8 ms·

Oculus VR’s New “Crystal Cove” Prototype Is Kind of Amazing

101 points by kirtijthorat 13y ago

bane 13y ago
Did I hear him say "gaze detection" near the end of the video? that's also a big deal I haven't heard anything about anywhere else.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Sounds like he just meant head tracking.
- christoph 13y ago
  He definitely says it. I think the prototype is maybe simulating gaze detection at the moment based on the position of the reticle position set by the thumbstick and possibly current head position + previous position + guess work on what a players focus is likely to be. I certainly get the impression from the way he says it that this is something they are looking at the moment in a more advanced way and is a common conversation point in their software/hardware dev teams at the moment. VERY exciting.
- MBCook 13y ago
  I haven't seen that anywhere else, so he probably misspoke. Eye-tracking seems like it would be an obvious future enhancement. In the EVE spaceship demo, it seemed a little odd that you locked missiles based on where your head was pointing and not where your eyes were looking.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Unfortunately, eye tracking is only possible in broad strokes, not fine detail, and certainly not for tracking fast-moving small targets across the screen in a realtime action game. There's pretty much no such thing as a smooth eye movement; your brain tricks you into thinking your eyes are moving smoothly when they're not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade I wanted to use my eyes to create 3D models via eye tracking. Looked into it for about a week before concluding it was probably impossible, or at least way less accurate than good old-fashioned hand movements. Dunno what the Oculus guys are doing with gaze detection, but I doubt they're doing fine-grained detection such as being able to pick out a particular target with your eyes. (I would love to be wrong about this! That'd be an awesome feature. I just doubt whether it's technically possible.)
    - anologwintermut 13y ago
      From eye tracking can you infer where the user thinks they are looking? I.e. recover the illusory smooth eye motion I perceive when tracking a moving cat.
      - sillysaurus2 13y ago
        I think it'd be impossible because when you think you move your eye, your brain is essentially just moving a bitmap image of what you're looking at around the center of your vision. E.g. look at the word "sillysaurus2" above my comment. Look at the 's', then look at the 'y' -- keep looking back and forth. Your eye likely isn't moving at all, even though your focus of vision does. It happens mentally rather than physically.
        yackob03 13y ago
        I tried what you said and I could definitely feel my eye moving. Is that being synthesized by my brain?
        sillysaurus2 13y ago
        Indeed, it is. Strange but true. The way to convince yourself your eyeball isn't moving is to touch your actual eyeball with your fingertip -- like press lightly against the left corner side of your left eyeball with your left index finger -- and then switch your gaze back and forth between the two letters. As long as your viewing distance is correct, you won't feel any movement. (You may have to back your head away from the screen. I'm viewing from a distance of arm's length.) On the other hand, if you look back and forth between adjacent words, then you can feel physical eye movement.
        erikpukinskis 13y ago
        I recorded a video of myself doing this, and I certainly can't see any obvious eye movements. But if I think about the number of degrees that my eye is shifting between the 's' and the 'y', it's probably one degree at most. It's not clear to me that even if my eye was moving I would be able to register that movement in a video. I'm assuming you've seen some peer reviewed research that fixed peoples' heads and used high resolution eye tracking to support your hypotheses, though?
  - jfoster 13y ago
    Sometimes when people "misspeak" like that it provides insight into what they have been discussing internally, but haven't yet announced externally.
- lsv1 13y ago
  A rift with eye tracking would be ridiculous :)
  - Tuna-Fish 13y ago
