Oculus Rift

The Rift is an upcoming virtual reality head-mounted display, being developed by Oculus VR. During its period as an independent company, Oculus VR raised US$2.4 million for the development of the Rift.

The consumer version of the product is expected to become available sometime in 2015. Oculus released two 'development kits', DK1 in late 2012 and DK2 in mid 2014, to give developers a chance to develop content in time for the Rift's release; these have also been purchased by many virtual reality enthusiasts for general usage.

Videos of these development kits featuring both impressions and gameplay have been broadcast on YouTube by a number of popular video game content providers, with home video titled "My 90-year-old grandmother tries the Oculus Rift" going viral, with over 2 million views.

History

Through Meant to be Seen (MTBS)'s 3D discussion forums,Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, developed the idea of creating a new head-mounted display that was both more effective than what is currently on the market, and inexpensive for gamers.

Coincidentally, John Carmack had been doing his own research and happened upon Luckey's developments. After sampling an early unit, Carmack favored Luckey's prototype and just before the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Id Software announced that their future updated version of Doom 3, which would be known as BFG Edition, would be compatible with head-mounted display units.[13] During the convention, Carmack introduced a duct taped head-mounted display based on Luckey's Oculus Rift prototype, which ran Carmack's own software. The unit featured a high speed IMU and a 5.6-inch (14 cm) LCD display, visible via dual lenses that were positioned over the eyes to provide a 90 degrees horizontal and 110 degrees vertical stereoscopic 3D perspective.

On March 25, 2014, Facebook announced that it had agreed to buy Oculus VR for $400 million in cash, $1.6 billion in Facebook stock, and an additional $300 million subject to Oculus VR meeting certain financial targets in a transaction expected to close in the second quarter of 2014.

Developer versions

The Oculus developer kit was an initial version financed by a Kickstarter campaign, which sought to get the initial Oculus Rift into the hands of developers to begin integration of the device into their games.[19] Since then, four different iterations of the hardware have been revealed to the public.

Developer kit

First version of the Oculus Rift development kit

Front view

Back view

Control box

In August 2012, Oculus announced that the "dev kit" version of the Oculus Rift would be given as a reward to backers who pledged $300 or more on Kickstarter. There was also a limited run of 100 unassembled Rift prototype kits for pledges over $275 that would ship a month earlier.

Developer kit preorders were made available for $300 on their website starting on September 26, 2012. These kits sold at a rate of 4–5 per minute for the first day, before slowing down throughout the week. As of March 12, 2014, the Rift DK1 kit was no longer available to order from Oculus.

While the first prototypes of the device used a 5.6-inch (14 cm) screen, the Rift developer kit uses a different 7-inch (18 cm) screen. The panel's pixel switching time is also significantly lower, reducing latency and motion blur when turning one's head quickly. The pixel fill is also better, reducing the screen door effect and making individual pixels less noticeable. The LCD is brighter and the color depth is 24 bits per pixel.

The 7-inch screen also makes the stereoscopic 3D no longer 100% overlapping, the left eye seeing extra area to the left and the right eye seeing extra area to the right. The field of view (FOV) is more than 90 degrees horizontal (110 degrees diagonal), which is more than double the FOV of most competing devices, and is the primary strength of the device. The resolution is 1280×800 (16:10 aspect ratio), which leads to an effective of 640×800 per eye (4:5 aspect ratio). However, since the Rift does not feature a 100% overlap between the eyes, the combined horizontal resolution is effectively greater than 640. The image for each eye is shown in the panel as a barrel distorted image that is then corrected by pincushion effect created by lenses in the headset, generating a spherical-mapped image for each eye.

Initial prototypes used a Hillcrest Labs 3DoF head tracker that is normally 125 Hz, with a special firmware that John Carmack requested which makes it run at 250 Hz, tracker latency being vital due to the dependency of virtual reality's realism on response time. The latest version includes Oculus' new 1000 Hz Adjacent Reality Tracker that will allow for much lower latency tracking than almost any other tracker. It uses a combination of 3-axis gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers, which make it capable of absolute (relative to earth) head orientation tracking without drift.

The weight of the headset is approximately 379 g (13.4 oz),[25] which is an increase of about 90 g (3.2 oz) in weight due to the increased screen size, and it does not include headphones.

A dial on each side of the headset allows adjusting each display to be moved closer or further away from the eyes. The development kit also includes interchangeable lenses that will allow for simple dioptric correction.

