Glad to see they’re still hard at work
Going to resurrect this thread.
Been looking into the oculus, seems pretty cool but it costs a lot. Discovered that all it is is a screen with two lenses in front of it and a gyroscope. So, what if someone made a head mount with lenses designed to mount your smartphone as a screen and gyroscope??? Obviously most phones don’t have a 7 inch screen but this could probably be compensated for by changing the lenses or the distance between them and the screen. The mount would probably be pretty cheap, and you could just throw your current phone in it to achieve, depending on the resolution of your phone’s screen, quality beyond what the oculus currently offers. You could even do stuff like wireless streaming.
EDIT: look like it already exists:
https://www.mobilemag.com/2013/09/06/convert-smartphone-oculus-rift-gadgets/
They don’t seem to have any computer connectivity planned at the moment though which makes them fairly useless. I hope someone comes up with a streaming version. Wait, the second one seems to have something planned.
What about latency? One of the big draws of the Oculus Rift is that it has very low latency, which can make a big difference when dealing with VR.
Wireless streaming is definitely going to be bad, I don’t know about a wired connection.
If making your own Oculus Rift was that easy, then John Fucking Carmack would feel no need to get directly involved in the project to try and improve it.
There’s more to it than screens and lenses and gyroscopes. Carmack wants to reduce the input latency as much as he can and that’s no easy task. He’s even had to bring NASA-grade technology from his aerospace company to improve the Oculus.
A smartphone Oculus probably won’t have the low latency, but at the fraction of the price, it’s completely worth it. Least for most people.
I thought that latency was one of the main issues regarding motion sickness. I don’t know if I would consider that “worth it.”
ditto
Low latency is of the utmost importance here and the main reason why VR hasn’t really caught on despite the many attempts over the years. You can’t be immersed if the response time to your motions have a noticeable delay and finally we have the technology to bring that down to optimal levels.
yeah plus when you shake your phone bacck and forth you get this weird liquid splashing effect and when you shake the occulus rift it’s just like you’re shaking a camera. Basically, there’s compensation for the g-force of when you stop moving your head and that makes this way better than a smartphone sensor.
Did they announce a price? I know the dev kit costs $300, but that’s their prototype; the cost will likely go down when they start mass producing the consumer version.
01:03 - Maxey: oculus rift isn’t gonna sell enough with that name
01:03 - Maxey: change it to oculus prime
01:04 - Maxey: strike a deal with hasbro and have some tie-in with transformers
01:04 - Xalener entered chat.
01:04 - Xalener: ur all ded
01:04 - Maxey: try not to drown in the millions
Oculus unveils new Rift prototype at CES 2014, with positional tracking and mysterious OLED display.
Former Valve VR head joins Oculus Rift. Atman Binstock appointed as Oculus chief architect.
https://www.computerandvideogames.com/453404/former-valve-vr-head-joins-oculus-rift/
So I just got back from the GDC and tried both the Oculus dev kit one and dev kit 2.
I was sorely disappointing with DK1. There was screen tearing, screen door effect, low PPI, noticable lag, and the device felt a little heavy on the head (a quick look upwards caused the oculus to tilt downward relative to your face from acceleration).
The DK2, however, was pretty cool. I couldn’t notice any latency whatsoever, the goggles felt lighter, there was no noticable screen door effect and no tearing. The 3d effect was perfect without causing any headache or eyesore at all. However, even the higher PPI was still completely unacceptable. In it’s current iteration you can pretty easily see every pixel and the RGB components of it. It was really immersion breaking. However, my friend talked to one of the devs and he assured my friend that they’d be upping the PPI before launch. I’m really hoping they get the PPI a lot higher, because as is the low PPI is a dealbreaker for an otherwise spectacular product.
I doubt that the Rift will go beyond 1440p, seeing as for displays its pretty much that or 4k if you want a higher resolution, there’s not much else in between. So if 1440p isn’t good enough, you cant go much further than that without jumping up to 4k.
To be fair those standards of nothing in between are relatively arbitrarily (unless I’m completely mistaken which I may be). With any luck 1440p would be enough, but by just how noticeable the pixels were I suspect 1440 isn’t even enough.
The other step for them to make, besides going to 4k, would be to jump up to two separate displays. Unless they changed it in the latest iteration, the rift only has one 1080p (720p in the first dev kit) display, which is split in half, one half for each eye.
It also depends on the smartphone market, in technology and price. 1440p screens might seem useless and marketing gimmicks for phones but their introduction will help get VR produce them at a lower price.
One guy fixed the screendoor effect on a DK1 by lifting a plastic transparent divider that’s already in the device half a centimeter from the actual screen. It diffused the light enough to blur out the space between the pixels, but not enough to defocus everything. Maybe that same kind of thing will work with DK2 and even the commercial release if it’s still a bit of an issue.