Oculus Rift thread - £399 Rift & Touch controller bundle!

An Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for consumers could go on sale next year, a company representative told Business Insider at Facebook's F8 developer conference today.

Management at Oculus VR, the Irvine, Calif.-company that Facebook bought for $2 billion earlier this year, will be "disappointed" if it doesn't have a headset available at retail for ordinary people by 2016, according to an Oculus spokesperson.

A consumer Oculus product in 2015 will be exciting for a couple of reasons:
Almost everyone who tries the device is completely blown away by the experience. It's completely different from any other audio-visual gadget you've ever tried — the worlds inside the headsets feel real and deep, because the company has gotten rid of the screen time "lag" that occurs when users move their heads. On top of that, the environment moves naturally as you move. In the game I tried today, I peered out into a lava-filled hellscape full of demons guarding battlements. If I leaned forward, I could see into the rivers of molten rock that flowed between them. Attendees at the conference lined up 20 deep to get 5 minutes with the device.
Oculus will completely turn the console game economy on its head. Once you've played a game inside Oculus, going back to playing on a TV just feels lame.

Currently, Oculus is only selling development kits to game creators. The Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 is currently on sale for $350, and units will start shipping to developers only in July of this year. After that, Oculus VR must wait while those developers create an ecosystem of cool games — there is no point in selling the headsets to consumers if there are no games or other content for them to see. That process could take months.

There is no word on a price tag for consumers. The company is in the process of building a team to work on marketing and branding the product.

Game creation takes time, but Redner says the current thinking is that there should be enough titles to justify consumer usage by 2016.

More tantalizing still is what Oculus is hiding inside the secret "Valve Room" within its Irvine headquarters near Los Angeles. (Valve is the company that originally used the room for developing games; Oculus has taken it over.) We first heard about this from Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon, an investor in Oculus VR, who says that the version of Oculus Rift inside the "special room" is more powerful and impressive than even the existing Crystal Cove and DK2 versions that outsiders have been allowed to play with.

"Crystal Cove is 50% of what they are running in LA," he says. Oculus Rift Crystal Cove is impressive, but it's still obvious that you're inside an animated game environment. It doesn't yet closely approximate reality. However, "what they have in LA does," Dixon tells us. "You go into a room. It's a special room. Fancier headset. ... In user testing it gets to a level of realism where almost all people feel that it's realistic." He gestured to the San Francisco street where we were drinking coffee. "Imagine everything you can see now, but it's a little bit pixelated. Eventually that [pixelation] will go away."

He believes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bought the company after being ushered into the Valve Room. (He obviously tried the other versions as well.)

The Oculus rep wasn't quite as hyperbolic when asked about the "mythic" room. But he did tell us that the demo version inside the Valve room does feature a photorealistic experience that is so real even people who are very sensitive to motion sickness don't "feel" it.

The test unit has an entire room to itself because it requires a massive amount of processing power to run. It's a headset tethered to a giant server, basically. Oculus expects, eventually, to be able to crunch that down into units that can be sold commercially.

Games will only be the start of it. Once it is commercially available, "There will be a million in the U.S. military, police, and fire services," Dixon says. "Anything to do with training" that is dangerous will utilize an Oculus experience instead, he believes.

We can't wait.

Dispute between Bethesda parent company and Facebook turns legal. Carmack joined Oculus VR in August 2013 Zenimax Media, which acquired Id Software in 2009 for what is believed to be north of $100 million, claims that when Carmack left the company he took various knowledge and trade secrets with him. Carmack joined Oculus VR in August 2013 to become the company's chief technical officer. But it is alleged that the ideas and technologies the seasoned programmer had used while at Id Software are the property of Zenimax.

In a statement issued to Engadget, Oculus VR denied the claims. It said: "It's unfortunate, but when there's this type of transaction, people come out of the woodwork with ridiculous and absurd claims. We intend to vigorously defend Oculus and its investors to the fullest extent."
Zenimax alleges that, when it had employed Carmack, the developer was building technologies that were key to improving its performance and commercial viability of Oculus Rift.

The corporation stated: "The proprietary technology and know-how Mr. Carmack developed when he was a ZeniMax employee, and used by Oculus, are owned by ZeniMax." It adds: "ZeniMax's technology may not be licensed, transferred or sold without ZeniMax Media's approval. ZeniMax's intellectual property rights arise by reason of extensive VR research and development works done over a number of years by John Carmack while a ZeniMax employee, and others. "ZeniMax provided necessary VR technology and other valuable assistance to Palmer Luckey and other Oculus employees in 2012 and 2013 to make the Oculus Rift a viable VR product, superior to other VR market offerings. The allegations also mention Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey,

"Luckey acknowledged in writing ZeniMax's legal ownership of this intellectual property. It was further agreed that Mr. Luckey would not disclose this technology to third persons without approval."In March, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion. The legal dispute could go to court if not settled

Venom » Sat May 10, 2014 10:53 am wrote:Amazing. Another self-propelled flying game is Skycall - Rook Island. It's offers the same experiences that dreams are made from™.

That's incredible! If the consumer version isn't gimped by Facebook next year, I'll probably buy one instead of a new GPU.

Xeno wrote:I'm still on board for one myself but I will have to upgrade my card as well.

We're proud to announce our latest work with innovation for the KNVB (Royal Dutch Football Association) and the Dutch national team. A unique Google Glass solution with live video analysis is brought to the training camp that starts today, and will soon be followed by an interactive Oculus Rift application to relive game situations.

Triple IT and the KNVB explore how new and interactive technology can contribute to football. The first solutions with wearables and virtual reality are developed, tested and will be used to train the Dutch players in run-up to the World Cup in Brazil.



