Oculus Raises $75 Million To Make VR Headset 114
An anonymous reader writes "The company making the VR headset that has John Carmack and many others in the gaming industry excited has just received another $75 million in funding to make it happen. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is joining the company's board, along with fellow investor Chris Dixon. Dixon had seen a prototype earlier this year, but it wasn't good enough to spark his interest. After recently seeing how the device has progressed since then, he was blown away, comparing it to early demos of the iPhone. 'The dimensions where you need to improve this kind of VR are latency, resolution and head tracking, and they have really nailed those things.' Now that the device is in good shape, Oculus is going to work on turning it into a product they can produce and ship for gamers."
But will it give me a headache? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But will it give me a headache? (Score:5, Funny)
Being an adult ruined it for me.
*shrug*
Re:But will it give me a headache? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
--C.S. Lewis
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Un bon mot ne prouve rien.
As a nerd, I game.
The majority of nerds I see wielding 3DS systems seem to be the type wearing jean jackets with MLP and Poke' patches on 'em.
My two young teen kids grew out of their assorted DS systems over the last two years. If you're still using a DS as an adult, you're likely just waxing nostalgic.
Re: (Score:2)
My nostalgia is PC games. It's just a better mobile gaming choice than a tablet or phone due to input technology.
Re: (Score:1)
I enjoy the whole, "not carrying a second device" and "not constantly needing a video game in my hand" as a part of growing up, and having a fallback of a tablet or phone as a mobile gaming choice.
So, to each their own.
Re: (Score:2)
Both! Thanks for reading my user history.
I use my smartphone to keep life totals in Magic, and as a crutch at the poker table to keep myself focused during long stretches of folding hands.
---
I played Magic from '93 to '00 or so. In 2012 I returned to the game when some friends of mine opened a store. To support them, I enjoy myself thoroughly playing and shopping only at their store - plus the occasional trip to events in Vegas.
I've played poker since I was a teen, and have made trips to the WSOP the las
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just getting trolled (which is fine), but Magic shares a common thread with poker in that they're both games of incomplete information. Magic also includes some of the same sort of probability questions when making decisions on how to play out you hand. [Figuring out what your chances of making a flush by the river and figuring out your chances of drawing a 4th land by turn 5 require similar {basic} math skills.]
A number of professional poker players got their start playing Magic, and a good number of
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not trolling you, I have a serious question for you.
I'm going to guess it's 50-50 at best, but...
Do you feel like this explanation has somehow made you appear more mature than an adult who enjoys playing Super Mario on his 3DS?
I think that, overall, an adult, not carrying around 3DS is more mature than an adult carrying around a 3DS.
As to playing on a 3DS, every last person in my house has outgrown their 3DS. My teen kids prefer consoles and PCs now for their "real" gaming, and phones/pods for killing time in a car. So, my experience is that it's a device for kids that kids outgrow. The last adult I saw with a 3DS was at a My Little Pony CCG launch event playing against an eleven ye
Re: (Score:2)
You sound like a teenager trying too hard to appear mature.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Lighten up, Frances.
Re: (Score:2)
Neither do anecdotes.
Re: (Score:2)
But video games aren't childish, they're pubescent. Every well adjusted adult has an deep abiding, ingrown fear of his pubescence.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Being able to drop $300 on impulse on a toy you will probably screw with for a few months then never touch again is imo a big part of being an adult.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
I find I get almost a form of sea-sickness (which others have dubbed "VR Sickness"). Logically it makes sense as your eyes are seeing stuff that doesn't line up with what your bodies balance mechanisms are telling it, and for whatever reason the response to that is to make you feel like shit.
For me I find it hits me all of a sudden. Like I'm fine, then I get a weird kind of combo mild nausea and head pressure. The first time it got me I literally closed my eyes, took the thing off, and went to lay down for
Re: (Score:2)
I have one, and it definitely messes with your head.
It's the same mechanism that causes sea sickness. Your eyes are out of whack with your sense of balance, and your body retaliates by making you feel like shit. After awhile you do get used to it, but I definitely see this as a major hurtle to overcome (how many non-geeks are willing to suffer what's been dubbed "VR sickness" for the month or so it takes to adjust).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It won't give you a headache like the 3DS, as the 3D is done via a display strapped to your head instead of lenticular lenses, shutter glasses, so the image that hits your eyes is always the proper one and there is no cross talk. The current devkit will however give you motion sickness as there is both latency between your head movement and the display updates as well as a lack of positional tracking, meaning there will be a small offset between where the image is and where it should be.
However people who
Re: (Score:2)
That's what killed the 3DS for me. Fine tune the latency, resolution, and head tracking all you want, but if I can't play it for more than twenty minutes, I'm not interested.
3DS is a totally different ballgame. The 3DS display has to be in exactly the right spot for the effect to work. It's easy for it to leave that sweetspot, which is possibly where your headache came from. Also, with the 3DS the display isn't all that's in your field of view. The rest of the world is there too. I can imagine that may cause problems for some users. With a head-mounted 3D display, both of those issues go away: the 3D effect will be robust and always present. No sweetspot issues. It will also b
Invest in nausea medication (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, every bit of horizontal motion not matched by your head is going to make you feel a little sicker, and even a tiny bit of unmatched vertical motion will have you vomiting.
