Day One with the Oculus Rift DK2 | Hacker News Reader

Day One with the Oculus Rift DK2

roadtovr.com

61 pointsbane15 comments

Does anyone have data on how big fonts have to be, to be legible on a DK2? Ie, if you embed a terminal in a virtual world, and give it about 30 degrees of horizontal space, how many characters will that fit?

It's a 90 degree FOV, Each eye gets half of 1920, then divided by 3 (30°/90°), you'll get 1920/(3*2) = at least 320 horizontal pixels to work with. There are more pixels in the center due to how the distortion works, so in practice a little more than 320.

(edit: actually, if I recall, the 90° FOV on DK2 is actually a diagonal FOV, so you are looking at a ~78° horizontal FOV)

i remember reading up on Forrest Reiling's master thesis: source, https://github.com/evil0sheep/motorcar an abstract with link to video, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTcyMTI

unsure of the specs as per legible font size and number of characters or lines, also, i believe it was on the DK1

Sounds pretty encouraging. I hope Facebook's financial backing can turn this into a mass market product in a few years. Also interesting that the development kits cost only $350. I wonder if that could drop lower with a bigger production, or if the economy of scale benefits have already been reaped via 3rd party hardware producers.

Well, it's entirely possible - probable, even - that Oculus are selling the DK2 at a loss right now (which isn't unheard of at all for development hardware.

I doubt they're taking a loss, and I'd be surprised if they're not making a decent profit. What are the components? A 1080p cell phone screen, some cabling, custom plastic enclosure and straps, an IR webcam, and the PCB+components. That's not much, cost wise.

I think this very much oversimplifies the costs. From a hardware standpoint this is probably mostly correct, but the problem is the sheer amount of research and talent behind it is not remotely inexpensive. I recall Carmack saying, about a year after he joined Oculus, that he thought getting the latency down would be straightforward (sorry - I can't find a source), but it turned out to be a much harder problem than he expected. And, when Carmack is stuck, I cannot but believe there are intricacies that I could not hope to understand at play. The fact that they have been unable to ship a consumer version after all this time, I think, corroborates that this is a much more difficult problem than just throwing some hardware together and calling it a day.

If nothing else, the new elite also supports the dk2, although we may not see the full experience until Monday.

This article has made me $350 lighter.

Does 'DK2' mean "ready to be released before Xmas" in their language?

I think they said if there is DK3 it will basically be production hardware released to a limited number of developers shortly before consumer release.

They have been careful not to say anything about release dates for the consumer device but my understanding is that 2014 is possible but unlikely.

there was also this game I forgot the name but the space ships were so detailed it was amazing when it was demoed on oculus rift.

this new version seems a huge step up from previous version, namely the resolution increase.

I so badly want this now as the low resolution is what has turned me off DK1.

On a side note, I wonder how difficult it will be to see a glove that you can wear and get tacticle feedback?

I think it might have been EVE Valkyrie. Although Star Citizen has got to look pretty amazing in the DK2 - Has anyone tried it? I only have the DK1 to play with, unfortunately.

They're actually hoping the consumer version will be higher resolution still. I think they're trying to hit 2K (2560×1440) along with the new round of smartphones.

Pretty sure you are referring to Star Citizen.

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