Oculus has officially unveiled its highly anticipated Rift virtual-reality (VR) headset! Excited? It’s been three years since Oculus showed its first prototype, but the real product is finally here and will be on sale in the first quarter of next year.
“The Rift delivers on the promise of consumer virtual reality and next-generation VR gaming,” Oculus crowed — and I must admit it looks like it’ll do the job!
We don’t know an exact price yet, but Oculus has said in the past that gamers can expect to get a Rift and all the required PC hardware for under $1,500.
“For the first time we’ll finally be on the inside of the game,” said Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe at a launch event last week. “Gamers have been dreaming of this. We’ve all been dreaming of this for decades.”
Unique motion-tracking and display systems
The Rift headset straps on the user’s head “like a baseball cap,” and with goggles over the eyes it immerses the wearer in extremely realistic 3D environments. The headset uses custom display and optics technology designed specifically for VR, with two AMOLED displays with low-persistence. Oculus said the technology “enables incredible visual clarity as you explore virtual worlds with the Rift.”
The user’s head movements in the headset are tracked by Oculus’ IR LED constellation tracking system for precise, low latency 360-degree orientation and position tracking.
The headset product will include removable headphones, and a high quality internal microphone for social experiences.
Get your hands in the game
Importantly, the company also announced a wireless game controller called Oculus Touch, which comes in pairs and is shaped like a (and was code-named) Half-Moon. A pair of the wireless handheld controllers give each hand an independent presence in the game. They’re gripped similarly to familiar game controllers, and provide the same kind of haptic feedback common to today’s advanced games. But a key goal of Touch is to create an extension of the gamer’s own hands, which can appear in virtual worlds as if they were the gamers own real hands. Oculus said they hope to provide “the sensation of feeling as though your virtual hands are actually your own. Touch will let people take their virtual reality experiences further than ever before by unlocking new interactions.”
The Touch handles have a matrix of embedded sensors throughout the device that detect when the user makes different gestures such as pointing, giving a thumbs up, or waving.
Oculus will also bundle a wireless Xbox One controller with every Rift. The Xbox controller is a key part of the broader VR input puzzle — Oculus said “it’s the absolute best way to play games like Lucky’s Tale, EVE: Valkyrie, and Edge of Nowhere.” Meanwhile Oculus has also partnered with Microsoft on developing Rift so it’ll work right away with Windows 10, which is slated to ship in July. The product will also provide a software interface called Oculus Home, on which users can browse VR previews of games, then purchase and play games.
We need great virtual-reality games
Oculus Studios’ Jason Rubin previewed several game titles at the event, including Chronos from Gunfire Games, Edge of Nowhere from Insomniac Games, and EVE: Valkyrie from CCP Games, a space-themed adventure Mashable said gave off “a Battlestar Galactica vibe.”
Visitors to E3 this week will be able to play all those games on the Rift, along with other new VR demos including:
- AirMech from Carbon
- Damaged Core from High Voltage
- Esper from Coatsink
- Lucky’s Tale from Playful
- VR Sports: Challenge from Sanzaru
$10,000,000 to boost independent game developers
And to help bring “innovative, one-of-kind independent games” to the Rift, Oculus also said it will be investing more than $10,000,000 to accelerate and support game development.
We know that virtual reality is going to inspire a new generation of game developers, driven by emerging independent teams and individuals” said Anna Sweet, Oculus head of Developer Strategy. “Not only will these folks bring more and better games for launch and beyond, but we’re looking forward to their inventiveness and creativity in VR.”
Amazing gaming demands serious gear
Oculus also recently revealed its recommended PC hardware specs for Rift:
- Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
- 8GB+ RAM
- Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- 2x USB 3.0 ports
- Windows 7 SP1 or newer (development for OS X and Linux is paused to focus on a high-quality consumer-level VR experience for Windows at launch).
And of course I’d add gamers’ favorite storage to this — a Seagate SSHD for huge capacity with SSD-like performance!
Oculus said the gear standard must be exacting — because of challenges around VR graphics performance, the Rift’s recommended specification will ensure developers can optimize for a known hardware configuration, which ensures a better player experience.
The configuration is “largely driven by the requirements of VR graphics. To start with, VR lets you see graphics like never before. Good stereo VR with positional tracking directly drives your perceptual system in a way that a flat monitor can’t. As a consequence, rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR.” Naturally, as VR increases the demands on GPU performance, games that make the most of the system will demand greater CPU and storage capacity and performance too.
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Who is John Paulsen? A creator, family man and former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