    Actually, quite sensible. One of the problems of immersive VR is that you need very high precision near the fovea ( = at the point of screen you are looking at), and you need to render very fast at the edges of vision. This means that you need to render at a very high resolution and at a very high frame rate. This is, of course, a problem. However, while the vision at the fovea is very sharp, it is also very slow, and while the vision at the edges is very fast, it is very blurry and imprecise. With eye tracking, this is exploitable. The practice is called foveated rendering, and the idea is to only draw full precision near the position of the screen you are actually looking at, and elsewhere render at a much reduced resolution but at a higher frame rate. In tests, this has been found to be impossible to distinguish from just drawing the full screen at full resolution and speed.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
salient 13y ago
I saw a video of some of the Verge guys trying it out at CES, and pretty much all of them were like "I don't want to take this off" at the end. It sounds like Oculus Rift will change gaming forever, and not just gaming. There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.
- christoph 13y ago
  Fully agree. When you see something like this - http://vimeo.com/75321405 http://vimeo.com/75321405 You have to consider that from a consumer tech point of view, linking that film set to an Occulus Rift at the moment, is not a huge leap. In fact, it's so close, almost the biggest problem it faces is going to be on a creative level of re-thinking how to tell stories in a new medium. I don't think we're more than 5-10 years away.
- daenz 13y ago
  > you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere. Oculus IMAX. I like it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- utnick 13y ago
  Or sports watching, Not sure if this is possible yet, but I'm imagining a 360 degree camera at the courtside of every sporting event. Then this is streamed to you at home so you can focus in on whichever part of the play you choose and feels like you are sitting courtside of a game.
  - mrfusion 13y ago
    Why stop at court side? You could be I the middle of the court!
- 13y ago
daenz 13y ago
Awhile ago I made this image http://i.imgur.com/yaIpP2r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/yaIpP2r.jpg describing an arena where virtual combat could take place with Oculus Rifts. I used some hand-wavy idea of tracking user position via wifi (dumb idea), but with Oculus positional tracking, I wonder if this arena concept becomes closer to reality? Edit>> link to original thread http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fxpqb/xpost_from_rcrazyideas_airsoftlike_arenas_with/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fxpqb/xpost_from_rc...
- gamegoblin 13y ago
  I've tried to do position triangulation with RFID signal strength and had pretty terrible results. I suspect wifi would be just as bad. An infrared system would probably work well I think. (I know you addressed this) That being said, sign me up. I have a friend with an oculus dev kit and it has blown me away time and time again. I can see this kind of thing becoming reality. Just stick foam padding all over the place and you're golden.
  - johnpmayer 13y ago
    What about ultrasonic positioning?
    - digitalengineer 13y ago
      Beacons (from Apple) perhaps?
      - guelo 13y ago
        Bluetooth is really the same technology as wifi. Super inaccurate for localization.
- mey 13y ago
  People run into each other all the time with laser tag and people can actually see each other in that case. I would be concerned about people running into each other and into physical objects because of their lack of visual feedback on their reality. Say for example, two people facing each other with a virtual wall between them. If both accidentally try to walk "though" the wall they would simply collide with each other, potentially causing injury or damage to equipment. Not to be a buzzkill, I'd love a system that actually could support this, in theory a large room with many freedom of movement devices (like what Virtuix Omni is working on) would allow this idea in a much smaller space and no risk of players colliding.
kirtijthorat 13y ago
Does anyone know when this will be released? It says Prototype Model and then there is a developer kit. I am not a big fan of Developer Kit as they tend to be far from ready to be a consumer product. Also add the price factor. Ditto goes to Google Glass which has a developer edition for $1500 (of course only for selected/invited ones) but if it ever becomes a reality i.e. meaning a real consumer product and drops the price to $300 then I will not be happy since it cost me $1200 more and the latest model may have better h/w components.
