Oculus Connect 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Oculus Connect 2014

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This quote specifically:

"This was followed by a dimly lit museum corridor with a T-rex coming around the corner and slowly but menacingly approaching me. The model was very detailed and well animated, which really sold it. It wasn’t scary per se, but when it got close and roared right at me, I was definitely teetering on the edge of feeling like I was near a living creature. Why take kids to museums when they can travel back to the era of dinosaurs? VR in education is going to be huge."[0]

Reminds me so much of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1_bp8YKUPU

[0]http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-oculus-rift-crescent-bay-pr...

> VR in education is going to be huge

I've been seeing this repeated a lot lately, but I am going to say not with current hardware it isn't. The potential is obvious, but since SDK 0.4.0, the Rift comes with a huge on-screen disclaimer that can't officially be disabled (much to the annoyance of developers) that it is not for use by minors.

The reason is that much more research is needed to determine whether or not VR headsets are safe for developing eyes and brains. When you are using a VR headset, you are continually focused on infinity, which is not natural.

Sim sickness also continues to be a problem. Again it is not known whether there are potentially damaging effects while the brain is still in development. I would expect especially younger children to compensate for sim sickness for more readily than adults do, but who knows if that is at the expense of their balance and coordination in the real world? Right now, we don't.

University-level education, yes: VR will yield immediate tangible benefits. The truly big gains for general education cannot come until these problems can be worked out, which hopefully will be somewhere around CV3-CV4 (say around 5 years out). It won't be a solved problem within a year or two, unfortunately.

>The reason is that much more research is needed to determine whether or not VR headsets are safe for developing eyes and brains. When you are using a VR headset, you are continually focused on infinity, which is not natural.

It's not natural for humans to move 60mph either, but we do it all the time. Before that, when cars were first invented, they thought that going that fast would just kill you instantly.

And rightly so. G forces absolutely will kill you, just not from the speeds a car can attain. Why on earth WOULDN'T we be cautious with a new technology that we know has the potential to cause permanent damage?

They don't let minors drive cars either.

Who are they? In most US jurisdictions, the age at which one can be licensed to drive on public roads is below the age of majority.

The new oculus kit I tried at connect seems to be close to nailing it. It won't be 5 years.

I could listen to John Carmack talk all day. Awesome keynote

God yes, it's so refreshing to hear someone that actually gets it :)

Sorry, didn't mean to downvote you.

No worries, clicking on the wrong button happens :)

They scheduled him for a only an hour (even though his talks are usually 2-3 hours) and chased him off the stage when he went over time. It's odd that even Oculus doesn't seem to be treating him with the level of respect he deserves.

He's going to talk off stage for another hour or two while the stage is empty during lunch. Hopefully they'll learn for their next event.

I don't think it's that they lack respect for him. I would attribute it more to having a schedule for the event that they need to stick to.

No one who works for Microsoft would bump Bill Gates off stage against his express wishes. Or Zuckerberg. Later in the same stream Palmer Luckey (founder of Oculus) was cut off even more rudely when he tried to allow one more question before a break. He was visibly upset.

Palmer Luckey and John Carmack should be in undisputed control of Oculus. These slick suits who invaded should all leave now that they've made tons of money. Leave the genuinely passionate people to their work.

Did they not realize they ate from Facebook's hand and now they're Facebook's little bitches?

Don't blame the suits. Palmer knew what he was taking. It's hard to tell if Carmack knew about the sellout before it happened.

These types of scenarios have been around for thousands of years. It's only recently that you can follow them live, though. Fascinating stuff.

Facebook is now in charge. These guys won't stick around forever, and they'll make tons of money regardless.

Carmack has said publicly that he wasn't involved in the negotiations and found out after the fact.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/30/5563440/john-carmack-faceb...

Checked out the stream. The guy who cut off Palmer Luckey is Nate Mitchell, Oculus's VP of Product, and is one of the cofounders. The way he said "no" to one more question a little awkward, but it's a stretch to attribute it to Facebook.

Great to hear details laid out on stage, too bad Twitch muted the beginning of his talk.

Is it recorded anywhere? I'd love to watch it.

Edit: I found it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqzpAbK9qFk.

And the original source points to http://www.twitch.tv/oculus.

