Oculus "Rift" : An open-source HMD for Kickstarter

[NZstory]

I've been following the Oculus Rift with great interest. I wouldn't call myself a tech head but like to tinker and if I was to purchase a rift I dare say the only contribution I could make to the scene would be as a beta tester for the members that can do the amazing stuff.

So the question I have is where does that leave things for someone like myself and possibly the people that will be lucky enough to try it at Quakecon and would like their fix now rather than wait a year for a more polished consumer version.
I know it's very early days, but with all these talks to said companies is there likelihood that we will see support for their games sooner than a consumer version?

I remember way back in the day when 3Dfx was on the scene. I bought myself an Orchid Righteous 3D card just to play Tomb Raider in all its glory. It wasn't until a few months later that it really came into its own for me when QuakeGL came onto the scene. I can imagine the same thing happening here and to me I find that very exciting. I'm approaching 40 so maybe this is my version of a mid-life crisis where I want to relive my youth

[Endothermic]

Didn't Carmack in his E3 interviews talk about the importance the render 120 fps for his VR demo?

Yes he did when he was talking about when he built a 120Hz display and there was a company that made 120Hz driver boards available but they were $6000

So the RIFT V1 will be 60Hz

Perhaps the commercial RIFT V2 will be called the RIFT 120!!!

*120 Hz
*120 degree FOV
*120 grams
*120 μs latency

[DragonM]

'...what with all the geometry (e.g. Tesselation)...

A small nitpick, but I've been seeing it proliferate, so it's time to knock it on the head. Tesselation is very unlikely to be what you mean. Until DirectX11, nothing supported tesselation. Tesselation in the context of 3D rendering is generating new geometry within the video card, then using it in later render steps to, for instance, add sufficient detail to be able to cast correct shadows. Very very few pieces of software ever actually tesselate in their render pipelines, because the installed base of DX11 is still miniscule compared to the installed base of DX9, which does not support tesselation on GPUs.

The word you were looking for is "transformation". Pushing geometry around is applying matrix transforms to vertices, hence the name. A matrix transform applied to a point results in a new point, which, if you use the right kind of transform, is recognizable in some sense as the same point relocated. This mathematical process falls under the category of vector math. GPUs are very very fast vector engines, which is what distinguishes them from CPUs, which are scalar engines (with a few vector instructions liked SIMD tacked on). So a modern video card is capable of and required to perform many many transformations per millisecond in order to render a typical video game.

Tesselated geometry may later be transformed as well, to move it around, but the two processes are entirely separate and entirely different.

DM

(Just as a historical note, there was a time when the gaming press was full of the phrase "T&L Engine" while referring to 3D accelerator cards. The acronym stands for Transform and Lighting Engine. It's a reference to the fact that those two stages of 3D acceleration used to be fixed function. That is, the video card could do them, but it did them only in a single way that was built directly in to the silicon of the chip. These days the phrase has fallen out of use because fixed function video cards are no longer manufactured. Instead, GPUs are programmable.)

[Endothermic]

Until DirectX11, nothing supported tesselation.

Just to nitpick I believe ATI cards supported tesselation way back in the early 2000's as did games back then such as Messiah and Sacrifice (think that was only software tesselation though don't recall the game needing an ATI card to enable it).

Either way things did support tesselation before DirectX11 its just that DirecxtX didn't have it mandatory till 11

[EdZ]

I gave tesselation as an example (as its been in the news in the last few years, everyone has a reasonable idea what it does), but I meant any and all geometry operation, including tesselation, transformation, vertex shaders, and so on, as well as any and all texture operations, GPU PhysX, CUDA and other GPGPU operations. Basically anything the GPU does other than writing pixels to the display buffer (or buffers, for deferred rendering) is only loosely coupled to the final output resolution.

[rmcclelland]

A couple thoughts:

Carmack recently tweeted:
"I would like to do it, but it might be a tough cost/benefit case to make." in response to a question about making Rage compatible with the Oculus Rift. What? If he can't take the time to make his most recent game compatible, how can we expect other developers to? The cost is time, the benefit is awesomeness.

