Need proof the Palmer Luckey (AKA PalmerTech) wasn’t teasing when he said he was working on the Oculus Rift HMD with some big names in the game industry? Here’s Cliff Bleszinski (AKA CliffyB), checking out a prototype of the Oculus Rift.
Hi and welcome to the new Road to VR. If you’ve been a regular reader, you’ll notice that things look at bit different. Fear not, looks are indeed the only thing that have changed. This refresh of the site represents my commitment to continue covering all things virtual reality. As you can see I’ve added some ads to help fund this site a little (I don’t expect it to earn more than pocket change). Regardless, I started this blog back in October of 2011 and have wrote in my free time for 10 months purely because I’m enthusiastic about the topic, and that hasn’t changed one bit. You can continue to expect the same quality coverage that you’ve seen from me. There is some very exciting stuff about to happen in the field of virtual reality gaming and I will be here every step of the way to keep you up to date on the developments. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to get involved in the conversation!
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Much has happened since the Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display / VR headset started picking up steam in May. Palmer Luckey has been teasing that he was in discussion with some big names in gaming, and today he’s ready to do some name-dropping. Can such strategic partnerships lead to high-speced Oculus Rift 2.0 in 2013 as Luckey says?
Finally an update on the Oculus Rift Kickstarter. The head mounted display that’s been… er… turning heads… has been teasing us with an upcoming Kickstarter campaign. The original plan was for it to go live in the middle of June but some exciting developments have happened since then. The Kickstarter was delayed due to these developments, but it’s actually been thanks to good news rather than bad — one bit of which is a lower price.
Yesterday I showed you Google’s incredible live Glass demo where they took Project Glass on a skydiving adventure. Today I want to compile all of the Project Glass info that came out of Google I/O 2012 in one place. Below is the very latest info about Google Glass.
Since Google’s announcement of Project Glass, the company has remained quite silent on their augmented reality glasses project. We saw Project Glass in an interview with Charlie Rose back in April, but that was nothing compared to Google’s latest demo. At the annual Google I/O conference, the company decided to take things to the extreme by equipping a team of skydivers with Google Glass.
The VR community seems to be holding its collective breath to see what impact the Oculus Rift head mounted display will have on the future of virtual reality gaming. Patiently folks are waiting for the Kickstarter funding round to start and I’ve learned today that it has been delayed two weeks. Don’t fret though; Palmer Luckery, the brains behind the project, says that the delay “is not actually bad news at all.”
Condition One aims to achieve a standardized way of capturing and displaying immersive 180 degree video. The company is a startup founded by noted photographer Danfung Dennis. Currently the product takes the form of an iPad app in which the user can tilt the device or pan using a finger to look around the 180 degree view; Condition One’s work could provide a standard way for capturing high field of view content to be played back on high field of view head mounted displays like the Oculus Rift.
One of the reasons why I’m so excited about the Oculus Rift is that John Carmack, founder and technical director of Id Software, is demoing the unit to people within the gaming industry and is building full support for it into Doom 3 BGF which is due out later this year. CVG / PC Gamer has a great 3 part interview from E3 2012 with Carmack who has clearly done his homework on HMDs and is hoping to push them into mainstream gaming!
Right now the Oculus Rift project is at the center of my attention. If you haven’t read up on it, see here. In short, I’m hoping that this is the first major step in bringing virtual reality to mainstream gaming. With that in mind, I wanted to point out the first glimpse of specs for the Oculus Rift as well as an official site made by Palmer Luckey (aka PalmerTech) who is responsible for the project.
I’m away from a full blown computer this weekend, so please excuse the brevity of this post. I’m writing from my phone because I wanted to share some brief but exciting information regarding the Oculus Rift that I wrote about the other day.
While Sony’s HMZ-T1 and Silicon Micro Display’s ST1080 have made a major splash in the world of head mounted displays by bringing high resolution and (relatively) low cost products to market, a key issue still remains — field of view. Field of View (FoV) describes how much of your vision is taken up by a display. Increasing the FoV means that more of your vision is taken up by the display and this often leads to a much greater sense of immersion. Most of the HMDs available on the market have FoVs of 30 or 45 degress. This isn’t much different than sitting in front of an HDTV that’s across the room. However, over at the MTBS3D forum, user PalmerTech is working on a project to crowd-fund a head mounted display with an impressive (and immersive) 90 degree field of view though Kickstarter.
The Verge recently took a prototype version of the ‘Oculus Rift’ (as PalmerTech is calling it) for a test drive thanks to John Carmack (of Id fame) who has taken great interest in the project. Mainstream immersive virtual reality gaming is coming, and this might be the first big step.
I spoke with Silicon Micro Display recently and they tell me that the scarcity of initial units has prevented them from getting the ST1080 out to major outlets for review just yet. That’s why we’ve thus far only seen user-impressions of SMD’s first head mounted display. We’ll see reviews from the big guys in the next few weeks most likely. Speaking of which, I’ve got another ST1080 user review to highlight.
Thanks for a tip from Jeff Austin, I’m now looking at the Leap, an incredible — and incredibly affordable — piece of hardware that allows for extremely accurate realtime sensing of one’s hands; the input from which can be used to control a computer, among other things. I was blown away yesterday by MIT’s T(ether) project, but that system required thousands of dollars of equipment to do high-fidelity hand-tracking and it was merely a proof-of-concept — Leap on the other hand is not only ready to hit the market, but it’s doing so at just $70; I’ve paid more for a mouse!
I wrote a few months back that augmented reality needed to prove itself. While I still think this is the case, I’m happy to report that top minds are working on just that. Some genius folks from MIT have created ‘T(ether)’, an amazing system which allows a user to interact with an augmented reality world by reaching out and manipulating it with their hands.
