Ask anyone in video games what new piece of tech has them most excited about the future, and thereâs a good chance theyâll bring up the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Good news: Later this year, developers (and the rest of us) will be able to own the latest, greatest version. And it really is pretty great.
Starting this morning, Oculus VR is opening pre-orders for their Rift Development Kit 2. Itâs an all-new headset, and a significant improvement over their DevKit 1, which people have been using to do all manner of stuffover the last year or so. The DevKit 2 (or âDK2â as the Oculus people call it) will be using the same technology in the âCrystal Coveâ prototype that sent so many people into conniptions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.
https://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598
The first Rift DevKit has been widely available for about year now. It wasnât made with consumers in mind, meaning you couldnât just plug it into your PC and immediately get to play sweet VR versions of your favorite games. Fortunately, most early adopters were game developers, programmers and modders, people who could get games like Crysis and Team Fortress 2 to work on the Rift (the latter with a treadmill for running!). By now, lots of games and other non-game things work with the headset, provided you know how to set up the software and get it all working.
But for all the cool stuff you can already do with the Rift, there was a lingering sense that the initial prototype hardware was holding things back. When would there be a higher-resolution version? How would Oculus come up with a way to combat the motion sickness that frequently set in after using the Rift? In other words, when would a new, improved Rift DevKit come out?
I tried the new Rift out yesterday and have some impressions of it, but before that, the news and specs:
Oculus says the new Rift headsets will be available on the Oculus website for preorder starting right about now, March 19, at 8AM Pacific. The headsets are estimated to ship in July of 2014. Theyâll be made available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
The new DevKit still isnât the commercial version, and wonât really be intended for the public. Itâs intended more for developers to start to learn how to make games work on a Rift. Of course, that doesnât mean that non-developers canât buy oneâŠ
Each headset will cost $350, $50 more than the first DevKit cost. The extra $50 apparently covers the included camera that tracks your head movement.
The DevKit 2 will run at 960Ă1080 resolution per eye, totaling out to 1920Ă1080, or 1080p between both eyes. Itâll use a low-persistence OLED display with 6DOF positional tracking.
Its refresh rates will be 75Hz, 72Hz, and 60Hz
Itâll use a gyroscope, an accelerometer and a magnetometer for inertial tracking, and those sensors will update at 1000Hz.
Itâll weigh 440g without its cable.
The headset is still called the Rift, and it will always be called the Rift. âCrystal Coveâ was just a code-name for the DevKit 2, but isnât the name of the actual headset.
Just like the Crystal Cove prototype, DevKit 2 will be able to track your headâs movements via the included camera (which you mount on a fixed point in the room), so you can lean in closer to objects in the game-world to make your view grow closer. It goes a long way toward making the experience more immersive.
The new headset looks a touch different than the Crystal Cove prototype â itâs now solid black. Itâs also a more streamlined form-factor from the first Rift, and looks more like how weâve come to expect VR headsets to look.
Here are a couple of official photos, along with a shot of me using it yesterday:
And hereâs a somewhat-technical video from Oculus about whatâs new in the latest headset design:
So, Yeah, Itâs Pretty Freakin Cool
Yesterday at an event hosted at a space near the Game Developers Conference in downtown San Francisco, I chatted with a few folks from Oculus and tried out the new version of the Rift. (And what do you know, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was there, too.) Overall I was really impressed by the DevKit 2, and had a hell of a lot of fun messing around with it. Some impressions follow.
https://lastchance.cc/the-prophet-of-virtual-reality-1545804458%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
New Rift > Old Rift
To begin, I sat down and tried out a simple demo on both the DevKit 1 and the new DevKit 2. Iâve mostly kept away from the original Rift, partly because I donât own one and havenât attended that many official Oculus events, and partly because Iâve wanted to keep my VR palate clean until the technology reaches a more advanced point.
