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'Rift S' hints revealed in Oculus PC software
After Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe left the company late last year, TechCrunch reported a shift in strategy from developing a "Rift 2" to a more lightly-refreshed "Rift S" VR headset. Now UploadVR cites code found in the Oculus PC software referencing the new device and giving some hints of its capabilities. A "lighting frequency for Rift S cameras to adjust to room lighting" toggle suggests built-in tracking cameras, while a software setting to adjust "IPD (Interpupillary Distance)" shows it will drop the original Rift's hardware IPD adjustment. Not surprisingly, it seems to have some things in common with the standalone Oculus Quest. Even if it doesn't follow the original Rift's path in pushing the envelope and showing people the cutting edge of what VR experiences can be, a simpler setup that's slightly more accessible is closer to what the company's owners at Facebook have in mind.
Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe leaves Facebook
Add another person to the list of high-profile leaders departing Facebook. Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe is leaving both his own team and the social network. He didn't say where he was going next or why he was exiting, but he noted that this would be his "first real break" in the space of 20 years. This is a chance to step away from the grind for a while, in other words. With that said, there are hints that it's about more than some overdue rest and relaxation.
Hugo Barra's next job: Head of Oculus VR
Mark Zuckerberg just revealed the next landing spot for former Google and Xiaomi executive Hugo Barra: Facebook. As Barra revealed a couple of days ago, he's coming back to Silicon Valley and will "lead all of our virtual reality efforts, including our Oculus team." This fills the hole left when former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe stepped down to focus on the company's PC efforts in December, as Barra becomes the VP of VR at Facebook. The announcement came along with a pic of Zuckerberg and Barra hanging out virtually, since the new VR exec is still in China. In a comment on the post, Barra said "It's been a dream of mine to work in virtual reality even back when AR/VR were just figments of science fiction; now we're taking selfies in virtual worlds," and stated his plan is to take the technology mainstream.
Mark Zuckerberg defends Oculus in court against VR rival
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in court this morning over the creation of the Oculus Rift VR headset, as part of a $2 billion lawsuit brought by ZeniMax Media. ZeniMax -- the owner of Bethesda Softworks, id Software and other video game studios -- says Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack stole ZeniMax's intellectual property when he left the company in 2013. Essentially, ZeniMax argues that it owns the technological foundation behind the Oculus Rift VR headset. Zuckerberg purchased Oculus in 2014 in a deal estimated to be worth $2.3 billion -- and as he made clear on the stand this morning, he disagrees entirely with ZeniMax's claims.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe steps down, will lead PC VR group
Brendan Iribe has been the CEO of Oculus VR since its inception in 2012, working with founder Palmer Luckey to essentially bring virtual reality into the mainstream. In a blog post today, though, Iribe announced a pretty major change in his role: he's vacating the CEO seat and moving within the company to lead its PC VR group. "As we've grown, I really missed the deep, day-to-day involvement in building a brand new product on the leading edge of technology," he writes.
Oculus Rift and a VR-ready PC will cost $1,500, CEO says
The Oculus Rift is prepared to melt your perceived reality in early 2016 -- if you have the proper PC. If not, a new, Rift-ready PC plus the headset itself should cost around $1,500, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said today at the Re/code conference. "We are looking at an all-in price, if you have to go out and actually need to buy a new computer and you're going to buy the Rift... at most you should be in that $1,500 range," he said (via Re/code). He didn't provide a standalone price for the Rift, but Oculus has already divulged its recommended PC specs and they're fairly hefty.
With Story Studio, Oculus VR embarks on its Hollywood takeover
Around the time Oculus VR began experimenting internally with the creation of tech demos, investor Marc Andreessen, impressed with what he'd seen, urged Brendan Iribe, Oculus VR's CEO, to show them off to Hollywood. Andreessen believed the medium was a perfect fit for that industry. Iribe, in turn, showed his company's prototype Rift technology to an unnamed, major Hollywood director. That director, responding the way most do when they first encounter modern-day virtual reality, enthusiastically implored Iribe to join forces and create a feature film with it. Iribe immediately balked and shot down the offer. "I don't know the first thing about movies," he says of that initial conversation. That was then. Today, Oculus VR plans to figure out the entertainment industry in a big way. With Story Studio, an in-house innovation lab focused on exploring and sharing tools and techniques to craft entertainment experiences within VR, the Facebook-owned company is embarking on a different path. Outside "guest directors" will be brought in to work with the studio and lead Creative Director Saschka Unseld, a former Pixar director, in what is essentially a VR workshop. And along the way, Oculus hopes to refine what it means to inhabit VR on a cinematic level, beginning with its first animated short, Lost, which will debut at Sundance.
Oculus co-founders donate $35 million to erect computer science wing at University of Maryland
New York City is a town of names: Rockefeller, Astor, Trump. Legacies of the vast wealth held by dynastic families in early 20th century New York City. America's college campuses are littered with the same convention; wealthy alumni donate large sums to expand a university, and subsequently name that expansion after themselves. The University of Maryland, for instance, is getting a $35 million computer science wing from two of Oculus VR's co-founders. And what's it named? "The Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation," apparently, after Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe. Oculus chief software architect (and co-founder) Michael Antonov is footing another $4 million. The new facility is planned to "feature state-of-the-art maker spaces," says UMD's Jayanth Banavar. Iribe describes it as, "designed for hackers, makers and engineers, which will help give rise to future breakthroughs, products and startups that will transform the way we live and interact with the world around us." More bluntly, the space is being built to educate the next generation of virtual reality and other future computing platforms. "This gift positions Maryland to be one of the leading institutions for virtual reality in the world," Iribe says.
