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Watch as an Oculus Rift takes itself apart
If you've been following the virtual reality scene in the past year, you probably already know that the Oculus Rift raised almost $2.5 million on Kickstarter. You probably also know that its 100-degree field of view is three times that of a traditional desktop monitor. However, you likely haven't seen one of the headsets taken apart screw by screw in stop-motion. YouTuber Vsauce3 has meticulously chronicled the VR unit's piece-by-piece disassembly, using the technique made famous by the likes of Ray Harryhausen and, more recently, the team behind ParaNorman. The teardown video has the above factoids (and a few more) literally folded and layered into the gizmo's circuit board and casing, too. Trust us, even if you know everything about the Rift, the clip is still pretty neat to watch.
CES 2014: Gaming roundup
Gaming is once again a thing at CES! Since splitting from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and creating E3, the game industry has sat out much of the past 20 years. Between last year's big news from Valve and this year's reappearance of Sony's PlayStation, it's never been a better time to be a journalist covering gaming at CES. In case the resurgence of gaming news wasn't enough to solidify our belief, the first ever Engadget-hosted Official CES Awards Best of Show trophy went to Oculus VR's Crystal Cove Rift prototype. Gaming, as it turns out, is more innovative and exciting than the curved TVs and psuedo-fashionable vitality monitors of the world -- not exactly a surprise, but validating our years-long assertion feels so, so right. CES 2014 saw Steam Machines third-party support go official -- we even told you about all 14 partners a full 24 hours before Valve loosed the info -- a new, crazy/ambitious project from Razer and Oculus VR's latest prototype. And that's to say nothing of Sony's PlayStation Now and Huawei's China-exclusive Android game console, or the dozens of interviews we did.
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 Rift's latest prototype features positional tracking, an OLED screen and kills motion blur (hands-on)
The newest version of the Oculus Rift headset is another major step toward the retail version promised for some point in 2014. It takes the existing HD headset we saw at E3 2013 and swaps an LED screen for OLED. It adds an external camera, and positional markers on the headset, to track your position depth-wise. Perhaps most importantly, it kills motion blur -- one of the biggest issues with previous versions of Oculus VR's incredible Rift headset.The latest prototype, dubbed "Crystal Cove," is here at CES 2014, and we've just gotten out of an EVE Valkyrie cockpit to tell you all about how much of an improvement this new guy is over the previous model.