- sekasi 13y ago
  If that difference in price versus getting it early to tinker bothers you, then you're probably not that interested in the product to begin with ;)
- modeless 13y ago
  They are likely to release a consumer product late this year or early next year, with an updated dev kit coming some time before that. Always subject to change of course since this is bleeding edge tech, but they can't delay too much or they risk Microsoft or Sony beating them to the punch.
  - blah32497 13y ago
    "they risk Microsoft or Sony beating them to the punch" I very curious what the competition is doing. They're obviously working on competing products, but nothing has been made public.
    - modeless 13y ago
      Sony has a head-tracking HMD at CES, but it's nowhere close to competing with the Rift. Yet. http://www.tested.com/tech/tvs/459687-ces-2014-impressions-sonys-head-tracking-hmd-prototype/ http://www.tested.com/tech/tvs/459687-ces-2014-impressions-s...
  - swalsh 13y ago
    I personally just can't imagine Microsoft or Sony beating them in this space... at least not for a very long time. One of the key advantages Oculus has is their staff, besides being made up of some of the most amazing programmers of our time (Carmack) they're also devoted gamers. Palmer literally created the oculus because he REALLY wanted it. There's a drive towards perfection that I just can't imagine a large company replicating as well.
scrabble 13y ago
They gained a huge asset with Carmack working full time for Oculus. I'd never have been interested in this, but now I am. It's progressing very nicely.
- erikpukinskis 13y ago
  I don't disagree that Carmack was a huge win, but it's a little insulting to Palmer and the rest of the team to suggest that he's the reason for their progress. He's only been on the team for a few months. A lot of what they're doing has been in the works for a long time. Plus, all I've heard about what Carmack has been doing is that he was working on Android stuff in the beginning.
  - cwyers 13y ago
    Carmack is a late add to the Occulus team, but he's been doing real work in reducing latency: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategies/ http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-...
    - benched 13y ago
      And for anyone who didn't know, Carmack has long been obsessively, arduously interested in latency problems.
- skeletonjelly 13y ago
  Have you tried it? It can stand on its own without Carmack.
prawn 13y ago
Tested have an interview/hands-on where they discuss why Oculus have used an optical approach with the external camera to track head movements. They note that it was superior to various other methods they tried. Wonder if eventually it could work with typical laptop web cams? http://www.tested.com/tech/459692-ces-2014-hands-oculus-vrs-crystal-cove-prototype/ http://www.tested.com/tech/459692-ces-2014-hands-oculus-vrs-... Also worth watching that video to hear about the switch to an OLED screen and the latency advantage there. Employees at that company must have so much fun trying all the alternatives to build the best product. (My dev kit in Australia is for sale if anyone is interested. Email in profile. It's amazing, but I'm curious more than I am a software developer so it might be more useful to someone else.)
- YZF 13y ago
  A similar approach could be used with a typical webcam. In their case it's probably a camera with a filter so they can isolate their IR LEDs. That's kind of a nice to have but it's not absolutely necessary. It's neat how they can get by with a single camera. Note the pattern of LEDs, as you move around they can use the pattern to locate you in 3d space. IMO the downside of using a camera is that you automatically get some latency as part of the deal. A full frame has to be read out, digitized and the 3d position derived. Some other systems could have better real time characteristics. The cost of this system is presumably a factor.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    With an embedded camera system you could be transmitting just the positional data to be fed into the computer after doing most/all of the work in hardware, no?
    - YZF 13y ago
