Oculus Rift (VR)

[Luke Leber deprecated]

First of all, hey everyone, it's good to be back. If anyone remembers my old account (luc lieber).

http://www.oculusvr.com/

Anyone else interested in virtual reality? John Carmack is, so I'm following suit. Big things will be happening in 2014 that have me on the edge of my seat already.

Anyone order the development kit for the system yet? I'm waiting for the 1080p kit before ordering mine.

[Dy7SLyTq]

i vaguely remember you. that was way back though. im not too interested in vr i would much rather have google glasses, ie, being able to manipulate the reality around you, or at least the direction those glasses are headed

[N36fSL3A]

I'm heavily interested in both... I'd like a system that puts human conscience in the machine, and it emulates the world for them.

[Telion]

I tried the OR once and it was much worse than it's made out to be. Everything is blurry (with or without my glasses which make distant objects perfectly clear in real life) to the point where the 3d effect is barely visible. Also, the gyroscope readings lag behind your head motions. I don't know which model this was, but I can't imagine that doubling the resolution would fix it.

[N36fSL3A]

Is the OR a monitor or does it have it's on GPU? O_o

I never quite understood that.

[chrisname]

I'm fairly sure it only has the human interface devices (monitor, speakers and input) but I'm not 100%. What I like best about it is that it's very simple to modify a game to run on it (with the source code, ofc). Someone over on the Ogre3D forums showed that all you need to do is create two cameras and two viewports (similar to how you would implement splitscreen) and have them move together with slightly offset positions, and aim them both at the centre of the screen. Then you apply what looks like a kind of fisheye effect for the depth (I think - I lost concentration at that point).

[S G H]

The fisheye effect could also be a deformed pixel position in the OR's pixels.
But yes, basically, you render the same scene twice, one from a purpose supposedfully 2.5cm left, and the other 2.5cm right, emulating the distance between your eyes.
You don't really need two cameras/viewports in a scene manager, you can just:

1. Edit Proj Matrix
2. Render
3. Re-Edit Proj Matrix
4. Render

In fact, it probably wasn't hard for Valve to adapt their games to the OR and I believe they did it EXACTLY like that - as adding a camera could be gamebreaking.

@Lumpkin: I believe it's just some kind of monitor, to be future-proof.

[Luke Leber deprecated]

The software side of things is quite simple (for those already experienced with 3D technologies), EssGeEich summed it up nicely. What intrigues me is the volume of independent developers working on creating hardware to interface with the rift system. The SDK licensing is also a huge plus from me, as it's seemingly incompatible with the GPL.

Carmack is confident that the tracking issues will be solved swiftly.

@Lumpkin - The rift can be docked to a desktop, they are going to be exploring using similar technology as is being currently used in mobile devices in the future. The rift itself has a screen in it that receives display data from the station it's docked to.

@Telion - The development kit can be adjusted via both hardware and software to account for a wide range of visions. Were you able to try adjusting the rift to see if the blur went away?