Having open-sourced the design and software that powered their first VR headset, Oculus shares 5 key ingredients that it believes are the baseline for achieving Presence in virtual reality.
After the success of the SVVR UBERCast, the folks who stayed at the VR Beach House decided that it was necessary to do it again, this time calling it the Oculus Connect ULTRACast. A great group of well-known developers and personalities in the VR community joined in and despite the ridiculous timing (Sunday at 2am), it turned out to be a great conversation.
At Oculus Connect, CEO Brendan Iribe took to the stage to talk about the company’s recent work, including their collaboration on Samsung’s Gear VR headset. During the presentation, Iribe showed photos of 8 previously unseen Gear VR prototypes.
Though Oculus didn’t initially allow photos or video to be taken of the new Crystal Bay prototype, the company has now released some images of the headset in use.
We’ve written about Striker VR and their electrically driven weapon recoil system previously, but it wasn’t until I met up with the company at Oculus Connect two days ago that I was able to try the system for myself. After 10 seconds of testing, I was sold.
During a session at Oculus Connect, the company released the totality of the Oculus Rift DK1 plans to the public. Under an open-source license, anyone can now freely download the blueprints of the company’s first VR headset and even manufacture their own.
Oculus Share was launched a little over a year ago as a way to gather together the torrents of content being produced by developers around the world. After the Oculus Rift DK1 shipped, well after its hugely successful Kickstarter campaign even Oculus must have been surprised at the sheer amount of early games and applications that were produced by developers even before they’d received their DK1 units. As an early adopter it was difficult to find and discover content and Oculus recognised the need to focus all this talent and content in one place.
Oculus Share launched August 2013 and offered a curated portal for developers to showcase their work and for enthusiasts to find it. Oculus introduced play-testing and a certification of sorts which ensured content in the store met a minimum threshold for quality. It also meant that they could vet any apps for virtual reality user comfort – something all the more important before the inclusion of motion sickness limiting positional tracking in the DK2.
Oculus has had a roller coaster couple of years and I suspect there is no one involved with the company form the start who would have imagined the company and its products would have evolved quite as quickly as it has. Oculus’s content horizons have now spread. Along with catering for early adopters in hardcore gaming, the company is heavily invested in the future of mobile VR, something their CTO John Carmack has been spearheading passionately with Gear VR. Oculus have evolved from a pure hardware start-up to an end to end solution and content provider.
See Also: Samsung Announes Gear VR
Oculus is keenly aware that, once VR becomes established as a technology, it’s the software that matters from thereon out. With that in mind, Oculus is broadening its content production and delivery plans to better position itself for having to deliver great games and apps to (if you’re to believe Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe) 2 Billion VR Users.
As part of the opening keynote addresses, yesterday VP of Product Nate Mitchell announced their vision for the future of VR content delivery. Oculus Platform is a moniker given to what will eventually become a suite of apps and portals on multiple platforms. A glimpse of one of Platform’s forms was seen during the recent launch of the Oculus / Samsung produced Gear VR Headset (see right). Oculus Platform will enable developers to publish content and, eventually, make money from it from purchases made in the same way as IOS or Android developers and users do now. The Gear VR variant is still in development but offers a way to purchase content whilst still ‘in’ VR, that is, no need to take your headset off to buy a new game.
It’s reasonable to assume that Oculus will want to offer a similar look and feel for all Oculus Platform based stores and what we’ve seen on Gear VR may be a glimpse of what PC users will see when they don their Consumer Oculus Rift looking for cool new VR experiences. Nate Mitchell outlined that Oculus Platform would also be available in more traditional web and app (IOS or Android) based forms, ensuring that wherever you are you can purchase content for your VR device of choice.
It’s fascinating to see Oculus, an incredibly cool but nevertheless scrappy startup just 2 years ago, positioning itself calmly as the go-to curators and purveyors of virtual reality content. It’s easy to see that, in just another 2 short years, comparisons to the IOS App Store and Android Play store might not be entirely far from the mark – beyond those 2 years, frankly the mind boggles.
The cross platform 3D development engine Unity 3D, it’s fair to say, has been incredibly important in the drive to get content created for virtual reality. According to Oculus’ VP of Product Nate Mitchell, at one point, Unity based submissions to their content platform Oculus Connect accounted for something like 95%. It’s low cost and ease of use lowered the entrance barrier for developers and keen enthusiasts alike wanting to create games and applications for the VR revolution.
Unity Free can be used by anyone to create content, one of the reasons for the engine’s popularity, but this version does not come with integrated Oculus Rift support – clearly key for VR devs. Unity Pro however does, but comes with a price tag of $1500 (or $75 per month) – not unreasonable at all for such a capable platform, but still a chunk of change for anyone wanting to dip their toe into VR development and experiment. Oculus saw this as such an issue that it managed to negotiate a 3 month extended trial of Unity Pro to ship with the original DK1. This cost niggle has beocme more and more a bugbear for cash strapped developers and has even prompted some to fire up Kickstarter campaigns to finance the purchase to they can get started.
Oculus clearly recognised this and have now announced a partnership with Unity 3D to bundle Oculus Rift support for ALL users of Unity – both free and pro. This now means that Unity offers the least costly way to get into VR development.
