Oculus Rift Catch-All

Is Carbon pure design or do they do the technical stuff behind the controllers too? If they can build controllers from the ground up, I'm way more interested. VR needs great input and that means letting your hands (and more?) be part of the experience.

I'm not a fan of RAZR's approach to keep putting plastic things in your hands to solve hand/finger tracking.

I will take it when there will interesting games for it.

Apparently the Dev Kit 2 will start shipping out in two weeks. Seems they have a lot of orders to fill and they expect to still be shipping pre-orders in August.

I cancelled my DK2 order a few months ago deciding I'm going to wait for the consumer release. I know once everyone starts getting theirs and I see a bunch of cool games I'm going to be kicking myself.

Having just gotten into the Elite beta and expecting the DK2 kit within the month makes me a giddy SOB. Especially with articles like this out there, based on an experience with the DK1

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...

Cant wait for mine. This my freebie after my tax return.

I was browsing the iRacing website just now and saw that they have support for the Oculus Rift. Anyone here tried it?

My DK2 just shipped!

High on my list of things to try are Elite: Dangerous and Skyrim (with extensive modding) That is, after I try some tamer demos to just get a feel for things.

Lucky! Did they send you an email regarding the shipping info?

When did you preorder?

They did send an email with shipping info. I received one earlier in the day saying my card had been charged, so that should be the expected sequence if they stick to that.

Looks like I ordered on March 19th, which was day 1. I had forgotten I bit into the bait that quickly, heh. Regrets of not getting the first round plus E3 impressions of the 2nd kit had me fully sold.

I will get mine Monday! Hopefully the latest Oculus SDK will get patched in UE4 by then.

I still don't know why I waited until May 1 to preorder. Damnit.

Mr.Green wrote:

I will get mine Monday! Hopefully the latest Oculus SDK will get patched in UE4 by then.

I've spent all day trying to work out why Europe Universalis would benefit from the rift.

*sigh*

Impressions from folks who received their unit?

Its been a trial getting it this early. The SDK and drivers supporting the hardware arrived within a day or two of the first units arriving on doorsteps. There's been no chance for bugfixing on Oculus' side or much in the way of development on the developer side. So we're left with troubleshooting and finding workarounds on our own. It works out of the box for some lucky folks but has a lot of issues for others. For me, my first night was full of annoyance and disappointment as there were severe problems with the head tracking and I found I couldn't NOT see the screen door.

I've since managed to get it workable in most demos and even in Elite: Dangerous, which is unintentionally the real showcase for the best and worst of the device. At the high end, I look down and see 'my' shoulder where it should be. I lean over and see how my pilot's seat is bolted to the floor. I look up and see the enemy trying to evade me.

At the worst is 2 main problems. One fixable in software, one can probably be made up for, but really needs new hardware to adjust for.
1. As I turn my head, I get what we're describing as 'juddering'. Instead of rendering the turning of my head as a smooth progression of frames. It's displaying maybe 1/10th of them and often in the 'old' position like its catching up. This is disturbing but not disorienting. I have actually found I can play through this without any nausea or anything. Its just ugly. This is most likely down to some software/hardware incompatibility (CPU/GPU/Rift) and the fact that we're having to use a bit of a workaround to run the game this way at all. It could be that when Frontier compiles the game explicitly for this new device and works out the bugs on their end, it will be buttery smooth.
2. This technology needs a very high resolution and when your eyes are inches from a screen, even 1920x1080 isn't going to cut it. To pile on, GPU hardware is going to have to step up to push 75fps at a higher resolution. This is a problem that will take a few years to really address. We'll get lower fidelity things to try in the mean-time that push less amazing visuals but at the right frame-rate. I don't see a software way around the problem. It'll take a whole new headset.

That is not to say there won't be extremely compelling experiences in this headset despite that second problem. Elite is amazing and it makes me not regret the experiment at all.

Thanks polypusher.

Need more updates! Especially from Certis and Pyroman!

Balthezor wrote:

Thanks polypusher.

Need more updates! Especially from Certis and Pyroman!

I'll share a quick Twitter conversation I had with him. I'm definitely planning on doing a major upgrade of my own first gen Core i3 and Radeon 5770 before I get a Rift now.


@pyromanfo 22h
The only thing keeping me from using the Oculus for extended periods of time seems to be that my system is too slow.

‏@mattperrin 22h
@pyromanfo What kind of rig are you running? That's something I'm worried about but I was trying to hold off upgrading for a while...

‏@pyromanfo 11h
@mattperrin GTX 660 and first gen i5, it hasn't been upgraded for a while

LockAndLoad wrote:
Balthezor wrote:

Thanks polypusher.

Need more updates! Especially from Certis and Pyroman!

I'll share a quick Twitter conversation I had with him. I'm definitely planning on doing a major upgrade of my own first gen Core i3 and Radeon 5770 before I get a Rift now.


@pyromanfo 22h
The only thing keeping me from using the Oculus for extended periods of time seems to be that my system is too slow.

‏@mattperrin 22h
@pyromanfo What kind of rig are you running? That's something I'm worried about but I was trying to hold off upgrading for a while...

‏@pyromanfo 11h
@mattperrin GTX 660 and first gen i5, it hasn't been upgraded for a while

Aww crap. I have an i5 and a 670 with SSD myself. May be too slow.

TAKE MY MONEY. TAKE IT NOW. NOW DAMMIT

JC wrote:

TAKE MY MONEY. TAKE IT NOW. NOW DAMMIT

I suspect they'd rather take Facebook's money. Seems like a play for an acquisition to get this tech included OOTB.

Oculus probably doesn't have the time to work on something like this so I wouldn't be surprised if this gets picked up. This is, if it works as the video shows.

Yeah, the Leap hasn't really made a big entrance into the market after the initial hype. So selling to Occulus would be a way to recover R&D and get some investor money back.

I'd like to know why dont they show any object manipulation? It looks like the fingers are very well tracked, so why isn't there a demo of someone picking up and tossing a virtual ball? I can only assume its because there's a core problem with the tech that prevents it.

probably. I was one of the early adopters of the Leap. Massive let down when I actually got the product. It just didn't work as well as advertised.

They're apparently getting ready to release V2 of the software so we'll see what happens.

What I think would make a huge change is what is shown in the occulus video. They rotated it 90 degrees so it points OUT rather than up. That would allow me to mount it on the wall, or right below my monitor, and would be much more effective in terms of using it on a PC.

Forcing it to be "under" your hands just made it get in the way. I played with the thing for maybe 20 minutes before it went into a drawer.

Yeah I'm planning on picking one up, with the new SDK and the fact that you can get them on eBay for like $45 makes me think this is the best input option right now. Everything else is crazy expensive. Probably will get one when I do my PC upgrade

PyromanFO wrote:

Yeah I'm planning on picking one up, with the new SDK and the fact that you can get them on eBay for like $45 makes me think this is the best input option right now. Everything else is crazy expensive. Probably will get one when I do my PC upgrade

best input option? Not by a long shot. Even if the new SDK is a marked improvement this will not replace your mouse/keyboard.

That's 'best' as opposed to something like the Razer Hydra or Sixense STEM which are not really available, at least not cheaply.

So how's the DK2 so far guys? Any improvements in the demos? SDK?

Mine finally arrived today but I am on call. Not sure if I should open it or sell it to my brother in law. I'm definitely not a developer.

Version 2.0 is still in developer beta unless I missed an announcement.

Programming is going to be fun(ner) in the future!