Interestingly, Cliff Bleszinski tweeted:
"It *is* Carmack's VR. Level was from Rage." Either there is some basic Rage support already or he is mistaken.

On another note, I played Skyrim on my 3D projector last night for the first time in a while. Very immersive. The experience of playing Skyrim with a high FOV/low latency/high res HMD would be truly amazing. I'd be willing to pay thousands to experience it (HMD + powerful gaming PC). Hopefully this will be a reality in the next year or so.

[space123321]

Any update if the Jumpstarter will start on the 19th still?

[mellott124]

Haha I enjoyed that little interaction. Engadget is the only place I go where I can be an bum-exit with no guilt, simply because its full of idiots. While he's been in VR for a long time, I don't really find his site a particularly good resource, looks like something out of the late 80's (seriously, spinning radioactivity symbols?) and the info in it is pretty much ancient as well.
I do always find it amusing to see those with some knowledge, refuse to admit they are wrong.

LOL. That page was designed in 1998. I update some sections from time to time but overall the site is the same as in '98. HMDs today aren't much more advanced then they were then either.
Everyone had spinning radioactivity symbols. We were playing Duke Nukem with the VFX1. I'm sure you remember.
Nothing I said at Engadget was wrong and I still hold to that. I spend a lot of my time in the schematics and FPGA code of microdisplay drivers.

Either way, I think for some people RIFT will be great. Looks like a great experimental platform. People have been trying stuff like that in homebrew for a very long time.
I hope Palmer does well because that will mean better HMD's from everyone else. However, people claiming its the end all of HMD's are just plain wrong. This type of hype and talk is what dooms HMDs when they come out. That's all I'm stressing. I don't mean to be hostile. I'm just giving my opinion like everyone else.

[zalo]

This type of hype and talk is what dooms HMDs when they come out. That's all I'm stressing.

Sage words. This reminds me all too much of the recently overhyped "Source Film Maker".
Too bad we can't bottle up all this hype and expectation for the first commercial release.
Besides, we are supporting one of our own here, it's hard to not get a little excited.


That said, OMG TOMORROW THE KICKSTARTER MAY BE STARTING. ONE MORE DAY, I CAN'T WAIT!

[hast]

A couple thoughts:

Carmack recently tweeted:
"I would like to do it, but it might be a tough cost/benefit case to make." in response to a question about making Rage compatible with the Oculus Rift. What? If he can't take the time to make his most recent game compatible, how can we expect other developers to? The cost is time, the benefit is awesomeness.

Interestingly, Cliff Bleszinski tweeted:
"It *is* Carmack's VR. Level was from Rage." Either there is some basic Rage support already or he is mistaken.

I believe Carmack has mention in passing in some of the many interviews I've seen and read that he has a special version of Rage with part of the map sectioned off where he plays with HMD stuff.

He hasn't really gone into a lot of detail about it, but it might be that it only has a static map and no NPC/enemies and stuff like that. I can easily see that a more complex game like Rage would take a bigger effort to port to something like OR since you still want to make sure that everything works and nothing breaks breaks because of the HMD. And you may not have enough power to actually keep it running at full FPS. (Which would be even worse for an HMD than normal gameplay.)

[TheRealistWord]

However, people claiming its the end all of HMD's are just plain wrong. This type of hype and talk is what dooms HMDs when they come out. That's all I'm stressing. I don't mean to be hostile. I'm just giving my opinion like everyone else.

Exactly. I feel like it's an incremental leap with HMD's - a step in the right direction - but overhyping anything, in just about every case, leads to disappointment. I feel I'm going to be VERY content with the Rift though, because for years I've been itching to try any type of HMD with a wider FOV. Even though it doesn't occupy our entire FOV, ~90° is much, much better than anything I've been able to get my hands on. The lower resolution, I'm almost certain, wouldn't bother me.

