I was an early backer of this project and thought the timeline completely unrealistic from the start.
Funded in September on the back of a render and an ugly prototype with John Carmack's seal of approval - ship in November.
Say what?
I'm sure a lot of folks will be miffed at the lack of communication about the shipping delay until now, but I'm thinking keeping quiet until they're able to set a hard date probably saves an awful lot of needless discussion.
There is, of course, a huge difference between making a few things, and having someone manufacture a few thousand things. It is interesting to see people learning these skills under such pressure. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a training class on manufacturing.
I was a bit confused about their comment on the display "We tested every available (non-proprietary) display we could get our hands on." At their volume most manufacturers would hand over details of connecting to their display.
> At their volume most manufacturers would hand over details of connecting to their display.
You'd think so, but I have had a hardware firm refuse to let me look at the data sheets unless they got a commitment to an order of 300,000 chips. And that was even though I tried to flash working-for-a-big-player-in-the-business credentials.
Interesting, in the past I've had the manufacturer require an in-person meeting at the facilities (which is basically their way of fact checking I guess) before coming through but for components never had them require a PO first.
On a funny/related note back when I worked at Google and was looking into compressing air during windy periods and then feeding it back through compressed air motors for energy and cooling, I tried to get specs and pricing from MTI, the French company that Tata Motors was said to be buying their motors from. In spite of being from Google and offering up the possibility of a very press worthy installation they wouldn't even give me the time of day. I figured they didn't actually have anything at that point and since Tata didn't ship their car for several years I continue to hold that belief. (I don't even know if Tata ever shipped their car, one option was buying cars and just taking out the engine)
I got one of the early pandora consoles ( http://www.openpandora.org/ ). They had some previous experience in the field and ended up shipping around a year after their original estimate. I think even the revised estimate for the occulus is quite optimistic.
On the other hand, the raspberry pi guys did a lot better than I expected.
Not quite irrelevant. The specs were on a par with the other things that were out when I got mine because they'd been very ambitious.
In terms of relevancy of course, the specs aren't all that it's about, having proper gaming controls and a qwerty keyboard in such a small device means that it's an entirely different kind of thing to almost everything else that's out there, and that's still the case. It's hard to overstate how important good controls are to the enjoyment of playing games. I certainly missed my train stop playing Speedball II (emulating the Amiga) and ended up miles away from home...
Is anyone else excited at finally being able to work in an immersive 3D environment? We'll no longer need two/three/N screens, we can either draw up as many screens as we need in the VR area, or just resize and position windows as near or far, and make them as large or small, as we like. I'm looking forward to decommissioning my screens.
It seems theoretically possible, does anyone know if it can happen?
If you need size and not resolution, soon. If you are running multiple high resolution monitors, I think its going to be a while before small LCD panels will be able to fit the pixels of 3 2560x1440 panels.
Also take in to account you have weight on your head. In games, players often get a sort of tunnel vision and ignore whats going on around them, making it easy to ignore the lack of comfort.
You don't need to put 12 million pixels on your head. 12 million pixels is useful on the desktop because it's nice to have a high density display anywhere you look.
For an HMD you only need "retina" resolution straight ahead. Peripheral vision can make do with a much lower resolution. I have no idea what the magic number is for retina HMD, but it'll probably be smaller than 12 million pixels. It's certainly possible that the 5" 1080p display used in the latest HTC could have a higher apparent resolution than putting 3 WQHD monitors on your desk.
And also keep in mind that higher densities are much easier to manufacture affordably in smaller screen sizes. There's a reason why you can buy a phone with a 440PPI, laptop displays with 220PPI but it's hard to buy a desktop monitor with more than 110PPI.
I'm trying to get a sense as to how exactly the head tracking will correlate with the controls. From the videos I've seen, it looks like the implementations so far have your head movements working in some combination with movements coming from your mouse/game controller.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd much prefer controlling my character's body (i.e. where the gun points) with the traditional controller/mouse, and use head tracking to move my character's head/camera only.
I think it'd be less tiring that way, and probably more immersive too. As I'm moving around in the game world, I could easily look around without changing the direction I'm travelling.
Various games do it differently. For example Doom3 last i I heard has head/body/aim movement the same while Hawken will be separate. Some games like ArmA currently have ability to separate crosshairs from view when using something like TrackIR.
I've never tried ArmA with a TrackIR setup but it sounds like it would be kind of annoying, i.e. when moving your head, your screen obviously stays on the desk, so you end up turning your head and looking at the screen from the corner of your eye. I'm sure you can adjust sensitivity, but it sounds pretty awkward nonetheless.
In the case of having the head-mounted display, it makes perfect sense. The immersive experience in first person shooters would benefit tremendously from that separation.
