Oculus Touch: How To Claim Your Priority Status

[HardOCP News]

If you are one of the people that pre-ordered the Oculus Rift, you have until October 27th to get priority status for your Oculus Touch order. The process is simple, starting this coming Monday you can pre-order the Oculus Touch but you must use the same e-mail address that you used when you preordered your Oculus Rift. You will receive a confirmation e-mail from Oculus and you'll be all set.

 

[Killahurtz]

got the email at 5:12 ...looking forward to using the hardware...and keeping an eye on the Santa Cruz Prototype

 

[HeadRusch]

Can't tell if Santa Cruz is a stand-alone entry-level VR helmet without the need for external sensors, or if its wireless HDMI for the Rift. I believe its the former. Anyone know more?

 

[zamardii12]

Can't tell if Santa Cruz is a stand-alone entry-level VR helmet without the need for external sensors, or if its wireless HDMI for the Rift. I believe its the former. Anyone know more?

No, I watched Tested's interview with Nate Mitchell and they are keeping it REALLY close to the chest and aren't discussing at all how it is being done, but impressions are that the tracking is super super accurate. See it here also some hands-on impressions.

The rumor is that HTC is working on the wireless video solution, but it is known that the Santa Cruz prototype is a self-contained unit. The way it was described was Gear VR level graphics with Rift-level tracking while this new "Spacewarp"technology is being used to bring the refresh rate up to at least the 90hz it needs. Super exciting stuff, but since it is very very early-on in development I suspect we won't get details on it for a while.

It's interesting to hear Nate talk about where it stands in their product lineup where they talk about Gear VR being the entry-level and Rift being on the high-end of the spectrum while this new Santa Cruz device will be the in-between solution. The interesting thing that Nate said as far as where they feel pricing would be with this thing is between Gear VR and the high-end Rift. He says "it is lower cost than necessarily the all-up high-end Rift package." Source is in the video above.

I interpreted that in two different possible ways; either the Rift package he is talking about is the Rift with a PC that can power it or the Rift and/or with touch package. So either the price will be between $99 and $799. Hopefully when he says package he is not talking about a computer that runs it, but just the headset itself which is still interesting because if it's just the headset at around $499 then the Santa Cruz device could be around 300 to 400 dollars. I think the sweet spot they will try to hit is around $300. Any more than that then people will probably just end up buying a Rift, and by the time Santa Cruz is a functional consumer product in 2-5 years the Rift will have seen 1 or 2 revisions/upgrades and maybe have split the "high-end" rift into separate categories for say people who want higher resolutions in the HMD for people who have a really powerful PC who want to push VR to the limit.

Anything is possible I suppose, but I believe those are accurate speculations. I am super excited for Santa Cruz because I think that is how VR really should be to get the most immersion which is wireless, but it is very far away so we'll see what happens. I think the wireless video could be a solution too that could be perfected. The example I go back to is the Wii U. When I had the Wii U, I was also surprised as to how amazing it was that the Wii U console itself was transmitting the game to the tablet controller as well as it was over whatever technology they were using. Yes, it wasn't anywhere near as high resolution as we need it but still wireless low-latency video should be possible.

The biggest mystery to me is that since this is going to be a new sub-category of VR, then how will games work on it? If you have to use a controller it'll instantly break immersion, but then if you need to use Touch (which I am sure will be optional or something like it) how will the headset also track the controllers? I think it's likely that by the time this will come out that there will be some sort of hand tracking going on. Don't know how they'll do it, but there are already some solutions out there to track the hand so we will have to wait and see.