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Oculus ends Rift dev kit sales citing parts supply issues
As forewarned, Oculus VR is officially ending sales of its first-run development kit. "We're quickly running out of stock for the Rift development kit, so we've shut down sales in most regions," a note from Oculus says. Specifically, the issue comes from certain pieces of the headset "no longer being manufactured." That said, those headsets are more than a little long in the tooth at this point: both the HD version and the Crystal Cove prototype take giant leaps past the first dev unit, to say nothing of Valve's prototype. Oculus isn't offering anything official in terms of word on new dev kits (beyond what the company's CTO told us last year), but we expect many devs already have some form of new hardware from the fast-growing VR company.
Oculus is running short on dev kits due to nearly-extinct components
While you're still dreaming of the day you can put on an Oculus VR headset and become a space accountant, devs have long been able to buy a starter kit for their projects. Any dev who doesn't have it yet might have a hard time getting one, though, because the company will soon stop selling its developer kits. According to a Reddit post by the startup's community manager, there's a shortage because some of the headset's components are no longer being manufactured. Although Oculus is looking for other sources, it can't quite tell when production can start again -- even worse, it's fast running out of stock. The firm has remaining units it intends to distribute in select locations, but anyone who misses out might just have to wait for the second developer kit to come out.
Oculus' best practices explains how to create a VR experience that doesn't make people sick
Couldn't make it out to Valve's Steam Dev Days to hear Palmer Luckey gab about how to build a good virtual reality experience? No worries - Oculus' new VR Best Practices guide will fill you in on the details. The 39-page document is designed to help combat simulator sickness, which can leave users of a poorly optimized virtual reality experience feeling nauseous, disoriented and uncomfortable. Inside it has guidelines for minimum framerates, graphics aliasing and response times, but most of it focuses on creating an experience that feels natural to the user. Seemingly simple things, like a player's walking speed or limitations in camera control, can have a major impact on how uncomfortable a player can feel in a virtual space. The user's awareness of their own presence in VR is also pretty important. "Looking down and having no body is disconcerting," the document reads. "A full character avatar can do a lot to ground the user in the virtual environment." The guide has health warnings too, suggesting that users take 10 to 15 minute breaks for every hour spent in the Oculus Rift and declaring its 3D technology potentially unsafe for children. Gee, that sounds familiar.
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.
Oculus Rift makers get $75 million from investors to finish consumer model
Short of attending an industry event or ordering your own dev kit, it's a bit tricky to get your hands on an Oculus Rift VR headset. Soon, that could change: the company just secured $75 million in funding to bring the product to market. The extra capital comes from both Spark Capital and Formation|8 (early Oculus investors), as well as Andreessen Horowitz -- an investment firm known for funding companies like Jawbone, Facebook Twitter and Skype. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Mark Andreessen will join the Oculus VR board of directors. "We believe Oculus will not only alter the gaming landscape, but will redefine fundamental human experiences in areas like film, education, architecture and design," Andreessen said in the company's official statement. "We're incredibly excited to help them change the world."The influx of cash will help Oculus VR finish building the consumer version of its Rift VR headset, which promises to bring immersive experiences to Windows, Mac, Linux and Android devices. The company didn't go as far as announcing a release window for the headset just yet, but CEO Brendan Iribe seems optimistic. "This additional infusion of capital, as well as the leadership and experience of Marc Andreessen, will help us take the final steps toward our ultimate goal: making virtual reality something consumers everywhere can enjoy." Details are scarce for now, but we're told more details should be available tomorrow. Check out the full press release at the source link below
Oculus Rift hires Doom co-creator John Carmack as Chief Technology Officer
It turns out that Doom co-creator John Carmack is more than just a virtual reality fanatic -- he's joining the company that's leading the most recent VR revolution, today announcing that he's taking the reins as Chief Technology Officer at Oculus Rift. In an email from the folks at Oculus, Carmack was confirmed to be out at the company he helped found -- id Software -- and joining Oculus full-time as CTO. He will apparently still serve some role at id, as id's parent company told Engadget, "The technical leadership he provides for games in development at id Software is unaffected." We've asked both Oculus and id's parent company for clarification.Carmack said in a prepared statement that the first time he wrote code for Oculus, it stood up to many firsts he's experienced in modern gaming: "the intensity of the first-person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods and so on." Additionally, he