I suppose it's a good idea to let game developers experiment with the various control schemes, just as they did early on with defaults key mappings. Eventually it landed as WASD, Ctrl for crouch, space for jump, etc. I remember using right-click to move forward, inverted mouse, ZX for strafing...
I just have the feeling that "looking where you want to aim" is the totally wrong approach and look forward to game developers settling on a quasi-standard of how it should all work, just as they eventually did with keyboard/mouse mappings.
This type of thing really shows the value of having viable 3d printing available to the masses. The delays involved in just getting ready to manufacture it are more than 3 months! If enough people in the rift community had 3d printers we could probably print all the housings for this order.
The delay is disappointing but ultimately not surprising. I was shocked that they were going to have a fully manufactured product out by December. Not including the more than 2 months required to make the injection mold and then running into the month long Chinese new year holiday is pretty unfortunate.
This announcement doesn't speak to the 100 people that ordered the 'Unassembled Prototype'. I'm in this group and wondering when I will be getting my prototype to play with.
The way they chose to present this delay is really infuriating - they have doubled the time to delivery from when the kick starter campaign ended, and made the product worse (a heavier screen farther away from your head).
I understand how hard it is to predict a timeline for a product in development, but I would expect an apology instead of "We’re happy to be able to finally announce that the Oculus Rift developer kits will begin shipping in March 2013."
I am still excited to get mine in March, but this attitude from occulus makes me question weather it is worthwhile to spend much time developing for it.
Also worth mentioning - they announced this to backers in an email titled: "Update on Oculus Rift Developer Kit Technology, Shipping Details".
It is easy to skim the email without realizing they are announcing a delay at all. This is the kind of statement that I would expect from AT&T, not a crowdfunded project.
and made the product worse (a heavier screen farther away from your head).
I think you're being both unreasonable and ignorant--who're you to say that adding 30 entire grams (while exceeding the original specs, most importantly refresh rate) is making the product worse? Additionally, how do you know that a change in screen distance is better/worse?
My problem isn't really with the changes - there is nothing they can do if they can't source the previous panel, and I am sure they chose the best one available. My issue is with how the changes were presented - instead of 'we are sorry, we made a mistake, and here is how we are fixing it' it was 'we are happy to announce..'
The reason a larger screen distance is worse is that the torque on your head is the product of weight, distance, and gravity, so an increase in the distance will cause your neck to tire faster.
Unfortunately they didn't say refresh rate is improved (i.e. 120 FPS screen updates), only that response time (latency) and switching speed (motion blur) are improved.
Yeah, I had to read that paragraph a couple of times to get it myself. I was really hoping for a 120 Hz panel because I think it could make a big difference. Of course, it's still possible it will support 120 Hz and they just haven't told us yet...
Here's a link to that Discovery Channel video on how to make injection molds that they mentioned, but didn't actually link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seZqq1qxW30
Something that most people who aren't in product engineering don't realize is that sourcing small displays is incredibly difficult if you are not building smartphones. All of the nice displays you see coming out and going straight into phones are simply unavailable to anyone looking to build a lower-volume consumer device (where "lower-volume" here means less than a million). If you want to build a product with a small display (and don't even get me started on touchscreens), you are stuck with old technology, very limited choice, and high prices.
What about the rejected panels? Someone must be selling them. I picked up a few of those 27" korean IPS's that codinghorror blogged about a few months back. I paid around $300 with shipping, but the import form said $190.
Cost was probably one of the main factors. Remember, these were sold for $300 including tax and shipping (or less depending on Kickstarter reward level), and that money also has to pay for R&D. A better screen is likely the first priority for the consumer version.
The delay is a huge bummer, but if it means we might be able to swap in a higher resolution display at a later date I'm all for it. Maybe something like this:
Is that how you'll see the image? Doubled? And won't this backlit display have a negative impact on your eyesight in the long term, being so close and all?
The image you see on the monitor is doubled and distorted to work with the LEEP optics in the headset. Each eye only sees the image for that eye and the optics focus the light so it appears to come from infinity, not inches from your eyes.
, so there shouldn't be any eye strain.
I don't know about the effects of the backlight, but there are lenses in-between your eyes and the actual display surface which allow your eyes to focus at infinity. So it isn't as if it forces your eyes to strain to focus at something an inch or so away. I think its pretty safe to say that they're not pouring millions of dollars into R&D for a system that gives you double vision and eye strain :)
I was an early backer of this project and thought the timeline completely unrealistic from the start.
Funded in September on the back of a render and an ugly prototype with John Carmack's seal of approval - ship in November.
Say what?
I'm sure a lot of folks will be miffed at the lack of communication about the shipping delay until now, but I'm thinking keeping quiet until they're able to set a hard date probably saves an awful lot of needless discussion.