      If the image you get out of the sensor is processing friendly (such as just the image of the IR leds) then you can do this pretty quickly in software. Some preprocessing on the camera can help but the source of most of the latency is going to be the image sensor readout. I've actually worked on a real time tracking system like this about 20 years ago.
lhl 13y ago
I've been following the Oculus CES coverage somewhat and by far the most in-depth interview/coverage has been by the Tested folks. Here's their video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNQHNkJY1g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNQHNkJY1g The most in-depth discussions probably happen on the Oculus Developer Forums and the Oculus Subreddit. RoadtoVR is good for general coverage on HMDs and peripherals.
- canadev 13y ago
  That was quite informative, but I have to say that the guy who did the interview really disoriented me. He kept jumping on everyone's words and it felt like he was way over caffeinated. I watched it almost 10 minutes ago and I still feel kind of jittery.
sukuriant 13y ago
So, Where can I buy one?
devindotcom 13y ago
Tried it out yesterday. Really a major improvement, and they're listening to feedback. The method of producing 'low persistence' is quite interesting, and only works becuase of the move to OLED. Really smart guys there.
- salient 13y ago
  Carmack has been talking about OLED for VR headsets for quite some time, and I'm sure Palmer and the rest were considering it, too. But I think it wasn't very accessible to them until recently. They're a start-up so they can't exactly go an order a few thousand 1080p OLED panels. This may have been possible now due to Samsung making the Galaxy S4 with a 1080p panel last year, and perhaps other launched some, too, and it pushed the prices down for such a panel, enough to make it viable for Oculus Rift.
  - bigtones 13y ago
    They have over $90 Million in venture funding. They can order pretty much anything they want.
YZF 13y ago
Awesome. The golden age of VR may finally be upon us. It's been talked about for probably 20 years but now all the technology to support this at a reasonable cost seems to be converging. I think in 10 years we'll look back at this in a similar way to how we look at Wolfenstein 3d, when everything changed.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Every time I see these guys I think they are the next game console. Basically something that doesn't connect to your TV at all except perhaps if other people want to see what you are doing.
salient 13y ago
I hope that while they're putting the finishing touches on the current product, and work on deploying it soon, they will also keep in mind what the guys at Avegant are doing, and either do their own R&D with this type of technology for future products, to completely eliminate the screen and the need to use UHD or higher resolutions in the future (or at least not for sometime), while making it easier for the eyes, or they buy them out. The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too. To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did. http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-34900_7-35833856.html http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-349...
chenster 13y ago
This is the future of gaming. I wonder if it uses some sort gyroscope to track position like the iPhone does.
- kgabis 13y ago
  You can't track position using a gyroscope. What you can track are changes in orientation.
- kaoD 13y ago
  See the little reflective squares on the unit? A webcam tracks those and nails down your position just like Motion Capture.
ansible 13y ago
Now I'm thinking I ought to start thinking about a 3-D desktop environment. I know it sounds nuts to use this technology to just render a browser and a bunch of terminal windows, but that could be an awesome working environment. It is neat to have bigger and higher resolution screens, but I can only read the text at one point in space anyway.
JonSkeptic 13y ago
Hrm.....I have to say that the technology is really cool, but the video makes it look like nothing more than a gimmick. Notice "makes it look". They picked a tower defense game to demo this? Really? Who's gonna want to have full upper body motion (lean in, out, sideways, up, down) to play a tower defense game? A few people, for the novelty of it. This type of marketing is very unfortunate. It's a technology with a lot of really cool potential and this video made it look like a gimmick.