believes VR "will have a huge impact in the coming years" -- Carmack is the first announced big new hire at Oculus. CEO Brendan Iribe said in the announcement PR that Oculus is, "putting together a team of the brightest minds." Carmack, as it turns out, was at the very top of Oculus' list.Carmack got his hands on the Oculus Rift dev kit headset far earlier than most, spotting creator Palmer Luckey's still nascent creation in a VR forum online. After getting in touch, Carmack asked Luckey if he could check out a prototype, which led to Carmack showing off a ported version of Doom 3 at E3; Doom 3's Oculus Rift version was supposed to ship with initial dev units, though that was later called off. Carmack also runs a rocket building company named Armadillo Aerospace, which he recently characterized as "in hibernation."Update: Bethesda Softworks (parent company to id Software) responded with the following statement to today's news: "John has long been interested in the work at Oculus VR and wishes to spend time on that project. The technical leadership he provides for games in development at id Software is unaffected." We've followed up for clarification as to what that means for Carmack's efforts at id. In the note from Oculus, Carmack is said to be heading up and working out of newly created Dallas offices for Oculus.Update 2: Carmack tweeted a bit of clarity to his new role at Oculus among his other jobs, saying, "My time division is now Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!"Update 3: Oculus offered yet another statement, this time saying, "John is working full-time Oculus. He is fully-engaged at Oculus as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). As you can guess from the title, CTO is never part time, it is a full time gig. John's role at id is between John and id."Update 4: And finally (we think), id's parent company Bethesda Softworks offered this final statement, "He's still going to be working at id, in id's offices."
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."
Oculus snags $16 million from investors to bring virtual reality to the masses
Oculus announced its first round of funding today, wherein the company secured $16 million from investors specifically aimed at putting the Oculus Rift in consumer hands. The nascent virtual reality hardware company has repeatedly said its end goal with the Rift is to make it a consumer product; currently, only folks who backed the Rift on Kickstarter and those willing to spend $300 on a developer kit have access. A handful of games support the Rift, though more and more developers are promising not just support in their games, but entire games built from the ground up with VR in mind. An HD version of the headset was also introduced at last week's E3 gaming show.Oculus' new business partners apparently see enough financial potential in the Rift to not only invest heavily, but to also take on board positions -- both Santo Politi of Spark Capital and Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners are now on the Oculus board of directors. "What Palmer, Brendan and the team are building at Oculus so closely matches the Metaverse that we had to be part of it. Working with them to get this platform to market at scale will be enormously exciting," Rodriguez said of today's news.The company launched last year with a Kickstarter campaign targeting $250,000 -- the project eventually raised just shy of $2.5 million, and now sells its Rift dev kit outside of the Kickstarter campaign.
PlayStation 4's Shuhei Yoshida on Oculus Rift: We have dev kits, 'I love it'
Sony Computer Entertainment head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida is a big Oculus Rift fan, it turns out. "We've got a couple of the development kits, and I tried it out and I love it," he told us in an interview this morning at E3 2013. Whether the PlayStation 4 will support it is another question. "No, it doesn't," Yoshida told us. Not yet, that is.When we asked whether the company's planning on offering support in the future, he only offered a "No comment" with a big smile. The picture of the retail Oculus Rift is potentially a bit clearer now, especially given this week's addition of an HD version of the headset. We'll be sure to keep on Sony about Oculus support on the PlayStation 4 as the year goes on.
Oculus Rift HD prototype VR headset appears at E3, we go hands (and eyes) on (update: video)
We've been impressed with Oculus Rift from the start, and have been following the VR headset closely ever since. The developer edition has been in the hands of devs for a couple months now, and while Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell have certainly received rave reviews of the headset from many, they've also heard lots of feedback about ways to improve it. The number one request from users and devs? A higher-resolution screen than the 1,280 x 800 panel in the dev device. Well, after months of research and tinkering to find the right hardware combination, team Oculus is finally ready to show off a Rift with a 1,080 x 1920 display, and we got to demo the thing.Before heading into the land of 1080p, we got to explore a demo built with Unreal Engine 4 in the existing dev headset. After looking around a snowy mountain stronghold inhabited by a fire lord in low res, we switched to the exact same demo running at 60 fps on the HD prototype device -- and the difference was immediately apparent. Surface textures could be seen in much higher fidelity, colors were brighter and less muddied and the general detail of the entire environment was greatly improved.