On the voxel front you have Atomontage, which is a much better engine than unlimited detail in pretty much every way (add shadows, shaders, tools for converting polygons, tools for generating high resolution terrain and rocks, polygon/voxel hybridization, realtime destruction and construction, and subtract the BS claims of "infinite points")

All the "unlimited detail" stuff is total marketing BS. If you are rendering anything on a computer is it within finale limitations: the number of pixels on the screen, the amount of physical RAM on the PC (or GPU), fill rates, bus speeds, etc. None of this stuff is even remotely "unlimited". Its all a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

'Unlimited Detail': a scam, or somebody fobbed a basic voxel renderer and some empty promises onto some clueless guys who proceeded to embarrass themselves by trying to sell it.

The impression I had was that Unlimited Detail completely lacks on the physics/animation/dynamic lighting/particles front, but would be well suited for displaying larger, static environments with a great amount of detail. My other concern was, like you guys mentioned, their claims of "Unlimited" despite everything existing in a finite manner. Even though they're currently able to sift through/render large amounts of data, the insane amount of memory required to store any massive environments (without repeating assets every so often) seems like an unrealistic feat atm, which I suppose might be more of a problem with technology and memory limitations than specifically with their engine. But just to clarify/correct my thoughts here, seems like an Unlimited Detail + Rift combination would be great for just general fly through's of environments, not for gaming/simulations/etc. (A video which was removed shortly after it was posted - most likely to an NDA - showed a camera moving around a large, static textured environment using Euclideon's engine).

I'm somewhat familiar with Atomontage and have seen a few videos, and I do agree that it blows Unlimited Detail out of the water in just about every aspect possible, but I was under the impression that Unlimited Detail was more efficient with speed and displaying larger environments. I'll have to do a bit of reading up on both engines, but Atomontage does seem to have more potential.

[hast]

However, people claiming its the end all of HMD's are just plain wrong. This type of hype and talk is what dooms HMDs when they come out. That's all I'm stressing. I don't mean to be hostile. I'm just giving my opinion like everyone else.

Exactly. I feel like it's an incremental leap with HMD's - a step in the right direction - but overhyping anything, in just about every case, leads to disappointment. I feel I'm going to be VERY content with the Rift though, because for years I've been itching to try any type of HMD with a wider FOV. Even though it doesn't occupy our entire FOV, ~90° is much, much better than anything I've been able to get my hands on. The lower resolution, I'm almost certain, wouldn't bother me.

I really think part of the problem here is that media which are reporting on this don't really understand what it's about. (Considering only a handful correctly attributed the construction of the device to Palmer I guess this isn't too surprising.)

Both Palmer and Carmack (in his interviews) have been quite clear that this is not intended to be the "end of all HMD's". In fact, they have been pretty clear that the intent is pretty much the opposite. The entire point of making it available to hackers is because it is NOT the be all end all product. But instead of trying to find all answers himself Palmer wants to get what he has out there so everyone else can tinker with it.

The end goal of this is to, hopefully, produce something awesome. But getting there requires both hardware and software. And since the current professional industries are not really interested in making affordable, worthwhile HMD systems then this is an alternative route to get the perfect HMD. (And I don't think anyone involved is so naive as to think something like that can ever be achieved considering how fast technology moves. There will always be something better around the corner.)

But you points are good in that it's important how this is presented to the "general public". So it's made clear that this is intended to be a prototype you tinker with. It's not really the same as a product you go buy in a store. (For better or worse.) We've recently seen the media blowback with the Ouya, and it would be a shame if something like that happened to this project too. (Although I'm sure $5 million in a week gives them some ointment for their problems.

[cybereality]

@mellott124: I don't think Palmer, or anyone else close to the project, marketed the Rift as the "be-all-end-all" of HMDs. But its certainly way ahead of mostly everything on the consumer market in the past 10 years (or ever really) and probably throws punches with some older professional-grade gear. So in that respect it is a huge step forward for homebrew VR, especially if its going to cost $500. Notice how I said "homebrew" and not "consumer". This is not a consumer product, or something intended for mainstream consumption. This is for hobbyists and hackers, people that want to mod the hardware, work with their own trackers or custom 3D engines. I think most of these people know what they are getting themselves into. Surely a few inexperienced people will bite on the Kickstarter and break off more than they can chew. Sure. But for the most part I think people understand what they are getting. Anyway, most of the hype has been coming from bloggers that actually tried the headset first-hand. These are people not familiar with VR, or maybe only trying out the standard 35 degree junk at CES or whatever. So I think their first impression is actually extremely valid.