101 points by kirtijthorat 13y ago

bane 13y ago

Did I hear him say "gaze detection" near the end of the video? that's also a big deal I haven't heard anything about anywhere else.

StavrosK 13y ago
Sounds like he just meant head tracking.
christoph 13y ago
He definitely says it. I think the prototype is maybe simulating gaze detection at the moment based on the position of the reticle position set by the thumbstick and possibly current head position + previous position + guess work on what a players focus is likely to be. I certainly get the impression from the way he says it that this is something they are looking at the moment in a more advanced way and is a common conversation point in their software/hardware dev teams at the moment. VERY exciting.
MBCook 13y ago
I haven't seen that anywhere else, so he probably misspoke. Eye-tracking seems like it would be an obvious future enhancement. In the EVE spaceship demo, it seemed a little odd that you locked missiles based on where your head was pointing and not where your eyes were looking.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Unfortunately, eye tracking is only possible in broad strokes, not fine detail, and certainly not for tracking fast-moving small targets across the screen in a realtime action game. There's pretty much no such thing as a smooth eye movement; your brain tricks you into thinking your eyes are moving smoothly when they're not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade I wanted to use my eyes to create 3D models via eye tracking. Looked into it for about a week before concluding it was probably impossible, or at least way less accurate than good old-fashioned hand movements. Dunno what the Oculus guys are doing with gaze detection, but I doubt they're doing fine-grained detection such as being able to pick out a particular target with your eyes. (I would love to be wrong about this! That'd be an awesome feature. I just doubt whether it's technically possible.)
  - anologwintermut 13y ago
    From eye tracking can you infer where the user thinks they are looking? I.e. recover the illusory smooth eye motion I perceive when tracking a moving cat.
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      I think it'd be impossible because when you think you move your eye, your brain is essentially just moving a bitmap image of what you're looking at around the center of your vision. E.g. look at the word "sillysaurus2" above my comment. Look at the 's', then look at the 'y' -- keep looking back and forth. Your eye likely isn't moving at all, even though your focus of vision does. It happens mentally rather than physically.
      - yackob03 13y ago
        I tried what you said and I could definitely feel my eye moving. Is that being synthesized by my brain?
        sillysaurus2 13y ago
        Indeed, it is. Strange but true. The way to convince yourself your eyeball isn't moving is to touch your actual eyeball with your fingertip -- like press lightly against the left corner side of your left eyeball with your left index finger -- and then switch your gaze back and forth between the two letters. As long as your viewing distance is correct, you won't feel any movement. (You may have to back your head away from the screen. I'm viewing from a distance of arm's length.) On the other hand, if you look back and forth between adjacent words, then you can feel physical eye movement.
      - erikpukinskis 13y ago
        I recorded a video of myself doing this, and I certainly can't see any obvious eye movements. But if I think about the number of degrees that my eye is shifting between the 's' and the 'y', it's probably one degree at most. It's not clear to me that even if my eye was moving I would be able to register that movement in a video. I'm assuming you've seen some peer reviewed research that fixed peoples' heads and used high resolution eye tracking to support your hypotheses, though?
- jfoster 13y ago
  Sometimes when people "misspeak" like that it provides insight into what they have been discussing internally, but haven't yet announced externally.
lsv1 13y ago
A rift with eye tracking would be ridiculous :)
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  Actually, quite sensible. One of the problems of immersive VR is that you need very high precision near the fovea ( = at the point of screen you are looking at), and you need to render very fast at the edges of vision. This means that you need to render at a very high resolution and at a very high frame rate. This is, of course, a problem. However, while the vision at the fovea is very sharp, it is also very slow, and while the vision at the edges is very fast, it is very blurry and imprecise. With eye tracking, this is exploitable. The practice is called foveated rendering, and the idea is to only draw full precision near the position of the screen you are actually looking at, and elsewhere render at a much reduced resolution but at a higher frame rate. In tests, this has been found to be impossible to distinguish from just drawing the full screen at full resolution and speed.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

salient 13y ago

I saw a video of some of the Verge guys trying it out at CES, and pretty much all of them were like "I don't want to take this off" at the end. It sounds like Oculus Rift will change gaming forever, and not just gaming. There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.

christoph 13y ago
Fully agree. When you see something like this - http://vimeo.com/75321405 http://vimeo.com/75321405 You have to consider that from a consumer tech point of view, linking that film set to an Occulus Rift at the moment, is not a huge leap. In fact, it's so close, almost the biggest problem it faces is going to be on a creative level of re-thinking how to tell stories in a new medium. I don't think we're more than 5-10 years away.
daenz 13y ago
> you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere. Oculus IMAX. I like it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
utnick 13y ago
Or sports watching, Not sure if this is possible yet, but I'm imagining a 360 degree camera at the courtside of every sporting event. Then this is streamed to you at home so you can focus in on whichever part of the play you choose and feels like you are sitting courtside of a game.
- mrfusion 13y ago
  Why stop at court side? You could be I the middle of the court!
13y ago

daenz 13y ago

Awhile ago I made this image http://i.imgur.com/yaIpP2r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/yaIpP2r.jpg describing an arena where virtual combat could take place with Oculus Rifts. I used some hand-wavy idea of tracking user position via wifi (dumb idea), but with Oculus positional tracking, I wonder if this arena concept becomes closer to reality? Edit>> link to original thread http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fxpqb/xpost_from_rcrazyideas_airsoftlike_arenas_with/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fxpqb/xpost_from_rc...