PSA: Oculus Rift development kits now shipping, some may have already arrived
Oculus Rift is in the mail! Development kits began shipping to customers on Wednesday, and even if you have yet to receive a tracking number of your own, a kit may very well be on its way. The Oculus team has been "tied up at GDC" this week, which explains the delay in sending out tracking info, but folks taking care of logistics have apparently been hard at work, prepping some 10,000 development kits for shipment. Of course, not every set will be on its way to a developer right away -- it does take time to get that many kits out the door -- but if you're expecting one at your front porch, it's likely to arrive very soon. In the meantime, the Developer Center has opened up to devs, with access to the SDK, Unity and Unreal Engine integrations, forums, wiki and other documentation. The team also published a video of its SXSW panel in full for your enjoyment -- you can catch it just past the break.
Oculus' Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell on the past, present and future of the Rift
As geeks, we have a tendency to let our imaginations run away with us. Science fiction-fueled dreams conjure up images of flying cars, robots and artificial reality. We judge our gadgets by the arbitrary standards of famous speculative works: hoverboards by 2015 and a holodeck in every home. It's a silly and unrealistic way to measure our progress, but it inspires us to build the future we're tired of waiting for. This is the kind of passion we found at Oculus VR headquarters, where founder Palmer Luckey and a platoon of software engineers, hardware gurus and marketing wizards hope to make virtual reality a plausible reality. We sat down with the company's aforementioned founder and VP of Product Nate Mitchell to find out where that passion came from and where Oculus VR is heading.
Hands-on with the newer, larger Oculus Rift prototype (video)
We like virtual reality headsets, but we also refuse to accept any such headsets with displays below 7-inches in size. Thankfully, the Oculus Rift VR headset met those exact specifications in its latest prototype update, going from a 5.6-inch LCD to a 7-inch 1280 x 800 display. Sadly, while we got to get a much closer look at the updated development prototype, we didn't get to actually use it -- Oculus reps told us that, while the hardware's working, it's not quite ready for press primetime just yet. But that doesn't mean Oculus had nothing to show -- not only have a variety of hardware tweaks been made (a new, custom sensor, for instance), but the software's been optimized. Oh, and there were some new demos to show off, albeit on an aging prototype model.Epic Games' original Epic Citadel demo of Unreal Engine 3 on iOS, for example. The Oculus folks -- no longer a single man, but now a company of around 20 employees -- worked with Epic Games on getting the source code up and running for the hardware prototype, though it's unclear if it'll ever actually be released to developers or the general public. Regardless, like so many software demos running on the Oculus hardware, it was unnervingly effective. There's an inescapable urge to look everywhere but straight ahead while in Epic's Citadel world, even if the wood grain textures on the buildings were a bit more muddy than we'd like. What matters is that the hardware works, and it works to an incredible degree -- the feeling of Epic Citadel's world simply serves to assist in selling the device. The team at Oculus isn't done optimizing yet, though, and promises that slight issues with motion blur (among other minor snags) will be ironed out ahead of launch. Frankly, we had few complaints.
Oculus Rift dev kits to ship in March 2013, orders fulfilled by mid-April
Were you one of the many folks to donate your hard-earned cash to the crazy folks developing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset? Sadly, we've got some bad news for ya -- you won't be playing Doom 3: BFG Edition with your new headset any time this year, as the device isn't shipping to its Kickstarter backers until some time next March. Citing a variety of factors, the folks at Oculus say it's simply impossible to get the dev kits manufactured and shipped to all 7,500 backers within the previous time frame of "before 2012 ends." The company hopes to have all dev kit orders fulfilled by mid-April 2013.Moreover, a handful of tech specs have changed on the OR since we last saw it, including a display change from 5.6-inch LCD to 1280 x 800 7-inch -- that's a lot of screen connected to your face! As such, the whole device is a bit heavier than before (by 30g). Additionally, previously off the shelf motion sensors were replaced with a custom one "that excels in VR-critical areas." Should you wish to get into all the (extremely) nitty gritty details, Oculus has a detailed Kickstarter update right here.