[zalo]

Now I know it's going to sound really stupid asking this question this late in the game, but how exactly does the Rift connect to the computer?

I've seen mention of DisplayPort, but VGA, DVI, HDMI, Thunderbolt, and USB are all somewhat technically valid options (less so for the latter two) and I was just wondering how that worked.

It's a good thing there are adapters for VGA and DVI to DisplayPort if that's the case.

[cybereality]

@zalo: I recall Palmer saying it was a digital connection, so probably DVI or HDMI.

[LeeN]

Carmack recently tweeted:
"I would like to do it, but it might be a tough cost/benefit case to make." in response to a question about making Rage compatible with the Oculus Rift. What? If he can't take the time to make his most recent game compatible, how can we expect other developers to? The cost is time, the benefit is awesomeness.

I think the problem is that it isn't a simple hack, and would require some QA testing and tweaking to get right.

Doom 3 BFG has a budget and will have a lot of resources (people) already working on it so adding a feature would be more cost effective and better tested. Where as Rage has already been released and there may not be those resources to properly add Rift support.

So basically it makes sense to add Rift support to games currently under development.

But once they release Doom 3 BFG with Rift support, it should make it a whole lot easier to add support for future games.

[zdam]

The oculusvr site is currently showing a parked domain page.

So either the domain has expired or maybe some awesome new content/news is about to appear.

Please let it be the second

http://www.oculusvr.com/

[nesqi]

The oculusvr site is currently showing a parked domain page.

The oculusvr.com name server setup has been broken for a long time. I get the parked domain every now and then.

[3dcoffee]

The oculusvr.com name server setup has been broken for a long time. I get the parked domain every now and then.

Or it will redirect to a new Kickstarter page? :) Anyway, can't wait, it is already a working day in Europe. So I guess 6 more hours or so, until it's morning in USA…

EDIT: Now it is morning in USA (stock exchanges are already opended for 20 minutes), and I am constantly reloading Kikstarter's "recently launched" page, this phorum, and my email. :)

[nixarn]

Yay! Today's the day ^_^

I'll be refreshing this page all day long, let's hope oculusvr.com hasn't expired, not that it's _that_ big of a deal, the discussion goes on here and the kick-starter page is the important page.

[space123321]

Refreshing this page every ten minutes or so hoping for an update lol!

[Alkapwn]

Refreshing this page every ten minutes or so hoping for an update lol!

Might I suggest this to everyone waiting on the Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/recently-launched?

Because there may be some overlap to when it actually goes live and when someone has a chance to post here. This page should be the fastest way to tell when the Rift goes live. This way you don't have to search for "Rift' in Kickstarter's crappy search either. Refresh away my friends.

Or follow Road to VR's twitter. He seems to be watching this like a hawk as well, and will most likely post as soon as it goes live.

http://www.roadtovr.com/

[benz145]

Refreshing this page every ten minutes or so hoping for an update lol!

Might I suggest this to everyone waiting on the Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/recently-launched?

Because there may be some overlap to when it actually goes live and when someone has a chance to post here. This page should be the fastest way to tell when the Rift goes live. This way you don't have to search for "Rift' in Kickstarter's crappy search either. Refresh away my friends.

Or follow Road to VR's twitter. He seems to be watching this like a hawk as well, and will most likely post as soon as it goes live.

http://www.roadtovr.com/

Thanks for the link, Alkapwn. I am indeed watching closely! For those looking for the twitter feed, it's here: http://twitter.com/RtoVR

If RSS or email is your thing, both options are available in the bar on the right of the site.

[alexlf]

It's going to go up the moment I leave for work, isn't it?
Save me some Doom bundles!

[PalmerTech]

Going to reply to everyone's questions tomorrow morning, but I am to have to have to delay a little bit more. I have to fly up to Washington for something that relates to the Kickstarter.