gamegoblin 13y ago
I've tried to do position triangulation with RFID signal strength and had pretty terrible results. I suspect wifi would be just as bad. An infrared system would probably work well I think. (I know you addressed this) That being said, sign me up. I have a friend with an oculus dev kit and it has blown me away time and time again. I can see this kind of thing becoming reality. Just stick foam padding all over the place and you're golden.
- johnpmayer 13y ago
  What about ultrasonic positioning?
  - digitalengineer 13y ago
    Beacons (from Apple) perhaps?
    - guelo 13y ago
      Bluetooth is really the same technology as wifi. Super inaccurate for localization.
mey 13y ago
People run into each other all the time with laser tag and people can actually see each other in that case. I would be concerned about people running into each other and into physical objects because of their lack of visual feedback on their reality. Say for example, two people facing each other with a virtual wall between them. If both accidentally try to walk "though" the wall they would simply collide with each other, potentially causing injury or damage to equipment. Not to be a buzzkill, I'd love a system that actually could support this, in theory a large room with many freedom of movement devices (like what Virtuix Omni is working on) would allow this idea in a much smaller space and no risk of players colliding.

kirtijthorat 13y ago

Does anyone know when this will be released? It says Prototype Model and then there is a developer kit. I am not a big fan of Developer Kit as they tend to be far from ready to be a consumer product. Also add the price factor. Ditto goes to Google Glass which has a developer edition for $1500 (of course only for selected/invited ones) but if it ever becomes a reality i.e. meaning a real consumer product and drops the price to $300 then I will not be happy since it cost me $1200 more and the latest model may have better h/w components.

sekasi 13y ago
If that difference in price versus getting it early to tinker bothers you, then you're probably not that interested in the product to begin with ;)
modeless 13y ago
They are likely to release a consumer product late this year or early next year, with an updated dev kit coming some time before that. Always subject to change of course since this is bleeding edge tech, but they can't delay too much or they risk Microsoft or Sony beating them to the punch.
- blah32497 13y ago
  "they risk Microsoft or Sony beating them to the punch" I very curious what the competition is doing. They're obviously working on competing products, but nothing has been made public.
  - modeless 13y ago
    Sony has a head-tracking HMD at CES, but it's nowhere close to competing with the Rift. Yet. http://www.tested.com/tech/tvs/459687-ces-2014-impressions-sonys-head-tracking-hmd-prototype/ http://www.tested.com/tech/tvs/459687-ces-2014-impressions-s...
- swalsh 13y ago
  I personally just can't imagine Microsoft or Sony beating them in this space... at least not for a very long time. One of the key advantages Oculus has is their staff, besides being made up of some of the most amazing programmers of our time (Carmack) they're also devoted gamers. Palmer literally created the oculus because he REALLY wanted it. There's a drive towards perfection that I just can't imagine a large company replicating as well.

scrabble 13y ago

They gained a huge asset with Carmack working full time for Oculus. I'd never have been interested in this, but now I am. It's progressing very nicely.

erikpukinskis 13y ago
I don't disagree that Carmack was a huge win, but it's a little insulting to Palmer and the rest of the team to suggest that he's the reason for their progress. He's only been on the team for a few months. A lot of what they're doing has been in the works for a long time. Plus, all I've heard about what Carmack has been doing is that he was working on Android stuff in the beginning.
- cwyers 13y ago
  Carmack is a late add to the Occulus team, but he's been doing real work in reducing latency: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategies/ http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-...
  - benched 13y ago
    And for anyone who didn't know, Carmack has long been obsessively, arduously interested in latency problems.
skeletonjelly 13y ago
Have you tried it? It can stand on its own without Carmack.

prawn 13y ago

Tested have an interview/hands-on where they discuss why Oculus have used an optical approach with the external camera to track head movements. They note that it was superior to various other methods they tried. Wonder if eventually it could work with typical laptop web cams? http://www.tested.com/tech/459692-ces-2014-hands-oculus-vrs-crystal-cove-prototype/ http://www.tested.com/tech/459692-ces-2014-hands-oculus-vrs-... Also worth watching that video to hear about the switch to an OLED screen and the latency advantage there. Employees at that company must have so much fun trying all the alternatives to build the best product. (My dev kit in Australia is for sale if anyone is interested. Email in profile. It's amazing, but I'm curious more than I am a software developer so it might be more useful to someone else.)

