Those of us wrapped up in the dizzying (sometimes literally) world of virtual reality have been so focussed on following the progress of how the hard, pure technical problems are being solved by those smart eggs at Oculus VR, that we may lose sight of the fact that the Oculus Rift needs to be a real, physical thing—probably kinda soon too.
More than most consumer electronics devices we own, good industrial design for virtual reality devices and in particular VR headsets is of critical importance. The Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 are examples of function over form, people ordering these products are already enthusiasts or developers (or both), they’ll put up with the way the unit looks just as long as it performs. Oculus’ first consumer product will have a much more difficult time with its target demographic—everyone everywhere. Oculus are clearly acutely aware of this and have just announced their acquisition of top design studio Carbon Design Group.
You may not know who they are, but you sure as hell know their designs. In the gaming sphere alone, the firm is responsible for the classic Xbox 360 controller, which won over so many converts to Microsoft’s fold back in 2005. Microsoft’s Kinect, another iconic form which became the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever.
Oculus claim the team have already been collaborating on “multiple unannounced projects” for nearly a year. Which of course throws a hunk of meat to the speculation hounds. It’s fairly certain Carbon’s first and primary brief will be the long awaited Oculus Rift CV1 (consumer version of the Rift), but what else have they already been working on for all that time? Let’s face it, almost certainly peripherals. And, frankly, given the Carbon Design Group’s pedigree in this area, they seem like an incredible choice.
Also, yet another tantalising view on Oculus’ latest prototypes comes from Carbon’s Creative Director, Peter Bristol:
A few seconds with the latest Oculus prototypes and you know that virtual reality is for real this time. From a design and engineering perspective, building the products that finally deliver consumer virtual reality is one of the most interesting and challenging problem sets ever.
This is an entirely open product category. With consumer VR at its inception, the physical architectures are still unknown — We’re on the cutting edge of defining how virtual reality looks, feels, and functions.
We’re incredibly excited to be part of the team and we’re looking forward to helping design the future
Oculus expect the deal to be ‘done’ by this summer; the cost of the acquisition has not been announced.
It’s been an interesting and somewhat sordid 24 hours since we broke the news a company supposedly called ‘Horizon VR’ who claimed that not only that they had a brand new VR Headset that comprised 2 x 4k / UHD screens, 2 x 2k front facing cameras and a whopping 210 degree field of view but that their product would be ready to ship in January.
Alarm bells rang and we dug a little deeper, noting some irregularities with the website – most notably the use of a modified product concept render directly lifted from the very real and very genuine InfinitEye team. What’s more, the Horizon V specification bore a striking resemblance to InfinitEye’s excellent HMD. Dual, discrete display panels, 210 degree horizontal FOV fed by dual HDMI cables – this all looked a little too close for comfort.
We wrote to Stephane Portes of team InfinitEye who in no uncertain terms condemned the use of their rendered imagery and confirmed they were in no way affiliated with Horizon VR and were understandably upset at someone potentially tarnishing their good name.
The Horizon VR Mockup
InfinitEye’s Original Concept Render
We emailed Horizon VR using the contact form on the website and received a somewhat staccato response from a Kevin Geiger, apparently CEO of Horizon VR. He claimed that he was bewildered by the apparent storm of interest they’d received, when they realised their work-in-progress website was actually live and being indexed by Google – bringing as it did a swarm of VR enthusiasts to the website.
Kevin went on to state that the specifications on the website “aren’t right” and the claimed delivery date of Jan 2015 was “not correct yet” stating that May 2015 was their intended target. A portion of the email is quoted below:
Firstly our website has been up for three days- in ‘test’ mode, though we started accepting preorders for our project. Though we are confident in in the design, some of our specs are incorrect- we simply weren’t prepared for the enormous interest so quickly, and we’re a bit in damage control at this point- so some things are in the process of being rapidly updated.
A short answer is, we’re not yet ready- our site was put up in a hurry and we need to hold off on any publicity until we can straighten some things out. Might take it down until then- but google is already indexing us, etc. and we’d hate to abandon any interest.
