
The Inside Story of Oculus Rift - relampago
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/
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clickok
It doesn't really mention that Palmer Luckey was working with Mark Bolas' VR
group at USC [1] at the time of the Kickstarter. The Rift isn't the product of
a lone 18-year-old VR autodidact.

I'm not 100% certain regarding the timeline, but it's starting to seem odd how
_every_ article about Oculus seems to marginalize everyone but Palmer and
Carmack.

[1] [http://interactive.usc.edu/2012/06/12/mxr-lab-members-and-
al...](http://interactive.usc.edu/2012/06/12/mxr-lab-members-and-alum-get-
play-at-e3/)

~~~
the_watcher
Most of these articles marginalize key players in relation to the public face

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polskibus
Did Valve really contribute the most important part to Oculus that is the no-
nausea experience? If so, on what terms did they share the technology with
Oculus? I'm wondering if Valve is the winner in the shadows or the biggest
loser.

~~~
gatehouse
IIRC, Valve wants to make games for VR, they don't want to make VR.

~~~
polskibus
That's the current state, but surely if they patented the no-nausea bit of
tech, they wouldve earn millions just licensing it. It makes me wonder whether
the Valve claim in the story is accurate or perhaps there is another story
behind the official one.

~~~
angersock
So, that's likely absurd, right?

The "no-nausea" bit is more likely a combination of factors: low-latency, head
tracking with thus-and-such a precision, field-of-view tweaks, etc.

It'd be like patenting the ideal air-to-gasoline burning ratio: it's just a
fact of life.

~~~
wmf
My impression is that Valve contributed two qualitative improvements:
replacing accelerometer/gyro with optical tracking and replacing LCD with OLED
and blanking the OLED between each frame to reduce persistence.

~~~
angersock
The first is a very obvious step in improving absolute pose estimation--one
implemented in various videos around the time the devkit came out.

The other seems like a natural evolution of display technology.

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bbrks
_Sidenote:_ wired.com articles have a truly annoying UX error. The
slider/gallery goes full screen when the user presses 'F', which hides the
article.

Not very helpful when you want to find something written in the article by
Ctrl+F!

~~~
vvvv
For me, almost every single time: Ctrl+Shift+K, push to Kindle, close the
browser.

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aniijbod
Rubin helpfully fills in a lot of blank spaces in what we already knew about
this. The one nagging doubt that still lingers sits somewhere between what is
doable, versus what is done. The Kinect, for all it's technological triumphs
and impressive market performance, still leaves us waiting for whatever it was
that made it seem like it was going to change everything. While few who have
ever had the Oculus experience have any doubt that it could change everything,
we mustn't forget that we are also all still waiting for the first concrete
confirmation that this expectation will be met.

~~~
rasz_pl
Kinect rode on Microsoft >$1 billion marketing campaign of lies. Every PR clip
showed people interacting with fast paced action packed games in very
responsive way.

Reality of hardware was totally different. M$ wasnt ready, Project Natal was
couple of years away. They scrambled in panic and bought Primesense. Kinect
was basically repackaged Primesense dev kit.

Kinect was supposed to be answer to Wii. Problem is there is a huge difference
in speed between tracking 4 points of light versus complex DSP on a point
cloud. Kinect had a 100-500ms delay between something happening and skeletal
tracking on the screen. Kinect One only manages to cut that in ~half.

You simply CANT do responsive input with latencies in the hundreds of
milliseconds. This is why Kinect has failed to deliver what $1 billion of M$
PR promised four years ago.

Kinect is great for puzzle games, art projects, slow complex input.

~~~
ryanburk
do you have sources for the latency numbers for kinect on xbox one? I've
searched and can't find anything concrete and the XDK isn't publicly
available.

and this might downvote me into oblivion, but is using "M$" still a thing? I
don't see how that helps a discussion.

~~~
rasz_pl
Unofficial Kinect one docs say 20ms depth sensor latency, this is same as
50fps vision camera so no lag there. They also say 60ms for tracking versus
90ms of original Kinect. Problem is original kinect did >100ms at minimum, and
topped at 500ms

[http://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/imda/sites/www.nrl.navy.mil.itd....](http://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/imda/sites/www.nrl.navy.mil.itd.imda/files/pdfs/2012_VRposter_kinectSkelPerf.pdf)

    
    
       We experienced maximum latencies of nearly 500 ms
    

M$ will cease to be a thing when Microsoft stops dropping Billion dollars on
every problem (kinect pr, original xbox pr, surface writeof)

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prawn
M$ is juvenile. Big companies will tend to spend up on building and then
promoting their products. What's the shame in that?

~~~
protonfish
The shame is with enough money pigs can fly. If the product you were making
was something of quality that people wanted, you wouldn't need billions to ram
it down the public's throat. (You'd probably only need hundreds of thousands.)

~~~
prawn
How are you going to quantify what constitutes normal advertising and what is
"ramming it down throats"?

~~~
rasz_pl
You decide, how would you classify paying people from third world countries to
spam YT with "product reviews" in broken english?

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grogenaut
I didn't know it had shipped to retail already

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teraflop
It hasn't. That's why the article says: "Now Oculus is hard at work on its
long-awaited headset for consumers, which the company predicts will be
released later this year, or more likely early next year, or perhaps even not
so early next year."

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grogenaut
Yes I get that but the article says how it became a reality. It's been a non-
consumer reality for quite a while in arcades. It's still not a reality unless
you have a dev kit.

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jesuslop
Wired, your pages are slooow.

