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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.
New Oculus Rift prototype brings out the best in virtual reality
Presence. It's the ability of VR headsets to fool your mind and body into thinking that you are actually in a virtual world, and that experience is what Oculus seeks to deliver with its latest prototype. Code-named Crescent Bay, it's an evolution of the DK2 headset that only recently started making its way into the hands of developers. I got to try out the new hardware today at Oculus Connect, the company's inaugural developer conference. Come live vicariously through me, dear reader, as I tell you how it went.
The new Oculus Rift headset is Crescent Bay and has built-in audio
Oculus VR has a new headset. CEO Brendan Iribe showed the prototype, dubbed Crescent Bay, off today at the first Oculus Connect conference. It has built-in audio, it's lighter and packs 360-degree motion tracking. Iribe says that the jump between the new prototype and the previous developer kit (DK) is as dramatic as the jump between DK1 and the recently shipped DK2. Of course, it has a higher resolution screen and refresh rate, but the focus on this version though, seems to be audio. The headset sports onboard headphones that apparently can be removed if you'd rather use your own, and custom audio software (with help from the University of Maryland's RealSpace3D tech) to make "presence" much more convincing. "We're working on audio as aggressively as we're working on the vision side," Iribe said. Which makes sense, considering that sound is at least half of the experience for most entertainment.