Believe me, I don't want to delay any more than you guys do, but things keep coming into play that make the potential of this project so much better. Not talking about tiny improvements where you eventually have to stop nitpicking, either, I mean REALLY big things. z

I am putting together some teasers for you guys, anyone want to see a render of the new Rift design?

[druidsbane]

I am putting together some teasers for you guys, anyone want to see a render of the new Rift design?

YES!

[rajveer]

Of course! Plenty of images please

[omcfadde]

I am putting together some teasers for you guys, anyone want to see a render of the new Rift design?

Absolutely!

[space123321]

Thanks for the update Palmer - I have 4 windows open on my PC that I have been refreshing all day lol!

Any updates are greatly appreciated!

[jimbo2go]

anyone want to see a render of the new Rift design?

Nice! Did you put something together in Maya or something?

[Krenzo]

I have to fly up to Washington for something that relates to the Kickstarter.

Oh, visiting Valve? Maybe they're offering to give away something to be included in the backer rewards?

[blitter]

Going to reply to everyone's questions tomorrow morning, but I am to have to have to delay a little bit more.

How long is "a little bit more?"

[zalo]

Woohoo! It's VALVE TIME.
Carmack has had his turn with Abrash, now it's Palmer's!

Valve has to be really interested to be doing all these flights (unless John and Palmer are paying for it themselves )

One thing that is certain is that Valve interest is hype you can't discredit.

Maybe they'll make a game compatible in time for the first release like they did with Portal 2 and the Hydra. If its a new game, Palmer may be getting some top-secret insider info. Half life 3.

[Flim]

Looks like this project is growing into a monster!

I'm a flightsim guy and can't wait to tinker with the rift. Hopefully we can get a source for better screens, I would pay more without hesitation.

[howsTricks]

Very excited too, make sure you visit some of the sights while you're up here!

[Bishop51]

Super exciting times! All I can say is that it must feel fantastic to have a passion project like this garner so much attention. Way to go Palmer!!!

And if this flight is out to VALVE, then I applaud VALVE for being right on the money in terms of what the next leap forward can actually represent! The masses still have zero clue about the true implications of what's about to hit them square in the face Monitors, Big 3D tv's, smartphones, all of it will pale in comparison to what we'll see roll out over the next year or so (at least with respect to gamers).

[omcfadde]

I wonder whether Carmack plans to release Doom 3:BGF under the same license as the existing Doom 3 code release: GPLv3 + additional terms. I wouldn't so much care about the extra levels or storyline, but rather the "reference implementation" for head-tracking and VR 3D in a real game (as apposed to a demo program.)

Perhaps this is something Palmer could suggest to Carmack. Considering this is targeted as a hacker/hobbyist device to work out the kinks for an improved version in the future (hopefully still hacker friendly) I don't see any reason he'd be against source release. Perhaps only the hurdles of the company legal department.

In either case, source code or not, I'm definitely going to attempt to get my hands on a Rift. I really hope the Kickstarter timing is such that I'll see it before all the units are gone. (According to the map my timezone is GMT+3; sometimes my brain disagrees. )

Are we going to have some kind of a countdown, Palmer?

[howsTricks]

Don't forget Nintendo of America is based out of Redmond... As is Microsoft. And Amazon. And there's a Google office here too... The list goes on.

[spyro]

@Palmertech
Hmm, I really was hoping that the project would start today. I'm sure that you have good reasons for another delay, but
maybe you should just take your time for what has to be done for the success of your project and not making any promises about June/End Of June/July 19nth anymore. I was refreshing kickstarter and this thread all day long because I was afraid that all units would be sold out within minutes - for no reason.

So, good night until tomorrow and good luck with - whoever it might be in Washington.

spyro

[chieF]

I was so all geared up to get HMD in gaming with the oculus.

Sadly, the first fact that was approvable for us - "the kickstarter date" - was disappointing. Luckey, please don't make up stories to get us reading your posts... Your credibility is not strengthened by naming a few names of the industry, where you got an (i begrudge) appointment. Please give us facts, we don't want to read about another Duke-Nukem-HMD-Myth.

If it turns out to never reach the market, would I stop reading your "blog"? In any case: Don't mind - there are many words to describe internet hypes. Boring isnt one of them