Oculus Rift

Two days ago I received my Oculus Rift developer kit. If you’re unfamiliar with the Rift, it’s an affordable Virtual Reality headset that had a successful kickstarter for developer kits last year.

My kit had a pretty long journey, going to Australia first. I used to think that people (particularly in the US) mixing up Austria and Australia was just a myth, but it seems like it actually happens:

Mislabeled Package

Tracking Information for the UPS order

Tracking Information for the UPS order

But hey, all is well that ends well. It’s a really nicely packaged kit, and includes adapters for anywhere on earth and 3 times as many video cables as you need:

Box

You can find much better pictures of exactly what’s inside (and the great box!) elsewhere on the web.

Sadly, I don’t have much time to do development for the Rift or even much testing right now, but here are my first impressions:

  • It works! When you first put it on and look around, it really feels like an entirely new experience. I had a few people at work try it today, and all were really impressed as well.
  • The resolution is low, but not as bad as I expected. I think with the consumer version’s planned 1080p resolution and really nicely anti-aliased rendering, we’ll be fine for a while.
  • The pixel switching time of the current display is too long. Ideally, I think it should use something like an OLED display, with instant response.
  • The headtracking is really fast, I didn’t notice any perceptible delay.

I just tested using the “Oculus World Demo” included with the SDK, and I noticed that the reaction speed and even the blur with head movement seemed significantly better with the windowed fullscreen mode instead of the “real” fullscreen mode. I’m not sure why this is the case, it could be that in real fullscreen I had VSync on.

Anyway, I hope I get more time to play around with it this weekend.

 

4 thoughts on “Oculus Rift

  1. Do you have any idea if Rift support would be technically possible for Dark Souls, and could you possibly look into that? :P

  2. I’ve noticed a similar effect with fullscreen vs windowed fullscreen back when Dark Souls came out for PC. It “looked” like the windowed fullscreen was rendering more than 30 fps, even though fraps showed only 30. It wasn’t laggy/choppy and looked smoother.

  3. Are you using windows 8?, ever since I upgraded, certain games, not all of them, have certain issues like input lag or screen tearing. Issues I never had in windows 7 on the same PC, all them get fixed when I use windowed fullscreen. I read somewhere it has to something to do  with “aero”, and the fact that you just can´t turn it off in W8, and you need a special fullscreen mode that some games don´t suport, or windowed fullscreen.

     

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