Oculus Rift Unveils New Prototype at CES

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I can't wait until the final version of these things hit store shelves.

Oculus unveiled a new prototype of the Rift virtual reality headset at CES today, complete with positional tracking and an OLED display that features low persistence for less motion blur and a more comfortable experience for players. The new prototype has been dubbed "Crystal Cove."
 
camera assisted motion tracking is not needed if you got a stem otw!
Still glad to see this happen though, no need to dedicate a stem pack for this
 
I've been waiting 20 years for this since I first started seeing horrible VR systems when I was 10.
 
Awesome! This is just getting better and better.
 
Want one badly but I'm glad they are holding off until it's ready. The last thing I'd want is a $300 peripheral to go completely obsolete in a few months because of major feature additions.
 
So this thing only works with games that specifically support it?
 
Hopefully they can add a couple of lights to a toy gun and track that as well.

Maybe even lights to some kind of treadmill, or suspension gizmo, to track character movement.
 
Seems like they are moving along nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMPFXYGoNHI

I wish they could make it smaller, is this picture what they hope it will ship like?

url
 
Today Rift. Tomorrow Holodeck. Oh, and lots of "special virtual content" involving using the contents of those special 55 gallon drums from Amazon.
 
Like I said previously; this kind of tech will only correctly with OLED technology.
Now they have an OLED prototype expect to see this thing gain momentum moving forward.
 
Today Rift. Tomorrow Holodeck. Oh, and lots of "special virtual content" involving using the contents of those special 55 gallon drums from Amazon.

You know if they released this there would be a lot of porn apps. Honestly, I think that would be the #1 push for this. Gaming would be awesome, but interactive porn? That's a HUGE market. Even if we don't use it for that, there are tons of people that would.... Jon could test it out with an Avatar VR sex game....
 
So this thing only works with games that specifically support it?

Its works on Game Engines that support it, but the list of supported engines is growing fast.

Individual games don't need to go out of their way to support it.
 
This thing can't come out soon enough. My body is ready.

Not a single word on refresh rate, though. That's my main concern at this point as I intend to use it as a dumb monitor attached to my head.
 
One of their big hurdles now is getting a supply of small OLED screens. Samsung is the only company currently making them, and they haven't been for sale. Oculus is disassembling phones to make prototypes.
 
One of their big hurdles now is getting a supply of small OLED screens. Samsung is the only company currently making them, and they haven't been for sale. Oculus is disassembling phones to make prototypes.

Where are you getting this from? The only info. I have read about the recent release is that Oculus won't say who is providing the panels or even what resolution they're actually running at, though its been accepted that they're running at 1080.

Even though Palmer originally started out by frakensteining his own HMDs together, a company with the levels of funding Oculus is generating now im sure could get a few sample panels from manufacturers.
 
I can understand their desire to include positional tracking. The rift is entertaining while sitting down, but when you stand up and make an effort to interact with the world it's a completely new experience. The simple act of turning your entire physical body around to change directions, to be able to twist at the waste and look over your shoulder effectively without craning your neck in a chair makes a world of difference. Going from a sitting to standing position while playing HL2 was all I needed to get completely absorbed. I even found myself trying to lean around corners which the rift doesnt support but it just came so instinctively that I'd do it anyway, and not even really notice that it didnt work properly. With positional tracking I can definitely see it taking me to the next level.
 
http://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598

A very positive experience from one Gizmodo writer:
There are two main upgrades here, the first of which is "positional tracking." Previous models of the Oculus treated your head like it was affixed to a stick in the ground. A rolling, pitching, yawing brain-box with a body that couldn't move. No more. Thanks to an external camera, the Oculus can now grok the motion of your entire upper body. This means you can lean in to get a closer look at control panels, or lean to the side to peak around a corner.

This, on its own, is freaking incredible. You're not just observing a virtual world, you're immersed in it. There's a table in front of you, there's a world around you. I played a simple tower defense game demo built in Unreal Engine Four and I couldn't help but reach out and try to grab the stupid little goblins because they were right there. RIGHT THERE!
 
The second he started talking about the "low persistence mode" I got worried...

There better we a way to turn that off, otherwise this just turned from a day-one purchase to a will-not-buy.
 
Because it operates by turning the display on for a split-second to display a frame, then immediately turning the display off until the next frame is ready for display.

This will create flicker and stroboscopic artifacts, which I can't stand.
 
Because it operates by turning the display on for a split-second to display a frame, then immediately turning the display off until the next frame is ready for display.

This will create flicker and stroboscopic artifacts, which I can't stand.

Well it's going to be interesting, because the point of it was to stop motion blur, which is also a bad effect for a VR unit.
 
Because it operates by turning the display on for a split-second to display a frame, then immediately turning the display off until the next frame is ready for display.

This will create flicker and stroboscopic artifacts, which I can't stand.

While I can understand how you arrived at this conclusion, if that were the case, you'd think we would have heard someone that demo'd it at CES say something about it. This tech was also developed in part by Valve. This, though long, is a good read about the technology. I understand that since the frame is only going to be presented to us for a short time then something has to fill the void but I don't understand what will be presented though like I said, if it was an issue, you'd have thought someone would have had something to say about it.
 
Having followed the lightboost threads and the eizo FG2421 backlight strobing monitor thread, and all the 120hz monitor threads, and owning a 120hz monitor.. I was very disappointed in the oculus being "out of date" in regard to such tech initially. Now I am stoked that they are addressing all of those concerns. High refresh rate and backlight strobing, bring it on.