YZF 13y ago
A similar approach could be used with a typical webcam. In their case it's probably a camera with a filter so they can isolate their IR LEDs. That's kind of a nice to have but it's not absolutely necessary. It's neat how they can get by with a single camera. Note the pattern of LEDs, as you move around they can use the pattern to locate you in 3d space. IMO the downside of using a camera is that you automatically get some latency as part of the deal. A full frame has to be read out, digitized and the 3d position derived. Some other systems could have better real time characteristics. The cost of this system is presumably a factor.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  With an embedded camera system you could be transmitting just the positional data to be fed into the computer after doing most/all of the work in hardware, no?
  - YZF 13y ago
    If the image you get out of the sensor is processing friendly (such as just the image of the IR leds) then you can do this pretty quickly in software. Some preprocessing on the camera can help but the source of most of the latency is going to be the image sensor readout. I've actually worked on a real time tracking system like this about 20 years ago.

lhl 13y ago

I've been following the Oculus CES coverage somewhat and by far the most in-depth interview/coverage has been by the Tested folks. Here's their video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNQHNkJY1g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNQHNkJY1g The most in-depth discussions probably happen on the Oculus Developer Forums and the Oculus Subreddit. RoadtoVR is good for general coverage on HMDs and peripherals.

canadev 13y ago
That was quite informative, but I have to say that the guy who did the interview really disoriented me. He kept jumping on everyone's words and it felt like he was way over caffeinated. I watched it almost 10 minutes ago and I still feel kind of jittery.

sukuriant 13y ago

So, Where can I buy one?

devindotcom 13y ago

Tried it out yesterday. Really a major improvement, and they're listening to feedback. The method of producing 'low persistence' is quite interesting, and only works becuase of the move to OLED. Really smart guys there.

salient 13y ago
Carmack has been talking about OLED for VR headsets for quite some time, and I'm sure Palmer and the rest were considering it, too. But I think it wasn't very accessible to them until recently. They're a start-up so they can't exactly go an order a few thousand 1080p OLED panels. This may have been possible now due to Samsung making the Galaxy S4 with a 1080p panel last year, and perhaps other launched some, too, and it pushed the prices down for such a panel, enough to make it viable for Oculus Rift.
- bigtones 13y ago
  They have over $90 Million in venture funding. They can order pretty much anything they want.

YZF 13y ago

Awesome. The golden age of VR may finally be upon us. It's been talked about for probably 20 years but now all the technology to support this at a reasonable cost seems to be converging. I think in 10 years we'll look back at this in a similar way to how we look at Wolfenstein 3d, when everything changed.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Every time I see these guys I think they are the next game console. Basically something that doesn't connect to your TV at all except perhaps if other people want to see what you are doing.

salient 13y ago

I hope that while they're putting the finishing touches on the current product, and work on deploying it soon, they will also keep in mind what the guys at Avegant are doing, and either do their own R&D with this type of technology for future products, to completely eliminate the screen and the need to use UHD or higher resolutions in the future (or at least not for sometime), while making it easier for the eyes, or they buy them out. The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too. To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did. http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-34900_7-35833856.html http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-349...

chenster 13y ago

This is the future of gaming. I wonder if it uses some sort gyroscope to track position like the iPhone does.

kgabis 13y ago
You can't track position using a gyroscope. What you can track are changes in orientation.
kaoD 13y ago
See the little reflective squares on the unit? A webcam tracks those and nails down your position just like Motion Capture.

ansible 13y ago

Now I'm thinking I ought to start thinking about a 3-D desktop environment. I know it sounds nuts to use this technology to just render a browser and a bunch of terminal windows, but that could be an awesome working environment. It is neat to have bigger and higher resolution screens, but I can only read the text at one point in space anyway.

JonSkeptic 13y ago

Hrm.....I have to say that the technology is really cool, but the video makes it look like nothing more than a gimmick. Notice "makes it look". They picked a tower defense game to demo this? Really? Who's gonna want to have full upper body motion (lean in, out, sideways, up, down) to play a tower defense game? A few people, for the novelty of it. This type of marketing is very unfortunate. It's a technology with a lot of really cool potential and this video made it look like a gimmick.