And when challenged about the use of InfinitEye’s imagery:
About the Infiniteye ‘similar’ image, yep- good eye- the infiniteye which is a great idea in many ways, but it’s a placeholder until ours is eye-friendly. It was simply a concept if you will until our unit is ready. It’s currently a mass of 3d printed plastic at this point- the photo is simply representational, and we’ll be changing it soon with our own. Didn’t intend for people to see it in three days, but google indexed us almost immediately. -There are some differances in the head strap design for example though where we go thinner than them to cut down on weight, and also ours will likely be more ‘blocky’.
Most worryingly though, the payment gateway portion of the site was partially functional (accepting Bitcoin and Paypal only), Kevin claimed they’d received some 500 orders already. Based on the lowest price tier, the deposit at $399, that’s a cool $199,500 in less than 3 days! When we suggested that they should disable the payment gateway immediately until the facts were straightened out, Kevin responded “As recommended we’ll be removing the pre-order option for the moment.” That response was 7 hours ago and as of writing this, the pre-order page seems still fully functional, presumably continuing to accept payments.
We suggested that the team also visited the /r/oculus subreddit to try and engage with the concerned VR Community and try to explain their situation. Kevin did so, reiterating much that was in the email received initially by us. With an additional answer to my query as to proof that the company’s legitimacy, to this Kevin Geiger responded: “Yep, started the company from our garages in the winter of this year (Rift, anyone?) Check back in a week the secretary of state pages for the business listing.”
What we Know
The VR community kicked into gear and tried to sniff out what facts they could. First up, we noticed something odd when checking they’re (very) recent domain registration used on the website:
The domain was freshly registered just 6 days ago. Seems like a quick turnaround between deciding a product name, company name and registering.
Next up ‘thebloodshed’ on /r/oculus noted that the company address used at the foot of the page, “4800 Hampden Lane, Suite 200, Bethesda, MD 20814” – seems to be the address of a recruitment agency called Hire Strategy.
User ‘bilago’ noted that the staff photos were lifted from elsewhere on the web, this goes for the entire supposed Horizon VR team. And the ever diligent ‘BOLL7708’ pointed out numerous inconsistencies including the motion tracking IR LEDs added sloppily to the InfinitEye render.
——
There is still a chance that this whole affair is a monumental administrative bungle, but with the evidence above we’re repeating what we said in our original report, do not buy from this website!
We’ll continue to look at new evidence as it arrives and liaise with the alleged Kevin Geiger from Horizon VR on what on earth is going on – we’ll keep you in the loop.
A friend recently sent me a video of a gal whispering into her microphone and tapping her nails on a coffee mug, with the message, “You have to talk to her about VR!” I invited Ally onto the Rev VR Podcast, and she explains how her videos are going to contribute to the growing VR space.
The VR headset race has seen many entrants in the last two years other than Oculus’s Rift. But none has managed to convincingly best the Rift’s raw technical specifications quite so dazzlingly as the InfinitEye 210 Degree, dual 720p HMD that I was lucky enough to try first when I visited the team in Tolouse back in October of 2013. I was impressed and to this day have never experienced quite the same expansive FOV.
Now, a new VR headset has appeared sporting a very similar approach to that monster virtual reality device. Horizon V claims to be the world’s first ‘UHD’ (Ultra High Definition) virtual reality headset. The unit sports dual discrete 4K (3840 x 2160) panels and claims to deliver an InfinitEye-equalling 210 degree horizontal field of view with 90 degrees vertical.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the device supposedly also houses Dual 4k front-facing cameras – presumably for a window on the world to flip to once you have the HMD on – and perhaps augmented reality applications some way down the track.
If Something Sounds Too Good to be True …
Too good to be true? We reached out to Stephane Portes from InfinitEye for comment on the Horizon V. Stephane told me that this project is absolutely not affiliated with InfinitEye in any way, but does use their HMD design renders. Therefore, please treat this device with extreme caution – we’d recommend not sending any money to this company before we’ve confirmed their legitimacy.