They talk about it like it is a new thing but it has been talked about around [H] and blurbusters for quite some time now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3YoUV7uty40

This makes the tradeoffs between a 120hz backlight strobing desktop monitor and the oculus negligible now in regard to high motion&animation definition at high fps (b/c it now has high hz apparently, though they didn't say what the hz is), and the blur elimination.
.
One of the only remaining things the oculus needs to address is resolution since the display grid is so huge and in your face to your perspective. This can be addressed in future revisions though (and probably competitors eventually). I am interested in getting a 1080p blur elimination-strobing high hz oculus rift asap. I hope they do keep the mocap camera idea as well. It works great on a ps3 move for 1:1 motion combined with the actuators in the controllers. Hopefully they will release some hand controllers similarly so you can at least do head + two hands mocap for starters.
 
I didn't mention the other thing they are working on.. - they are also shooting for a goal of under 20ms latency, so they are knocking things off their list. There were at 30 - 40ms last demo.
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They did say that the refresh rate was very high too, to reiterate on that point I wonder how high it is.
 
Its a bit hard to explainin text, here is an image that explains it.

OGRj2h3.png


When it comes to display the next frame, if any part is not upto date it shows nothing in the old area and onlu shows the new parts. So all that is on screen it the latest frame.
 
Am I the only one that rather have regular LCD over OLED for gaming purposes? Sure the OLED would look better, but I'd be afraid of UI elements getting burned in rather quickly.
 
Am I the only one that rather have regular LCD over OLED for gaming purposes? Sure the OLED would look better, but I'd be afraid of UI elements getting burned in rather quickly.

LCD's cannot display black due to the backlight. Propper OLEDs should not suffer from burn in.
 
Its a bit hard to explainin text, here is an image that explains it.

OGRj2h3.png


When it comes to display the next frame, if any part is not upto date it shows nothing in the old area and onlu shows the new parts. So all that is on screen it the latest frame.

I don't think this is what they were talking about. What you are showing is something that video compression (like xvid, etc) does to save bandwidth/file-size.

They go into pretty good detail in the youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3YoUV7uty40

The oculus rift devs basically talk about screen blanking or strobing to cut out the retinal retention FoV movement blur.

Rending the image sending it to the screen, show it for a tiny period of time, then we blank the display. Then it is black, until we have another image. So we only show the image when we have a correct, up to date image to show. If you do that at a high enough frame rate, you don't perceive it as multiple discreet frames, you perceive it as continuous motion.. but because you have no garbage data, nothing for your retina to you know, try to focus on except for correct data, you end up with a crystal clear image.

Then they go on to mention that the motion blur is in your brain (sample and hold blur). Low persistence allows you to read text while moving, etc. This is basically the backlight strobing style of tech that has been touted in the lightboost threads and the eizo fg2421 monitor.

They
 
Its a bit hard to explainin text, here is an image that explains it.

OGRj2h3.png


When it comes to display the next frame, if any part is not upto date it shows nothing in the old area and onlu shows the new parts. So all that is on screen it the latest frame.

I don't think this is what they were talking about. What you are showing is something that video compression (like xvid, etc) does to save bandwidth/file-size.

They go into pretty good detail in the youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3YoUV7uty40

The oculus rift devs basically talk about screen blanking or strobing to cut out the retinal retention FoV movement blur.

Rending the image sending it to the screen, show it for a tiny period of time, then we blank the display. Then it is black, until we have another image. So we only show the image when we have a correct, up to date image to show. If you do that at a high enough frame rate, you don't perceive it as multiple discreet frames, you perceive it as continuous motion.. but because you have no garbage data, nothing for your retina to you know, try to focus on except for correct data, you end up with a crystal clear image.

Then they go on to mention that the motion blur is in your brain (sample and hold blur). Low persistence allows you to read text while moving, etc. This is basically the backlight strobing style of tech that has been touted in the lightboost threads and the eizo fg2421 monitor.

For many of us, these are things the oculus rift was severely lacking compared to the best gaming monitors - namely high hz and blur elimination.
 
You know if they released this there would be a lot of porn apps. Honestly, I think that would be the #1 push for this. Gaming would be awesome, but interactive porn? That's a HUGE market. Even if we don't use it for that, there are tons of people that would.... Jon could test it out with an Avatar VR sex game....
Japan Otaku would slurp this thing up like a Hoover.
 
From Valve's blog:
If low-persistence strobing does turn out to be a problem, the obvious solution is, once again, higher frame rate. It’s possible that low persistence combined with a higher frame rate could get away with a lower frame rate than is needed with increasing frame rate alone. Even so, the frame rate required is higher than is currently available in consumer parts, so it’s probably not a viable option in the near future.
Strobing was a fairly predictable consequence of low persistence; we knew we’d encounter it before we ever built any prototypes
we expected to run into issues with low-persistence motion perception, because a series of short, bright photon bursts from low-persistence virtual images won’t necessarily produce the same effects in the eye’s motion detectors as a continuous stream of photons from a real object.
Atman Binstock tried standing near a wall, looking down the wall into the corner it made with the adjacent wall and the floor, and shifting his gaze rapidly to look at the middle of the wall. What happened was that the whole room seemed to shift or turn by a very noticeable amount. When we mentally marked a location in the HMD and repeated the triggering action, it was clear that the room hadn’t actually moved, but everyone who tried it agreed that there was an unmistakable sense of movement, which caused a feeling that the world was unstable for a brief moment. Initially, we thought we had optics issues, but Aaron suspected persistence was the culprit, and when we went to full persistence, the instability vanished completely. In further testing, we were able to induce a similar effect in the real world via a strobe light.
They mention all the nasty things that can happen when you strobe a display, many of which I've experienced first-hand.

I really, REALLY hope the Rift has a way to disable this garbage...
 
I want one but...
Optic nerve hypoplasia :(
The rift still works, even if you have vision impairment.

It wont suddenly grant you the power of sight like Geordi LaForge's visor, but you should be able to see the game world as well as you see reality.
 
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