It is incredible, but your body's reaction ain't.
Re: (Score:2)
The human mind is capable of adapting to viewing the world upside down [wikipedia.org]. Disjointing motion from vision certainly can cause nausea and disorientation, especially in some people, but most people will be able to adapt very quickly. That's assuming the problem even still exists when they release the Rift, and eliminating that problem is a lot easier when you have $75 million to play with.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes my rift is sitting approximately 2.3 meters behind me.
Re: (Score:2)
Your head, maybe. Mine does just fine. I used to play Early VR games in the mid 90's. Other people puked, but not me.
I can only assume this is because my ancestors were actually time travelers from a future where wearing badly tuned VR headsets is an essential skill of survival if one wishes to reproduce.
Unfortunately, it seems wearing a VR headset has just the opposite affect in this day and age.
Re: (Score:2)
I worked with Jason Lanier's VPL stuff in the 80's and even then the amount of people that got motion sickness was negligible. But we where "flying" over and through wire-models so the immersion was less than complete. And the "helmet" weighed 12 kilo's/ 30 pounds iirc.
Re: (Score:2)
Multithreaded FU too, buddy
Re:Invest in nausea medication (Score:5, Funny)
Wow... MTFU! You motion sickness people make me sick with your faint-hearted constitutions. I bet you can't read in a car either!
People started complaining when I ran them over.
Re:Invest in nausea medication (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You readers are lame (Score:4, Interesting)
the nausea and vomiting parts are laughable,
As an owner of one, I have to disagree. You can come over and use mine. If you can beat the first 2 chapters of half-life 2 without taking it off or vomiting, I'll be staggered.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
They're like vampires. Next thing you know you'll be up to your eyeballs in MyCleanPC and ass tickle trolls.
No worries, just invite apk over to update your hosts list and you'll be good to goatse.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, I agree. HL2 is a bad fit for the Oculus.
My findings so far is that anything that's like a FPS where you have to run around like mad and turn around constantly is going to make you very sick, very fast. And HL2 also has things like the screen freezing when the next area is being loaded, which is absolutely vomit inducing.
What seems to work best is constant linear movement, like the roller coaster. The next best thing is slow, reflexive games, where you move at human speeds and have time to gawk at the
Re: (Score:2)
seems like car racing games would work great, most of the time you are staring straight ahead with small movements to check on the apex of the turns and see if anybody is on your side via your peripheral vision
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, vehicles are awesome.
The only really playable part of HL2 in the Oculus is the part in the airboat. It feels amazing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's funny because HL2 made my puke all by itself when it came out. It wasn't until I could hit about 80+ FPS on it years later that I could get through the air boat levels. I can imagine combining it with an OR would be some sort of nightmare induced vomiting for me.
Am still super excited about the device and will attempt to train myself through disorientation. Strangely I was ok with the 3ds, took a touch of finding the right angle but overall ended up liking it.
But yeah I'm basically picturing the next I
Mech Sim (Score:2)
I think you could still do an FPS, but more in line of a mech sim - where you would have more of a plodding pace, or perhaps the sim was you inside of a cockpit looking at video screens that look out on the world moving past you very fast.
You could even stick your head out to risk an open air look but have to retreat quickly or risk being shot, which would naturally encourage you to have only short segments of more nausea inducing views.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently Hawken finally added support after promising to for a very long time
Going to try it out now.
Re: (Score:2)
>I think FPSes are going to need something like the Virtuix Omni. With that, you can turn around completely without forcing the camera to move out of sync, and that should fix most of the problem.
Or, you know, it could usher in a new generation of FPSes where you move at reasonable human speeds instead of darting around like a squirrel on speed. I imagine something like the System Shock games would be far more VR friendly than say Unreal Tournament. As a corollary I would suspect that the increased sit
Re: (Score:2)
The squirrel on speed is part of the problem, the other is turning around, which is going to be needed in pretty much any FPS.
Something as simple as walking around corners in HL2 doesn't work. On the first turn you can sort of manage, but it's uncomfortable. On reaching the second corner in the same direction you have to look backwards from where you started, and are getting tangled in whatever wires you're attached to. Using a keyboard doesn't work.
So the alternative is using the mouse and moving the camer
Re: (Score:2)
A fair point, but even in vehicles our inner ear is going to be expecting certain accelerative inputs when turning, yet it sounds like VR cockpits lack the same nausea factor as FPSes. I suspect the problem is more that in addition to ridiculous linear movement speeds FPSes also involve ridiculous turning speeds - it's not at all uncommon to be able to turn 180 degrees at the flick of a wrist, whatever fraction of a second that is, and indeed it's quite common to be doing so almost constantly since turning
Re: (Score:2)
That thing was brutal. Swimming in a sea of jello surrounded by huge pixels of green and brown != fun. It was the Virtual Boy all over again, except on a PC and in color.
