Oculus at CES Round Up!

[Tbone]

Well, it's been an informative week coming out of CES! While we still don't have specific release dates, we have received a good bit of information about where the Rift's evolution is right now and how it's all coming together. For a near-complete list of articles and highlights, you can check out my coverage.

The Crystal Cove Prototype

The big news out of Oculus was their newest Rift prototype, named the Crystal Cove. This particular prototype, while not the very best prototype Oculus has back at their offices, was meant to showcase two things: positional tracking and a low persistence OLED screen.

Positional Tracking
So the Rift now has positional tracking. They accomplished this by adding LED lights all around the cover and using an IR camera to track this data. This, combined with all the tracking already done inside of the Rift, puts together a very nice positional tracking solution. They promise this solution is still relatively cheap and the additional hardware of the camera shouldn't make a big difference to the price. While this won't 100% be the positional tracking solution of the consumer product, Oculus claims it is currently the "front runner".

This does bring up some concern from the Oculus community. The biggest concern is the lack of 360 degree support. Currently if you turn 180 degrees, the camera will lose track of your position and revert to the standard way of tracking. There's also line of sight issues - if you duck down too far below the camera, it will lose you as well. Rest assured these are issues that Oculus is considering. Fixing positional tracking reduces simulator sickness.

Low Persistence
This is somewhat hard to describe, but the problem it fixes is one of the main things that has Oculus claiming it's reaching the "Holy Grail". Essentially, when you move your head in the current dev kit, the image is displayed for an entire frame before updating to the next frame. Even if you didn't have latency/lag, your head is moving fast enough that for a majority of that frame, the pixels on the screen are in the wrong place. This causes a motion blur effect as when the frame is updated again, the image has to correct itself.

Low Persistence fixes this problem by only flashing the correct image on the screen for a millisecond and then going black for the rest of the frame. This means that the image/pixels are never in the wrong place. When the frames are going fast enough, what your brain sees is just a clear image/world - no blur. This is HUGE in fixing simulator sickness, and was the big barrier that Oculus wasn't sure they'd be able to solve. They say it's like hitting a magical switch where everything suddenly works. Out of all the people at CES who have tried the new prototype, no one has reported any nausea! That's huge!

OLED
The other factor in the new prototype is an OLED screen. The benefit to OLED is pixel switching time, which becomes under 1ms. This, along with other solutions, has cut the latency from 60ms of the current dev kit, down to 30ms for the Crystal Cove prototype. Oculus has internal hardware that's down to 15-20, and Oculus is confident they can hit that for the consumer product.

Currently the resolution is at 1080p, better than the dev kit. This reduces the "screen door effect" significantly, though it hasn't quite eliminated it yet. People are still hoping for 1440p for the consumer product. On that front, Palmer Luckey states that screen manufacturers are willing to work with Oculus on creating custom panels (before they were hoping to piggy back off a phone manufacturer).

Oculus Content

Another important note coming out of this week is Oculus' dedication to software and content. Oculus is building a team devoted to developing a platform as well as some killer apps. John Carmack, of course, is one of the heads of this (on top of his work with Android compatibility). What you should expect is a smooth consumer interface without the sort of "DIY" approach of the current dev kit demos.

Valve Has Skin In The Game

One big announcement to leak out today was that Valve is releasing their own VR SDK next week during Steam Days. This SDK will focus on creating a standardized input for VR. This is great news for consumers! A standardization for input is very needed! It's still unclear if Valve is developing their own hardware for VR, but they are definitely devoted to making the software as perfect as possible.

Rumor has it that at least one of the new Steam Machines Valve unveiled this week was originally supposed to be featured with an Oculus Rift. The speculation is that Valve might be building their own "VR ready" package with a Steam Machine, controller, etc. Look for more information on this next week!

Games

CES is more of a hardware show, so there weren't really any game announcements. CCP was showing off their latest version of EVE: Valkyrie at Intel's booth with HD Rifts, though, and they let slip that EVE: Valkyrie will be a launch game for the Rift. So expect this game to come out whenever the Rift does! I think this will definitely be one of the first games FA gets into in a big way!

The Future

With no dates being announced this week, one can infer that we shouldn't be looking for a release anytime soon. Oculus confirmed that they will be shipping out a second version of developer kits (DK2) shortly before the consumer version releases, but there still is no time table. Oculus was quick to point out that any current development under their SDK should automatically work with the new features (positional tracking, etc.) of future headsets.

Palmer did say it would be unlikely that we would see a release before the summer.

Update: While still no dates have been announce, Oculus is quoted as saying "While I can't give you a concrete day, I will say that 2014 is going to be a great year for VR". We can infer that, currently, they are planning on launching sometime in 2014.

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No doubt the Crystal Cove prototype was a strong showing. The fact that simulator sickness has pretty much been eliminated is HUGE for the potential of the consumer product. With positional tracking already implemented as well, it almost seems like there's not much left for Oculus to do. I think if there's going to be one thing holding the Rift back, it's going to be content. Oculus has a lot of game developer companies making killer apps and games for the Rift, but they won't release until they have enough to justify a launch, and that just takes time.

[Tbone]

Update 2: In an interview that came out today, Oculus confirmed that the consumer version would have a larger FOV than the dev kit (which is pretty impressive. They also mentioned that Crystal Cove's optics works with a wider range of IPDs, but they plan on coming up with a solution for the consumer version that wouldn't require the user to wear their glasses. They also said their working with panel manufacturers and hope to have a CUSTOM screen for the Rift.