We’ll do our best to try and establish the HMD’s credentials as soon as we’re able and report back soon. If you’ve any information concerning Horizon 4K, drop us an email at info@roadtovr.com.
At E3 2014 I had the chance to try out the $150 Kor-FX gaming vest which has far exceeded its Kickstarter goal with 31 days left in the crowdfunding campaign. The vest seeks to add immersion to gameplay by rumbling appropriately with events happening in the game world around you.
Bridging the gaps that still remain in virtual reality once the visual and audio elements are at least ‘good enough’, VR enthusiasts will surely turn their attention to elements that are missing from their experience whilst trying to reach into these new virtual worlds.
It’s fairly clear that input development is still lagging some way behind the blindingly rapid progress made by VR Headsets in the last 2 years. Although E3 2014 gave us extremely positive experiences with Sixense’s STEM and Control VR’s VR Gloves, it does seem as if we’re moving in the right direction.
Haptics are tied to input but often seen as disposable. Haptic technology, speaking broadly, transfers feedback via physical movement. A basic example is the force feedback you have in your consoles controller, where different motor oscillations give you immediate physical feedback when tied to gaming events. We’ve covered Tactical Haptics many times now, and their approach to a particular type of ‘skin stretching’ haptics were uncannily effective and proved that advanced haptics could indeed help enhance immersion.
Now, DEKKA Technologies reckon they’ve produced one of the most advanced haptic feedback system, specifically built to emulate weapon recoil. Originally designed for training purposes, DEKKA seems to have realised that a realistic way to emulate the feel of firing weapons might just be of interest to the consumer entertainment market and, in particular immersive entertainment such as virtual reality.
Striker VR (stands for Virtual Recoil) claims to differ from other realistic recoil simulators in that their system uses an electro-magnetic linear drive system rather than bulky, noisy compressed CO2 – DEKKA claim the drive converts energy “directly to linear motion” which seems to effectively mean precisely moving a weighted barrel to simulate the movement usually caused by detonations within the weapon. Their programmable system can apparently also simulate changed in weight distribution, although it’s not clear how far this capability can be pushed.
Striker VRs Electro-magnetic Linear Drive Recoil System
What’s not clear however is if the unit contains the other requisite technology to be involved in a VR experience. Realistic recoil is great, but if the movement of your weapon isn’t translated into the game, there’s not much point. Whether DEKKA will begin investigating these avenues is as yet unclear. Also, the system clearly requires some heavy duty power, supplied by a rather chunky cable. The image above which includes the control box (designed for industrial use) but it’s unknown how much of that box is assigned to power supply.
Still, it’s an interesting progression of haptic technology, the uses of which could well give us that realistic weapon feel enthusiasts crave. We’ll keep an eye on Striker VR and let you know how it develops.
Right now though, one fan in particular is finding these last few weeks so tortuous, he felt he had to express himself in this short film. An accurate and emotive piece I think you’ll agree. Nice work meepsblah, you managed to occupy us for almost a minute – but we still have many more to go.
Virtual Reality cinema and video is quickly becoming the hot topic. A seemingly endless stream of ‘360’ cameras are spawning, Jaunt VR of course recently won $6M+ backing for it’s 3D 360 VR cinema venture and it seems even James Cameron wants to hop along the bandwagon.
But for the VR enthusiast on a budget who wants to quickly and cheaply capture reasonable quality 3D footage that looks great on an Oculus Rift, what options are there?
Well, the enthusiast in this video claims to have achieved good results bolting 2 x GoPro Hero Black’s together using an extended 5mm rod, then attached to the official GoPro mount. The video author also claims the system emulates a fairly standard 64mm IPD with his hacked mounting technique. Controlling the units using a multi camera remote control, what you end up with is decent quality side by side 3D footage, ripe for processing for viewing in the Rift. The GoPro Hero 3 is capable of capturing footage at 2.7k at 30FPS (and up to 4k at an unacceptable 15FPS) the rigs specs do impress.