For those of you wondering about the higher resolution: A reddit user made the suggestion¹ that they are using two displays on top of each other and some clever signal processing to (almost) double the spatial (and temporal!) resolution.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XwaARRMbSA for a demonstration of this technique and note that one of the guys from this project was hired by Oculus.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2gytxj/i_just_did_t...

I would be wary of jumping to that conclusion at this point. Lanman et al had demos of this display technology at SIGGRAPH last month and it was pretty raw - myself and a few coworkers tried the demo at different times and at no point were the displays aligned well enough for the effect to really work. Lanman came from the media lab where he worked on a huge variety of (insanely cool) display technologies generally around light field displays, so his breadth and value-add is definitely more than just w/ this specific project.

Yeah. I'm watching the keynote right now, and Carmack talks quite extensively about the display problems they're facing and in no way indicates the use of multiple displays.

Also, the demo video of Lanman and company mentions 'calibration issues' they have on the outer parts of the display where you can cleary see alignment issues.

I still think it's a very clever idea of getting better resolutions with reasonable effort tough ;)

Just checked it out, looked like the same 1440p screen as the Note 4/GearVR. The sense of presence definitely makes it seem like much higher resolution than it actually is, but if you look into the distance or at text you realize it's not.

Is there a reason they have white dots on the new prototype? Are they doing any kind of external tracking?

Edit: Ah, yes that's apparently how they're doing 360° head tracking.

Both Crystal Cove and DK2 had the external IR LEDs, as well. On the DK2, they're just covered up by an IR-transparent material.

Nvidia's Maxwell GPU architecture seems to add some very nice VR features [1]. With Maxwell coming to Tegra, and Nvidia finally being able to utilize heterogeneous computing, it seems to me Samsung would be really smart to try and get the next Tegra chip for their Note 5 or whatever phone they use for Gear VR 2, next year. Oculus/Carmack also have some great relationships with Nvidia, and it seems Carmack has already been able to convince Samsung to do a lot of technical changes for them. I think if they make this happen, Gear VR 2 would be a lot better next year.

[1] - http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/09/18/maxwell-virtual-real...

I'm working on building a rapid application development framework for VR. I'm doing it in WebGL right now to, well, be fast about it, considering I don't have an Oculus yet, just a cardboard box and my smartphone. If you're interested, please join me to help get ahead of VR software development and make sure it stays open: github.com/capnmidnight/VR/

I'm looking very forward to hearing from anyone there who tries out the Crescent Bay prototype.

It's much better than DK2. Believable presence. They showed a series of scenes, about 10. Some of the scenes were quite impressive. Much harder to see the pixel now than DK2 (its still somewhat visible)

Any word on whether this is the final iteration between DK2 and the consumer launch? I'm debating whether to get the DK2 now, or just wait until the thing is launched.

This is simply an iteration. They mentioned that they had some things to fix, so there will definitely be more work done before the consumer version is ready. If you're not actively wanting to develop for the rift, wait. The current version is flawed in many ways and definitely not consumer ready. The biggest reason to wait however is that the first generation of VR content simply isn't finished yet, so you'd get the hardware and most likely quickly run out of experiences. The consumer version will be much better, and will actually have content made for it upon release.

Some sites say it's 1K resolution per eye. Which is roughly the same as DK2's 960 x 1080 per eye resolution.

Maybe the new one isnt pentile?

Have a look here: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2gytxj/i_just_did_th...

Apparently the difference from DK2 to Crescent Bay is just as large as the difference between DK1 and DK2.

First Hands-on: Oculus Rift Crescent Bay is Incredible: http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-oculus-rift-crescent-bay-pr...

It's awesome. I have a DK2 at home and this is so much better.

Great to hear that 360 degree position tracking is in. You'd think it would be only a small thing, but almost immediately once you get the sense of presence you start trying to look behind you.

I just ordered a DK2 last week, I guess I should cancel that

Same here, but I'm guessing this model wont be available until mid to late 2015?

Are we even allowed to cancel? The terms are all sales final.

Looks like we can cancel as long as its still in "Pending"

https://support.oculus.com/hc/en-us/articles/201721253-Order...

But if I won't be able to get my hands on this version until this time next year, maybe I won't cancel.