Recently, the release of Epic‘s Unreal Engine 4 caused a stir by offering a single subscription model for access to all features including Oculus Rift support. UE4 can be used by developers for a sub of $19 per month with a 5% revenue share in any UE4 based product. UE4 has been used for some time by Oculus to demonstrate cutting edge feature prototypes, most recently with the new Crescent Bay prototype and bullet-time extravaganza ‘Showdown’.
See Also: First Hands-on: Oculus Rift Crescent Bay is Incredible
The Oculus Rift support is provided by a dedicated add-on which in addition to providing stereo imaging optimizations, also ships with 3D audio support – something that Oculus seemed to have started to focus on publicly at Oculus Connect this year. Bear in mind however that Unity Pro still offers a large array of other features still not available in Unity free – you can find a comparison chart here.
It’s not yet clear when this new add-on will become available, but we suspect that it probably won’t be too long. We’ll of course let you know once it’s ready for download.
“How to recognize what elevates VR from good, to breathtaking, and practical steps on how to get there. In this presentation, we explore how to recognize the levels of excellence to aspire to in VR, and how to take the quality of your product to greater heights. Drawing on our own experience, and our findings as we help developers large and small, we identify common issues and inadvertent shortfalls, give trouble-shooting advice and share ways to enhance your VR experiences to the best they can be.”
Speakers:
Tom Heath, Senior Software Engineer @ Oculus
Ben Lang is live blogging from the show floor. Updates will appear below, no need to reload your browser.
“We’ll give a high-level overview of how we integrated the Oculus Rift hardware into Unreal Engine 4, with a focus on tricks we used to reduce latency and optimize the engine. Additionally, we’ll go through the successes, failures, and learning experiences we’ve had creating VR experiences to premiere Oculus’s prototype hardware.”
Speakers:
Ben Lang is live blogging the event from the show floor. Updates will appear below, no need to refresh your browser.
During a keynote at Oculus Connect, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe unveiled a headset they believe approaches the holy grail of virtual reality, presence. That is, it delivers an experience that your brain accepts as an alternate reality. This means motion sickness is much reduced or eliminated and the user is utterly immersed in the virtual world. Crescent Bay is its name and Executive Editor Ben Lang just went hands-on with the new feature prototype.
At Oculus’ inaugural ‘Connect’ event in Hollywood CA today, CEO Brendan Iribe announced a new feature prototype that Oculus believes delivers VR presence for the first time. The Prototype is called Crescent Bay and although exact specs are not yet available, this is a rough breakdown of the features set:
And the attendees at Oculus Connect get to try it today! Ben Lang and the Road to VR team are on the ground ready to get their hands on this new hardware and we’ll bring you impressions as soon as we can.
This story is breaking – we’ll add more details as they become available
Watch Oculus VR CEO and VP of Product Nate Mitchell as the address attendees of the Oculus Connect event in Hollywood CA. Rumours are there might be some surprises in store. CV1 announcement? New controller perhaps? We shall see soon.
Those of you who’ve followed the Oculus story from the start may recall Oculus hiring a young engineer who’d produced a high performance “9 DoF” tracking sensor – a version of which eventually found it’s way into the first Oculus Rift Developer Kit (DK1).
Now, Nirav presents a retrospective talk on what it took to build that very first device, one that set the ball rolling on what has become something of a VR revolution.
Join Ben Lang as he Live Blogs from the event. Posts should appear below automatically, no need to refresh your browser.
Epic‘s Unreal engine has been front and centre in Oculus’ technical demonstrations since the Oculus Rift HD Prototype appeared just over a year ago and ever since. From the dazzling Elemental demo used to debut UE4 to the unnamed tower defence demo used to demonstrate the Crystal Cove’s new positional tracking tech and finally Coach Knights, used at the DK2 launch. Not to mention the raft of sample demo’s available from the UE4 marketplace.
See Also: Download 13 Beautiful Unreal Engine 4 Examples for the Oculus Rift DK2
It looks as if the trend continues, this time at nVidia‘s recent Editor’s Day, a press event used to launch their new Maxwell line of GPUs and a slew of new VR based tech. The demo scene captured above by Tweaktown shows a new demo from Epic which drops you into the centre of a chaotic action sequence played out in super slow motion, allowing you to move through the action as the scene plays out.
Christened “Car Flip” due to it’s centrepiece it shows off UE4’s cutting-edge technology to dazzling effect. The scene is strongly reminiscent from the opening scene from the 2001 hacker flick Swordfish (see below) and demonstrates something I’ve longed to do since seeing the Matrix all those years ago – experience bullet time.
Also on hand to demonstrate nVidia’s SLI tech which uses dual GPUs, dedicating one for rendering the view for each of your eyes, was another ‘old’ VR stalwart EVE: Valkyrie. Using stations configured with dual Maxwell GTX 980 GPUs hooked up to Oculus Rift DK2s, one would hope that achieving the required 75FPS at 1080p wouldn’t have been too challenging here.
nVidia have clearly seen the enormous potential for selling to a new wave of hardcore gamers and the important role low latency, high frame rate rendering pipelines are going to be to virtual reality. And given the rumoured minimum 90Hz / 1440p requirement of the forthcoming Oculus Rift CV1, it looks like they’re just in time to ride that wave.