It’s an interesting and economical approach that may well allow quick capture of immersive 3D footage. If anyone does try out a similar technique, so let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
The Kinect was a great example of cutting edge technology coming from R&D into entertainment. First released as a peripheral for the Xbox 360, it quickly became one of the most successful console peripheral ever launched and then promptly completely failed to deliver on its promise to bring natural human gesture recognition to compelling gaming experiences.
Arguably, the Kinect’s most interesting projects have almost all come from hackers and developers on the PC, after Microsoft released official driver and SDK support for the device back in 2011. The Kinect’s (at the time unique), RGB plus Depth sensors in particular gave those interested in Augmented and Virtual reality development ways to quickly capture the boundaries of physical spaces and project them into the virtual.
One of the projects that was borne from within Microsoft’s own research labs was KinectFusion, which undertook research into grabbing high quality 3D environment models captured from cameras with depth sensors, just like Kinect. The upshot of the project was the ability to scan an environment and reconstruct the geometry digitally in 3D models.
Now, a team of researchers have taken KinectFusion and combined it with the Oculus Rift. Kintinuous captures your surrounding environment as KinectFusion did, but then renders the output directly to an Oculus Rift. What’s more, when the viewer moves their head, the render is transformed based on depth information (and an implicitly aligned point in space, in this case the desk) from the Kinect’s depth sensor and not the Rift’s onboard IMU. The results are an impressive way to capture an environment and move through it physically with positional tracking.
According to Hack a Day, the project is not free for release due to copyright issues. However, the research papers here, here and here. As Hack a Day states, nothing prevents a suitably smart individual from taking the research and producing their own Kintinuous implementation. Fingers crossed the results of the project see the light of day. We’ll let you know if we hear anything.
Of course, now the Xbox One is out, the original’s Kinect’s upgraded offspring imaginatively entitled ‘Kinect Sensor for Windows 2’ is available for Pre-order now. With MS promising better SDK support and the upgraded sensor hardware, Kinect 2 could be an interesting device to watch if you’re a VR hacker.
A little while back we reported that the racing simulation genre was embracing virtual reality enthusiastically, with almost all major titles either already having implemented or planning to implement support for Oculus Rift at some level. Games like Assetto Corsa and the hugely successful iRacing have now had fully playable levels of VR support for quite some time.
Now, Live for Speed, a long running favourite with the driving simulation community has announced that it’s latest 0.6F update, has joined the VR fold – implementing support for 3D devices and a special mode for the Oculus Rift VR Headset.
LFS Programmer Scawen Roberts got in touch with Road to VR to pass on the good news. What’s more, the team behind the game have pre-ordered DK2s and plan to support the new headsets soon after receiving them. Will LFS be the first racing sim to implement full positional head tracking? We’ll have to wait and see.
Frustratingly, Road to VR and the White Lotus Interactive team seem to keep missing each other. Such was the case at E3 this year too unfortunately. It’s especially annoying because, as a backer of the project, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the game for some time and up to now never had the opportunity.
The Team with Oculus’ Joe Chen (far left) Palmer Luckey (2nd from right)
Well, I doubt I’m alone in this sentiment, and it seems the 3 member team have detected this as, in their latest update they reveal we won’t have to wait much longer to get our hands on the game. After listening to feedback from people visiting their stand at E3 this year, they’ve decided to release the very same demo show to attendees. No details on precise release date just yet, we’ll of course let you know when we do.
Elsewhere in the update, the team speak of their success in optimising the demo at the last minute, being interviewed by Gamespot and just generally enthusing about all the awesome people they met. Their update also functions as a neat ‘go to’ guide for those attending shows like E3 for the first time. Best of all? They got into a Kotaku comic!
I’m a wimp! There, I said it. I never did make it all the way through the dark, dank and terrifying tunnels of Dreadhalls when it debuted as a finalist in last year’s IndieCade VR Jam event. It was a finalist and, despite my inability to spend more than 5 minutes playing before yelping like a girl, one of my favourite entrants. It was also widely adopted by the YouTube community and their never-ending thirst for ‘hilarious‘ reaction vides involving the Oculus Rift.