In June 2013, a 1080p version of the Rift was shown at Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The entire source for the Rift DK1 was released to the public in September 2014, including the firmware, schematics, and mechanicals for the device. The firmware is released under a simplified BSD license, while the schematics and mechanicals are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Crystal Cove

In January 2014, an updated prototype codenamed "Crystal Cove" was unveiled at Consumer Electronics Show, which uses a special low-persistence of vision OLED display, and includes a new motion tracking system that uses an external camera which tracks infrared dots located on the headset. The new motion tracking system would allow the system to detect actions such as leaning or crouching, which should help alleviate sickness experienced by users when the software did not respond to these actions.

Developer kit 2

In March 2014 at GDC, Oculus announced the upcoming Devkit 2 (DK2) which they expected to begin shipping in July 2014. It features several improvements over the first development kit, such as having a higher-resolution (960×1080 per eye) low-persistence pentile AMOLED display, higher refresh rate, head positional tracking, a detachable cable, and the omission of the need for the external control box.

A teardown of DK2 revealed that it incorporates exactly the same screen as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, including the front panel from the device itself.

Crescent Bay

In September 2014, during the Oculus Connect conference in Los Angeles, Oculus once again presented an updated version of the Rift, codenamed Crescent Bay. This version has a greater resolution than the DK2, a lower weight, built-in audio, and 360-degree tracking thanks to the presence of tracking LEDs in the back of the headset. Oculus has also licensed software library RealSpace3D, which is expected to provide the Rift with HRTF and reverb algorithms.

Consumer version

A consumer-oriented version of the Rift is in development, which will be aimed at a general market and feature improved components. Improved head tracking, positional tracking, higher resolution, and wireless operation are some of the features under consideration for the consumer Rift.

On April 30, 2014, Business Insider titled an article to assert that the consumer version of the Rift will be released in 2015, based on a partial quote attributed to "Management at Oculus VR." The quote in question indicates that the company would be "disappointed" if the headset is not released commercially before 2016. This article has been referenced by multiple other sources as official confirmation of a 2015 release date,but representatives of Oculus assert that no release date has yet been announced.

Adoption

Paramount for the immersion into virtual reality are a high frame rate (at least 95 fps) as well as a low latency. Furthermore a pixel persistence lower than 3 ms is required to avoid nausea when moving the head around.

Games and game platforms must be specifically designed to work correctly with the Oculus Rift. Oculus is producing a software development kit (SDK) to assist developers with integrating the Oculus Rift with their games. The SDK will include code, samples and documentation. Since its introduction, many developers have been working on integration.

Team Fortress 2 was the first game to add support for the Oculus Rift, and is currently available to play with the Oculus Rift dev kit by use of a command line option. The second title to support the Oculus Rift was the Oculus-only version of Museum of the Microstar which was released in April 2013. Half-Life 2 was the third, and Hawken is the fourth game to support the Rift; it was prominently featured in the Kickstarter, and Oculus used it to demo the Rift at the GDC.

Several titles are playable on the Rift via the free and open source Vireio Perception VR drivers. Games currently with full or partial support include Left 4 Dead, Skyrim, Portal 2, Half-Life 2, BioShock, Star Citizen, and Elite: Dangerous.

The Gallery: Six Elements is the first announced game being designed specifically for the Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality, rather than adding Rift support to an existing game. This is considered important because many existing games use features that do not translate well to VR, such as a HUD, cutscenes, menus, third person sections, fast movement speeds, not being able to see one's own body, etc.

Several prominent figures from the games industry, notably John Carmack, the co-founder of Id Software, Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation, Michael Abrash, the author of Zen of Graphics Programming and Graphics Programming Black Book, Cliff Bleszinski, former design director at Epic Games, and David Helgason, the founder of Unity 3D publicly endorsed the Rift. Epic Games, creators of the Unreal Engine, have announced that the engine will integrate support for the Oculus Rift. David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies, has announced support for the Oculus Rift with the Unity engine. John Carmack, formerly of id Software, had stated that he had plans to make the Oculus Rift a concurrent part of the Doom 4 development to ensure that it worked well with the game at launch. Michael Abrash, who was researching virtual reality and augmented reality at Valve said "I personally would like to get our games running on the Rift and make it a great experience". Notch, developer of Minecraft, while initially stating that his games would likely support the Rift, shortly after announced the cancellation of such plans, following the Oculus' acquisition by Facebook. However, a Minecraft mod by the name of "Minecrift" adds unofficial support for the Rift.

Several commercial options are also available that could potentially add Rift support to games that don't have it natively, including Vireio Perception 2.0, the VorpX commercial driver, and Dynamic Digital Depth's Oculus Rift "Add-On" VR with their TriDef Ignition stereoscopic 3D drivers.