Max Reckers, Video analyst at KNVB: "Louis van Gaal is known for its progressive approach. That mindset allows us to go further than other teams. The deployment of Google Glass and Oculus Rift give us that desired lead."

Realtime video

Triple IT developed a unique analysis app for trainers to have static information and live video of occuring game situations available through Google Glass. While these recordings are generally analyzed in retrospect, the Glass app enables them to have a more profound insight into player movements as the action takes place. Providing a unique and handsfree tool for trainers in the field to respond even more effectively.

Virtual reality

Other solutions include the interactive simulation and analysis tool that uses virtual reality. Thanks to the Oculus Rift, previous game situations can be relived infinitely. With the Oculus Rift glasses on you will find yourself on the field as one of the players, or at any desired position while a specific course of the game is simulated. The reanaction enables players to look back at specific actions, experience it from a different perspective and simulate alternative actions to gain a better understanding and improve their game in a interactive manner.

Xeno » Sun May 11, 2014 9:54 am wrote:560TI, I will need a better card to run the games on it more effectively. It will be about time for me to update the card anyway tbh. So in for a penny in for £600.

The Korean consumer electronics giant is about to enter another major new category: virtual reality headsets. We're told by sources close to Samsung that a virtual reality headset is not only in the works at the company's mobile division, but it's set to be announced this year. The urgency is said to be a measure of beating Facebook's Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus to market. Some developers already have early versions of the headset, which -- at least in the development stages -- is powered by flagship Galaxy devices (think: Note 3, Galaxy S5). The consumer model, however, is said to require the power of next-gen, unannounced Galaxy phones and tablets.

CitizenErased wrote:

Thought I was looking at some sort of sex machine at first.

I participated in the Boston VR jam this past weekend, had an awesome time making some new VR stuff, and had my mind completely melted by the Valve hardware and demos. We've had a few posts here about it already, but some more pics, thoughts and details here:

Pics of the Valve HMD's: http://imgur.com/a/jSdgb#0

The most interesting thing I heard all weekend was: after I tried the demos, I was asking about The Room (Valve's Holodeck setup with AR trackers on the walls), and asked if it would be viable to do edge detection in an arbitrary space to get inside-out (cameras on the HMD looking out) positional tracking, and the guy from Valve said "no, that's not fast enough; we have a different solution already." My speculation has run dry -- what do you guys think it could be that doesn't involve trackers on the wall, edge detection, or external cameras? And I'm assuming not STEM or a similar sensor, since they're not as accurate as cameras, and Valve & Oculus are looking for the least-cumbersome experience.

Thoughts on the Valve hardware & demos: We ran our jam project on the hardware a number of times, and also each got to run through Valve's official demos. The demos were the same ones they run in "The Room": a 3D grid of cubes showing webpages, a mirror showing your head as a cube, a tiny office of the 2D Portal people, the room full of pipes, a room with three of the robot playable characters from Portal 2 (one that's your size, one tiny, one huge), one looking at a complex animated robot, and one where particles are constantly created a couple of feet in front of your face (thousands of serious DX11 compute particles with complex motion). All were very impressive; everyone I talked to agreed that the office full of Portal people was the most interesting: you really felt like a giant, and being able to bend down and hang out among them was very cool.

Needless to say, the experience in the HMD is amazing: low persistence, perfect tracking (within the camera of course), very high frame rate (they implored us to keep the jam games running at higher than 95 FPS). I don't get sim sickness with the DK1 as it is, but nonetheless felt much more comfortable in the Valve units. However, I did consistently have major disorientation after leaving the HMD: I felt a little fuzzy and distant, and once felt like I was going to fall over. I felt something similar the very first time I came out of the DK1, never since, but every time after leaving the Valve units (4 or 5 times).

Other details:

•The HMD's are dual vertical S4 (OLED) screens, running a total of 2160x1280, with white IR-reflective dots on the shell. As you see in the pictures, the bottom ~half of the screen sticks out below the faceplate, so clearly you're only seeing about half of it.

•This is not a change of plans from The Room (as I saw someone speculate in another thread) -- the Valve guys said that they each have one of these units on their desks for convenient VR testing, and then they load it up in the Room for primetime.

•We used a Unity plugin from Valve which is interoperable with DK1, DK2 (apparently), and the Valve hardware. The biggest end-user difference between this plugin and the Oculus Unity plugin that my team experienced is that the Valve plugin creates the stereo camera setup at runtime, so attaching gameobjects to the camera / using its forward vector / etc is slightly less trivial.

•No DK2's, or Oculus folks, to be had -- word on the grapevine is that they decided they couldn't afford the time off, as they're busting ass getting DK2 to the rest of us.

There's a Boston VR meetup tonight where people will be seeing the Valve hardware and jam games; we'll report back with any updates.

Update & Edit: /u/IMFROMSPACEMAN asked about how displaying the image across both screens works, so I asked the Valve guys, and they showed me this box that they made which, if I'm understanding it correctly, makes the image double wide and sends half to each screen. I'd like to point out how shockingly chill these guys are about posting stuff: I've asked for permission repeatedly, and they've been so chill that one of the guys literally lit that circuit board photo while the other held it so I could take that photo.

To be clear, the Dota 2 VR modes were mentioned as demos/experiments, not as confirmed things that they'll release. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it, being that they explicitly gave the social go-ahead for talking about and posting pictures of the hardware, but no such encouragement to spread news of content they're making (and I've as such removed that from the post... for what good that is now). Awesome as it would be... take it with a grain of salt please!