This model - much like the Crystal Cove prototype is likely not available to purchase. It is not a dev kit, but rather a proof of progress, and a stepping stone to CV1. I believe there will not be a DK3. All estimates point to CV1 being likely available in Q4 2015.

Why? If you're a developer wanting to get in on this at the ground floor, why would you cede months of time when you could be testing with a working beta unit?

Or is everyone just ordering these to play games as a consumer?

I don't plan on developing anything serious for the oculus, I just wanted to play around with it.

The DK2 experience is pretty phenomenal, if you ask me, but if you buy one you should know that it's definitely still not a plug-and-play affair to get anything substantial working, and real long term experiences are still thin on the ground (HL2 and Minecrift are the better ones right now if you ask me).

I have a DK2 for experimenting and some light dev work (I don't plan on releasing anything; I just wanted to toy with VR dev) and I think it was worth it for that, but those are just some things to keep in mind.

The development kits are limited in quantity. Why would you reduce the supply for legitimate development efforts?

I'd bet half the Oculus Rifts dev kits were in "enthusiast" hands and not serious developers. I think your assumption that every rift not sold to a dev is one less available to a dev, is incorrect. They've made 130,000 dev kits total. They're not precious.

I am wondering: how would Oculus compare with this http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/09/19/sony-dreams-of... especially taking into account the obvious PS4 synergy...

John Carmack said the controller is the missing link. For those who have been developing / testing DK1 or DK2, I wonder what are you thoughts on existing controllers that you've been using? What are they lacking, and what would be nice to have in a controller for VR (or AR)?

A linux SDK, or open source "runtime" is the sorest missing link.

Any type of pointer to start with. The first thing you notice (and do) in the demo scene is try and reach out and touch something.

But isn't a pointer already provided by controllers like those made by Sixense already?

Been having a great time attending the conference via Janus, http://vrsites.com/assets/Firefoxg/9/convcenter.html

I believe the future of the optical tech is going to be custom screens. They'll be shaped for the optics and have a pixel layout to complement the optical distortion. Has there been any talk about this?

Yes, they did talk about this briefly. I believe Carmack talks about it in his keynote (video linked in another HN news post). Basically the issue in the near to medium term is that VR isn't a big enough market to drive the development of custom displays yet. Display hardware design is still primarily focused on the needs of smartphones and Oculus has to work with what they can get from Samsung right now.

Integrated audio is going to be a dealbreaker for me. If I can't use my own high-quality headphones I will not use an Oculus.

They are designed to be removable.

You might not want to, though. They are there because 3d audio is important to the experience, and the reason they ship with integrated headphones is that it's both hard and important to get the 3d audio to "sync up" with the display, especially during rapid head movements.

It's nice that they add support for HRTFs.

Now all that's missing is a cheap and scalable way to measure or measure a person's HRTF.

Maybe somebody could develop a mash-up of these two excellent products for a "personal ear casting system":

http://kemar.us/

http://www.createamate.com/

When I worked at Interval Research Corporation, they had one of those in the lab (the Kemar mannequin, not the CreateAMate kit), and it was really creepy!

And no, the Kemar mannequin is NOT to be used as an aural sex toy. It's totally legit!

http://kemar.us/

"If KEMAR was not part of your life already from 1972, you can catch up with the timeline we made to highlight KEMAR's evolution. Many things may have changed in our lives, but KEMAR remains the same: your faithful friend and up-to-date manikin for acoustic research."

One of its uses is to make your own Head Related Transfer Function by casting a pair of rubber ears (pinnae), plugging them into the head, and recording their response to sounds. They are also great fun to dress up and accessorize at parties. And they give you a totally legitimate excuse for when you are caught walking around with a briefcase full of rubber ears.

The timeline pictures for 2013 show it "assembled, calibrated and delivered as a complete out-of-the-box system" that would be a blast to carry through airport security.

Mark my words: some day, everyone will own one of these awesome things. Kickstarter, anyone? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_head_recording

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/virtual-surround-sound3...

http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~acl/Equip/KEMAR.pdf

http://www.gras.com.cn/down/KEMAR_body_model_measure_catalog...

I would love to have seen the wild parties at this conference:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

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