Oculus' new research program aims to make students into VR wizards
Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe is excited about the future of virtual reality (naturally), but the company can't make VR a global phenomenon all by itself. It's doing more than just tapping into Facebook's resources, though -- Iribe said at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that the company just put together a research group (which includes newly installed head scientist Michael Abrash) to get more folks thinking about (and hopefully adding to) our virtual reality future. How? By playing extra-nice with schools and students, for one thing.
Internal game development at Oculus VR is already happening (and yes, it involves John Carmack)
It's hard to imagine John Carmack not developing games. Sure, he signed on to Oculus VR as chief technology officer, but he's also the man who co-created such gaming classics as Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. With Oculus Rift, Carmack and the many talented game developers working at Oculus VR have a new test on their hands: showcasing their new device with impressive software. Thus far, Oculus has relied on third parties to create demonstrations of the Rift. From our conversation this morning with CEO Brendan Iribe and Director of Developer Relations Aaron Davies, it sounds like that may change in 2014. "He's working on a lot of exciting tech," Iribe told us of Carmack's role. "But, his heart and soul and history certainly lies in the game-development side." That means, like Epic Games before them and id Software before Epic, Carmack and co. are working on software that'll showcase the Rift's many functions. "That's always been Epic's philosophy. And it's what allowed them to make what they made. It's certainly been id's philosophy in the past. It's been John Carmack's philosophy -- you gotta eat your own dog food here, and develop internal content also," he told us. So that's what Carmack and Oculus are doing, with plenty of game developers in-house to expedite the process. "You'll see, over the next six to 12 months, if you monitor the careers page, we are putting up our team out there. We wanna make this a very open company. Pay attention to that page and you'll see more and more game developers showing up," Iribe added.
Oculus CEO clarifies: one Oculus Rift headed to consumers, supports Android and PC
Despite contrary reports, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says that only one version of his company's consumer-ready virtual reality gaming headset is planned for launch. "We will be delivering a single Oculus Rift," Iribe tells Engadget. After giving a keynote during GamesBeat 2013 this week, it was widely reported (based on this VentureBeat piece) that two versions of the consumer Oculus Rift are being prepared for launch: one PC version, one Android. That is not the case according to Oculus. "We will be delivering a single Oculus Rift which is a tether to multiple different devices," Iribe says. The device is able to tether to a variety of laptop/desktop OSes (Windows/Mac/Linux), "and now we're looking to also support tethering to a mobile device." At launch, Android support is slim -- not exactly a surprise considering the horsepower required to run VR -- but Iribe promises it won't require next-gen, Kepler-grade mobile GPUs. "I don't think it's going to require that full Kepler capability. I think we'll be able to deliver on an even earlier chipset than that." He says that newly hired CTO John Carmack is producing impressive results already on existing mobile hardware. "I think people will be pretty surprised with what set of devices we're able to make this work on. We are focused on just a few right now, basically just to stay focused so that we can deliver a great experience on a couple devices first. Then over time we'll have that span out," Iribe says. Of course, he won't say what devices those are just yet, but we'd bet they'll be of the Snapdragon 800 variety -- something powerful. The company never specifies "mobile" as tablets or phones, and Iribe didn't say during our interview. When we followed up, the official company line is this: "We're testing the latest Android phones, tablets and gaming devices to see what delivers the best VR experience." Devs have yet to receive the Android SDK from Oculus; Iribe admits it's "taking a little bit longer," but he promises it's for the best. "When we do release it, and we say it works with this set of devices, and here is the SDK, and here are the demos and samples...when people try them they're blown away with how well they work. It's coming soon, but not ready to release a date."
Oculus remains focused on PC first for Rift, using new capital to scale up staff
The Oculus Rift company is barely one year old, but it's already off to a strong start. Developers have kits from a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, said kit has support from the industry's biggest game engine creators, and the consumer-friendly HD version is already being shown off to press (we loved what we saw at E3 2013 last week). And now the company's got a solid $16 million in the bank backing up its next step: creating a virtual reality headset that's significantly more mainstream than the $300 dev kit currently available. But don't think that alters the young company's promise of virtual reality on the PC platform; quite the contrary, as CEO Brendan Iribe told Engadget, "We're really focused on the PC as the platform to bring this to market right now."He said that Oculus isn't against bringing its VR headset to consoles, but that PC remains the primary platform. "We're always looking at other platforms -- looking at consoles, we're also looking at Android and the mobile side in a big way -- but right now we really are focused on the PC platform," he said. Sony's Shuhei Yoshida told us last week in an interview that, "We've got a couple of the development kits, and I tried it out and I love it," though he wouldn't outright say if the PlayStation 4 will support the Rift. We're betting "yes."As for what Oculus is doing in the short-term with the new infusion of cash? In short, it's being used to staff up (the company's still under 50 employees right now, mostly engineers). "We're using the funding to ramp up on hiring more smart people, the best and brightest that we can find," Iribe said. "The dev kit as it is now, that we're shipping, will stay the same, and the software side will just keep getting better." The vast majority of those new employees will be engineers -- one glance at the company's careers page quickly confirms this claim. Outside of new employees, though, Iribe said little will change in the company's ongoing goal to develop "the very best virtual reality platform we can create."
Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with Oculus's Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell (update: speaker change)
Is 2013 the year of the wearable here at CES? It's certainly shaping up to be one of the bigger trends of the show, thanks in no small part to the folks at Oculus. We've already spent some time with the company's Rift prototype this week, and now we'll be joined by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe, the company's co-founder and CEO. Update: In lieu of Brendan Iribe, we'll be speaking to Palmer Luckey and VP Nate Mitchell. January 11, 2013 1:00 PM EST Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!