Oculus Rift developer kits go up for regular pre-order, catch VR procrastinators
Anyone who's been wanting to make a game for the Oculus Rift headset, but hemmed and hawed during the Kickstarter run, now has a second chance. Oculus has kicked off its own pre-order campaign that offers the VR developer kit at the same $300 that it cost for the more proactive among us, or $345 for those beyond US borders. As an added incentive, the first 1,000 who pull the trigger still get a copy of Doom 3: BFG Edition to show what the Oculus Rift can do. Twiddling your thumbs will have cost at least a month -- these new kits won't ship until January -- but the pre-order still means a head start over competing developers that haven't yet seen the virtual light.
Oculus Rift's latest VR headset prototype gets a showing at Gamescom 2012 (hands-on)
"This is the latest prototype," the Oculus guys tell us. That's great, now strap us in. The team decided to make a sudden stop in Germany ahead of appearances back in the US over the next few weeks -- and we're glad, because it meant we got to call in on them and grab some time with the Oculus Rift. If you didn't know, the Rift is a Kickstarter-funded VR gaming headset (stay with us) that's caught the attention of several games developers -- most notably John Carmack. He liked it so much, in fact, that he developed a special Rift-ready version of Doom 3 for the headset and Doom 4 will also be heading to the VR peripheral too. We got to play with the earlier game and while there's a video after the break, we reckon you'll really need to try this in person to fully grasp how the Oculus Rift plays. Check out our impressions after the break. %Gallery-162593%
John Carmack-endorsed Oculus Rift VR project hits Kickstarter, developer kits start at $300 (update: $250k goal met)
We heard late last month that the John Carmack-endorsed Oculus Rift VR headset would be hitting Kickstarter any day now, and it turns out today is that day. The project has just launched on the crowd-funding site with a goal of $250,000. To reach that, the team (led by company founder Palmer Lucky) is offering a variety pledge options, starting with posters and t-shirts for $15 and $25 (or $10 for a simple thanks), and of course the headset itself that is initially only being offered as a developer kit. It will set you back $300, which also includes a copy of Doom 3 BFG, and is expected to start shipping in December (signed kits and a complete bundle are available as well). Those that act fast can also snag one of 100 unassembled prototype kits, which run $275 and ship a month earlier in November. Despite that developer-only status, though, the project is already off to an impressive start -- it's raised over $50,000 as of this writing. You can find the usual video overview of the project after the break.Update: The 100 prototype kits are now sold out, and the project itself has already sailed past the $100,000 $150,000 mark. John Carmack also clarified on Twitter that he's not "backing" the project in any official capacity, only endorsing it as a "wonderful advancement in VR tech."Update 2: And the project has now easily met its goal on the first day. Those interested are still able to make a pledge any time over the next 30 days.
Project Holodeck and Oculus Rift hope to kickstart every gamers' VR dream for $500 (video)
Star Trek: The Next Generation may be coming to your living rooms soon courtesy of some hot new Blu-ray pressing, but one of the most compelling pieces of the technology shown on that series still remains elusive: the holodeck. Don't get down, sunshine, because we might soon be making our first, tentative steps into a virtual courtesy of Project Holodeck. It's underway at USC's School of Cinematic Arts as well as the Viterbi School of Engineering and starts out with a pair of Project Oculus glasses. These glasses, which were shown off at E3 by none other than John Carmack, cram a 1,280 x 800 display into a pair of glasses that present a wide, truly immersive field of view. Pair that with a PlayStation Move for head tracking and a Razer Hydra controller and you have the beginnings of a proper virtual reality environment.An early concept of what the complete system might feel like can be found after the break, a couple of people acting out a sequence from Skies of Arcadia, which could be called a spiritual inspiration for the first game designed for Project Holodeck: Wild Skies. In it, two people "pilot a massive airship through a exotic world of floating islands" -- though whether they look as kawaii as their Dreamcast predecessors remains to be seen. When you might actually get your hands on the system is also unknown, but one piece of the puzzle, the Oculus Rift glasses, are said to be hitting Kickstarter any day now -- for an anticipated price of just $500. Bat'leth and copy of Workin' out with Worf not included.