Re: (Score:2)
I Thought Oculus (Score:2)
I Thought Oculus was an album by Paul Speer
Re: (Score:2)
What is that price point, IYHO?
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno about the Coward, but I think it's a good guess that the mass market won't pay much more than the price of a standard LCD panel. And by that, I mean the gamer mass market. It's a kind of display, so it falls into that category in people's minds, despite the additional complexity and capabilities. Maybe at the high end of the range, but only of the mainstream range, not the full range that includes Ultra HD.
Re: (Score:2)
Right. Just like all those high-end CPUs and video cards all end up in the land fill.
Do you really think some PC gaming enthusiast who's spent $500 on their CPU, another $600 on their video card, and at least as much on the rest of their system, is going to flinch at paying $300-$400 for a VR headset that promises to give them far more gaming goodness for their dollar than the 5% increase in frame rates they got by paying twice as much for their CPU?
Perhaps it will never expand beyond that enthusiast marke
Re: (Score:2)
BTW, whatever happened to a Joystick ? Every PC store had them in 90ies. Not so much, anymore. Did $300-400 bucks kill it ? No, i think my trusty old Sidewinder Pro cost be around 100 max.
However, the content dried up ..
Re: (Score:2)
I think it was a combination the coming of age of the mouse-and-keyboard control scheme for FPSes, the waning of the flight/space sim genre as a driver of action games, and the refinement of the console-style general purpose game pad into something that kinda-sorta-almost approached the flexibility of the m&key combo while allowing much more flexibility in posture (incidentally I'm going to be really interested to see the Steambox controller in action). Heck, the last few space games I tried I gave up
Re: (Score:2)
Both the technology and price is already there. The devkit cost just $300, which is already extremely low for a highend non-mass-market tech gadget. The mass-market version is targeting the same price while getting some additional features. Given how the price for small displays is developing there is no reason to assume that the thing won't be $150 or less in a few years.
Oh yea (Score:1)
$75M is a lot of money (Score:2)
Should have parterned with MS/Sony/Nintendo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
I'm willing to bet Microsoft would buy you outright (see: Bungie), Nintendo would want an exclusive license and Sony would just steal it and release their own version of it later.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I find your post amusingly insightfully funny. Get some mod points.
Re: (Score:2)
Did Gabe Newell invest in Oculus? We know Valve has been messing with HMDs, and they had one of the prototype Rifts at one time, but I'm not sure we ever heard whether or not Gabe invested. He was definitely giving Palmer Luckey free advice, so he might have.
Given the features of the prototype SteamBoxes, and specifically their selection of video connectors, it really does sounds like they're keeping their options open as far as supporting an HMD of some kind, if not the Rift specifically.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There a link in this webpage (I didn't link it directly as there's also some interesting information on the first page too) saying that while they are not working together on a VR headset, they aren't enemies either, and Palmer doesn't mind if there is competition as he understands that it would be better for VR in general in the long run, to breed innovation.
Link: http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/valve-to-follow-oculus-rift-s-lead-and-demo-its-own-vr-headset-1200642 [techradar.com]
Re: (Score:1)
I'm willing to bet Microsoft would buy you outright (see: Bungie), Nintendo would want an exclusive license and Sony would just steal it and release their own version of it later.
You forgot Apple: they'll wait a few years and release one "done right".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh well, I guess that just leaves the PC master race to take advantage of it!
How about for work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget about gaming, how about a HUGE virtual desktop for work?
--PM
Re: (Score:2)
Why, so my boss can dump more work on me? No thank you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Check the resolution of the display.
It may cover your full field of view, but it's pixel count sucks. There is just no excuse for that in the day of 5" retina displays and such.
Re: (Score:3)
Excuse? I dunno, having production runs spoken for by other companies and until recently having an order of magnitude less cash to work with are pretty good excuses. High DPI displays haven't been around very long yet, and it took Apple to kick the display manufacturers in the ass to make it happen. They were perfectly happy making low res displays with really nice yields. Apple demanded higher res and you can bet the yield on them is noticeably lower. So they're harder to make, and meanwhile Apple wan
Re: (Score:2)
We would have to wait and see for side effects for 12 hours work sessions I sometimes spend in front my 3 22 inches flat screens.
For extended periods of time like these, I am not sure yet how my head would feel after with a virtual desktop. Think about people complaining about getting headaches watching 3D movies for example.
The concept sure sounds great although.
Needs Surround Audio Too (Score:2)
The next step is to work on proper surround sound for the helmet:
Embed high quality speakers into the helmet so that they are positioned spherically to the head, and encode all software materials with Open Source Ambisonics [wikipedia.org] in full-sphere sound field mode. Don't bother with the limitations and closed source nature of DTS or Dolby surround systems as they are only suited to sound fields that involve a central screen or stage.
After that a chair with integrated joysticks, pedals, a bass shaker, back massager,
Jeri Ellsworth is making an interesting VR device (Score:2)