The DevKit 1 demo was relaxing â I was sitting in a chair on a porch, looking out on a sunny ocean in a tropical paradise. I could turn and look behind meâstill something that feels revolutionary and finally makes it hit home that youâre wearing a VR headsetâbut the low resolution and somewhat blurry motion-tracking immediately felt a bit uncomfortable.
The same demo in DevKit 2 was a huge improvement. The screens are brighter and the resolution has taken a significant jump, and while there was still a sort of screen-door effect happening on everything, it all looked much clearer. I canât yet say whether or not that the softening of the image actually made the new headset more comfortable to use than if it had been sharper; Iâd need more time with it to be sure.
My view tracked much more responsively when I moved around, and best of all, I could now lean in to objects and my view would move closer to them. If and when you have a chance to try out the new headset, I all but promise that the first time you do that, youâll freak out a little bit.
Putting My Head In The New Unreal Engine
The next demo I sat down for was based on the Unreal Engine 4 âElementalâ demo. It was in Epicâs powerful new graphics tech, though that softened, screen-door-like effect was still present, so it didnât look nearly as sharp as Epicâs engine demonstration videos have been. Again, though, the softness actually might help it be easier on the eyesâuntil Iâve compared it with a sharper VR headset, I canât quite say.
https://lastchance.cc/meet-the-next-generation-of-graphics-unreal-engine-4-5916798%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Itâs pretty wild to play a game that looks like a tower defense/real-tim strategy game but gives you the ability to lean in over the board and get closer to whatâs going on there. Embracing the clichĂ©, it âput me in the gameâ in a disorienting, wonderful way â I can only begin to contemplate the various ways that existing types of video games could be enhanced with this technology, let alone virtual-tourist stuff, live concerts, moviesâŠ
Every time I hit the right trigger, a blue fireball would lance out of my head toward whatever I was looking at. It was trailed by a stream of white-hot particles, exploding out in every direction. Needless to say, I cast a lot of fireballs.
Tiny Knights Are Wrecking The Living Room
The last demo I played was a two-player game that put me in a virtual living room with another guy who was also there to try out the new Rift. When I first put on my headset, I found myself looking over at a couch with a horrifying, deflated man laying on it. I then looked down and saw that I, too, was a horrifying deflated man. It was unsettling, the kind of disorientation that⊠well, actually that would pretty naturally accompany the act of looking down and seeing that your body has been replaced by a broken crash-test dummy.
Once we were both set up, we looked forward and the DevKit 2âs head-tracking camera got a bead on us Both of our virtual bodies sat uprigt and began to move along with our heads. I leaned toward the other guy, and watched as his head moved around. Neat. And weird.
https://lastchance.cc/the-closest-you-can-get-to-actually-being-in-skyrim-1515201680%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
At first we kept our swashbuckling constrained to the coffee table between us, but soon the fight spilled over to the rest of the room. It became clear that I could pilot my knight anywhere in the roomâinto far corners, knocking over lamps on side-tables, and even onto my friendâs lap. When his knight jumped up onto my virtual lap, I flinched â this weird little thing was standing there, right in front of me, swinging a sword. Thanks to the DevKit 2âs head-tracking, when I recoiled my view actually pulled back from the thing on my lap. Again, difficult to put into words, but uncanny.
I eventually sent my own knight off behind me, and I turned around to follow its progress. It was another of those âDude, you are doing something you have never done beforeâ momentsâcraning my neck backward, watching a tiny creature run behind me through a room that doesnât exist.
I Didnât Want To Stop Playing
We played for a little while longer and I didnât want to stop. I still want to go back and play more, just to try to further get my head around this new experience, to try to get used to it.
In July, the dedicated among us will be able to own their own version of the new headset. I canât wait to see what they come up with as they start to experiment with it.
And hey, hopefully it wonât be too long before Oculus finally releases a finalized, commercial version of the Rift. If the leap between the headsetâs first and second generation is anything to go by, the world of virtual reality is only going to get more interesting as we go.
Hereâs what I have to say to that:
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton
