
labs], and I have volunteered at the last couple of events)

~~~
lowglow
Awesome. :)

------
blazespin
The dirty little secret here is that Nausea isn't just caused by hardware
alone, but also by software. There are a significant number of things software
can do wrong which makes the improvements on the Rift redundant. For example,
jumping from large heights, moving too quickly, stopping too suddenly, poor
clipping artifacts, inconsistent lighting, and much much more.

OVR can talk all day about how they've 'fixed' nausea, but until they fix the
games people want to play (which aren't going to be optimized for a pretty
small subset of hard core gamers that have one of these), they're going to
have a hard time selling the HMDs.

That all being said, I have one and love it dearly and try to get everyone I
know to buy one. Realistically though, it's going to take awhile to fully
launch this device.

------
sopooneo
This Rift deeply excites me. But I wonder what time-scale we need to consider
for this to be an intermediate step?

That is, we're putting an interface on an interface here. Picture on eyeball.
How long until we can mainline this stuff?

------
leoc
It's going to be pretty disappointing if the production Rift's resolution is
1080p or only a little higher, especially because it will make the Rift much
less useful as a general-purpose computing display for non-gaming tasks.
Hopefully they're just being coy so as not to give display manufacturers too
much leverage over them. I've been worried that they'll badly mugged on price
by the panel makers.

------
julianpye
I wrote up a blog post today about the Oculus and its potential to grab a big
bite out of Hollywood at [https://medium.com/best-of-
tech/1a3151f2bc55](https://medium.com/best-of-tech/1a3151f2bc55)

Don't mistake it with the Digital 3D experience that came to home televisions
and is absent this year at CES - it is a totally new ballgame.

------
kaizendc
I received DevKit V1 a few weeks ago and had the privilege to demo it to a few
friends and family over the holidays.

Everyone from ages 4 to 80 absolutely loved it. Most of these people are not
even gamers, and they could see the incredible potential of this device.

It is truly a novel experience. Now I'm just trying to save up some cash so
that I can invest in this company when it goes public!

------
weaksauce
I can imagine the nausea induced by a game like mirrors edge would be off the
charts. I'm looking forward to this though!

~~~
simoncion
The unofficial Mirror's Edge Oculus port (on the Kickstartered dev hardware)
caused virtually no nausea for me. (Well, except for the parts where camera
control is taken away from you, natch.) I cannot say the same about the
official TF2 Oculus software. I'm not sure what the difference is between the
two, but it was most definitely there for me.

------
Kiro
I'm worried that the motion sickness was a side effect of the experience being
so realistic and that the removal of it will make it less real. Please tell me
I'm wrong!

~~~
Kiro
Not sure how I should interpret the downvote. I WANT to be proven wrong since
I'm getting one so please tell me if I am.

------
bm1362
Anyone in Seattle looking to sell a Rift? I'd like to give it a shot but don't
intend to spend $300.

------
idoco
A classic case of "Shut up and take my money!"

------
knodi
I can't wait for this.

