By combining stereoscopic 3-D, degree visuals, and a wide field of view—along with a supersize dose of engineering and software magic—it hacks your visual cortex. Now Oculus is hard at work on its long-awaited headset for consumers, which the company predicts will be released later this year, or more likely early next year, or perhaps even not so early next year.
As a home-schooled teenager in Southern California, Luckey spent much of his free time tinkering with electronics—modding videogame consoles and repairing iPhones for extra cash, then spending the money on high-powered laser systems and upgrades for his gaming PC. The PC, in particular, became an obsession: Luckey found himself pouring tens of thousands of dollars into it.
And soon, a hunt for 3-D monitors became a search for true immersion. Then he moved on to the more expensive eMagin Z 3DVisor. And he kept looking. Over time, through a combination of government auctions and private resellers, he would spend the money once earmarked for PC upgrades on more than 50 different units, building what he touts as the largest private collection in the world.
Until now, VR was blurry, buggy, and nauseating. Francesco Muzzi. The Brain The biggest challenge in creating realistic VR is getting the image to change with your head movements, precisely and without any perceptible lag. The Rift fuses readings from a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer to evaluate head motion. The Optics You want an image that fills your entire field of vision without distortion. Typically that requires heavy, expensive lenses. The Rift uses a pair of cheap magnifying lenses, and Oculus developers distort their games so they look right when viewed through the optics.
Positional Tracking Previous VR headsets let you look around but not move around. When he put them on, he felt like he was looking at a play space, not living inside of it.
The head-tracking latency was off the charts, causing a nauseating lag every time he turned his head. But most of all, the field of vision was too narrow. He could always see the edge of the screen, which meant his brain could never be truly tricked into thinking it was inside the game. Luckey figured that he had as good a chance as anyone to solve those problems. It was a cumbersome beast, built on the shell of a headset from his collection.
It displayed only in 2-D and was so heavy that it needed a 2-pound counterweight in the back. But thanks to a massive chassis that could fit a nearly 6-inch display, it boasted a degree field of vision, an angle nearly twice as large as anything else on the market. Over the course of the next 10 months, Luckey kept tinkering, cracking problem after problem.
A few months after announcing the PR1, Luckey was browsing the documentation of a Fujitsu ultramobile PC he owned and noticed that the usable display area was millimeters wide—just about double the distance between a pair of human eyes. What if I just used half of it for each image?
In September , he announced the wireless PR3. The PR5, which he worked on throughout early , had a gargantuan degree field of vision though it was neither wearable nor remotely practical. By that point, Luckey had become something of a celebrity on the Meant to Be Seen forums, whose members eagerly awaited his updates. This is ready, he thought. This is the future.
It looked futuristic, but not pretty—the kind of thing a teenager might create to approximate his vision of the future, which, in fact, is exactly how this particular device had come into being.
Zuckerberg was in the Menlo Park Facebook headquarters, in the office of C. Sheryl Sandberg, with his deputies, chief product officer Chris Cox and chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer. He was in another universe entirely. His attention was on a ruined mountainside castle as gleaming snowflakes fell all around him.
Wherever he looked, the scene moved as his head did. Suddenly he was standing face-to-face with a giant stone gargoyle spouting lava. It was January , and the Facebook C. For years, Zuckerberg had pushed, almost single-mindedly, for growth. What comes after the smartphone? These headsets would eventually scan our brains, then transmit our thoughts to our friends the way we share baby pictures on Facebook today.
And now here it was: the Oculus Rift, which Facebook will begin shipping to customers early next year. The top two manufacturers of video-game consoles—Sony and Microsoft—are both preparing to release their own headsets in the next year. Tull is also a proud investor in Oculus and believes that the impact of virtual reality, no matter who wins, will be much more significant than past breakthroughs such as HDTV and 3-D movies.
The race is on. On the other side of the table was Luckey—or rather a bluish head and a pair of hands that floated in space, and from which his boyish voice emanated. He snapped his blue video-game fingers, making several dozen M firecrackers appear on the table.
The prototype he was showing me was called Toybox, the name being a nod to the slingshots and firecrackers and maybe also to the fact that virtual reality itself, despite the hype and the billions of dollars at stake, is still in a juvenile state.
How does it work? Your first steps on Mathosia will eventually lead you to Ember Isle, and then to the wider continents of Brevane and Dusken, hidden on the edge of the known world. There lies an ancient dimensional gate that opens the way to fate-changing realms. If your Planetrotter mind craves more exploration, alternate dimensions of Telara called Slivers push the limits even further. Sony had the PlayStation VR arriving in the fall. This week marks five years since the Rift went on sale Facebook just put up a lengthy oral history from the perspective of execs and developers , but what I'm saying is that VR existed before that , and it kept reinventing itself after that.
I've never been a big PC gaming guy. Plugging the Rift into a big rig computer with a bunch of wires was certainly cyberpunk, but not the free-form immersion I wanted. The Samsung Gear VR's form , tiny and self-contained and powered off just a phone, felt more like the future.
Phone VR back then didn't do much, though. You could only turn your head around and point and click with a small, simple remote control. If you wanted to reach out and grab things, duck and weave and walk in a full spatially mapped world, you needed that full PC. Many of those games, like Job Simulator, are still classics today.
PC VR is still here, but the future is entirely different now.
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