Now, Dreadhalls is back and in development and on course for a commercial release late this year. Developer Sergio Hidalgo, who originally conceived and built the game in 3 weeks, in accordance with VR Jam’s rules, did a remarkable job infusing everything in Dreadhalls with claustrophobic dread. The visuals were perfunctory, but it didn’t really matter as the sound did a very respectable job of plunging you into the depths. It was a slow, considered and sparse experience – using it’s procedurally generated map and distant echoes of .. something it was a brilliant antidote to the cheap jump scares that comprised the majority of VR horror titles up to then.
The latest Dreadhalls demo has come along nicely since then. Now sporting new textures and an upgraded lighting model the new game looks great. But perhaps the feature we’re most interested in is that it’s now DK2 ready, meaning that if you’re lucky enough to have one of Oculus’ new developer kits on the way, it’ll support it straight away—head tracking included.
Sergio said of his plans for the new Dreadhalls; “You can expect more varied environments, new creatures and scary encounters, etc… I’m also working of having a longer experience that covers more than a single level, with a progression and more backstory.”.
We asked Sergio about launch date plans and whether he’s planning on releasing the demo to the public:
The full game still needs more work, but my idea is releasing it by the same time that the Oculus CV1 hits the market, so I plan to have it finished by Q3/Q4 this year. I can also tell you it will be exclusively for the Rift at launch. Whether I’ll release this demo or not depends on the feedback I get from the people I’ve sent it to, so it’s still undecided. However, if I choose not to release it, I’ll probably add positional tracking support to the already available VRJam version instead.
Finally, we asked Sergio how he tackled the challenges of implementing head tracking with no DK2s yet in the wild:
I wrote an article on this issue here. Basically I’m fading the image to black and muffling the sounds, but not limiting the player’s movements at any point, since I found out that leads to discomfort. I don’t have a DK2, but I had access to one for a couple of days thanks to Oculus, which is how I was able to test this out.
We hope to give this a proper playtest soon, but I’m already very much looking forward to one of my VR Jam favourites getting a full overhaul in time for Oculus’ consumer model. Frankly though, I’m not sure I’ll be brave enough to actually play it.
The VR community is awesome and growing rapidly every day and the gatherings that have sprung from the collective enthusiasm and passion for virtual reality are now many and diverse with some blossoming into fully fledged conventions.
We got word from Henry Velez, a VR enthusiast and fledgling podcaster about a VR Meetup he’s organising out in North Carolina is being co-hosted at EPIC Games (they of Unreal Engine / Gears of War fame) at their Cary Offices. Henry tells us that there are a few slots left for any VR enthusiasts or merely VR curious who live in and around the area. This is actually the 2nd event for the RTP VR Enthusiasts group.
Virtual Reality and a visit to one of the most important HQs in games today? How could you pass this up? If you’re interested, pop along to the meetup homepage and signup. And if you do go, let us know what you see.
Today Sixense is revealing the reason for the delay of their STEM motion input controller—the company revamped their board design to include an IMU sensor which augments the motion tracking capabilities of the controller. The IMU is used for calibration-free correction of magnetic distortion. At E3, Road to VR went hand’s on with the latest STEM prototype and came away very impressed with the system’s performance.
The famous Steam Summer Sale of 2014 is upon us. This is the first year of the Summer Sale since Valve announced SteamVR, the company’s adaptation of their ‘Big Picture Mode’ for use with the Oculus Rift in virtual reality. Here is a list of all 27 games that support the Oculus Rift and SteamVR available on Steam—you’ll want to keep your eye on these for a chance of deep discounts once the annual firestorm of sales begins.
Those of us wrapped up in the dizzying (sometimes literally) world of virtual reality have been so focussed on following the progress of how the hard, pure technical problems are being solved by those smart eggs at Oculus VR, that we may lose sight of the fact that the Oculus Rift needs to be a real, physical thing—probably kinda soon too.
