There are a number of threads going on on how to deal with input, both for existing and future games. There are many options that might either do away with the keyboard entirely, or I hope as well, allow us to map it in to the VR world somehow.

Edited: wow, I'm late to that topic please ignore

Ok so that rules out any pixels being visible to both lenses, do we know how many pixels (width at centre) are not visible to either lens?

I think Palmer mentioned that the distance between both images on the screen is adjustable. So there is no single answer.
But I don't know if this feature is only necessary when you want to change / install the border between both halves of the screen or if it is also useful to adjust the rift to your personal properties like eye distance.

CVG checked out the Rift at GamesCom this week and liked it quite a bit. They emphasized several times that both it and Doom BFG were still in the early prototype stage, but neither mentioned the low resolution, so it must not have bothered them that much.

The primary downside was that the one guy was "so excited" while using it that he got it sweaty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX10ZTrTvFU&list=UUFiHjGyrJux8Rt4e6mUPU-w&index=1&feature=plcp

Edit: Here's a longer video of him using the device and describing the experience. You can skip the first 43 seconds of the video, as it's the same footage used in the link above.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/17/oculus-rift-hands-on-video-everything-youve-heard-is-true/

This project looks great! I discovered this forum looking for more info about the Oculus Rift, and It's also pretty neat. But I have a question regarding the rift SDK: Is it known which languages will you be able to use the SDK with?, I suppose it will work with C/C++, but I'd like to know if it will also work with other languages such as Java.

Hi all,

my first post since I registered in 2009!
However, I was following this thread since April, reading every line down to page 102 so far.
I just wanted to mention that I met Palmer and Nate (Marketing) at GamesCom. An introduction to the Rift required me to have an appointment and thus I emailed them and hoped for the best. After a series of prompt replies from the duo, I finally got the chance to meet the Rift and the people behind it. I was invited to a hotel close to the exhibition where "it" was available for demo in a small room. Extremely delighted and amazed to see that I am the only visitor who was given the 7:00 pm appointment (of course I took my wife with me ), I just hoped that this "HMD" would not disappoint me. I could try the rift and play Doom BFG with it for some minutes and I was just plain HAPPY. I waited for this for years! They even demoed it to my wife and even she being an extreme non-gamer was impressed
I also had a chat with Palmer and Nate for about 30 min. Both were quite tired after the long flight from west coast and after spending the day with presenting the rift.

I also would like to add that both were quite kind and open to discuss everything that came to my mind. I guess they mainly deal with Journalists and big game developers there, but they had no problem with giving me an appointment for late evening. They treated me and my wife nicely and I never felt that we are a burden to them (although Palmer was obviously very tired).
I behaved a little bit like an excited child that sees his Christmas gift first time. Most of my questions were gone and I completely lost my brain somehow out of excitement. In case you meet them, make a list of what you want to ask and prepare for the event

@Palmer: Thank you so much for your time!!!

I will give some impressions later on...

You can ask him directly at kickstarter.

He was very enthusiastic but he said some things that were either mistaken or possibly some new development. He mentioned that he could lean and peek around corners and dodge fireballs. That sort of 6DOF control scheme is not something that I have heard any mention of. Either in his excitement he just assumed that was happening when in actuality he was just using the control + head tracker, or Carmack added some gesture based animations. It would be possible to initiate leans using a signal from the tracker but it would not match your motions 1:1. Carmack is a bit of a purist with this sort of thing though, so I doubt he would have added that type of hack, and I think the guy was just mistaken.

I did ask him two days ago when I discovered the project, but I haven't recieved any answer

I picked up on that as well. Carmack recently said in an interview that people would try to peer over railings only to find that the motion didn't translate into the game properly, and that they were only supporting vertical and horizontal rotations. If the guy's session with the rift was short, he may have gotten so caught up in the experience that he was perceiving things that weren't actually there. He also mentioned Doom 3 was a work in progress, yet if id intends to ship the game on 10/16, I'd expect them to be wrapping up development very soon. I suppose Carmack might still be tinkering around with Rift-specific code even if the rest of the game is ready to go.

He probably is. I wouldn't be surprised if he is still using the same code from E3 for his public demonstrations at other conventions though. He's already familiar with how that version works and doesn't have to change the way he is used to presenting it, if there are workarounds or other hiccups he has to avoid. If anything was stripped out that they don't want showing from the actual release, he doesn't have to do that every time either.

Regarding the dodging fireballs remark, if you watch the Virtual Insanity keynote they admit that was a lie when they first said it but should be possible on release, or something to that regard.

Well if JC implemented the neck rotation thing he was talking about, then it would be possible to peek slightly around a corner using only 3DOF tracking.

There will probably be C# support due to wanting to support Unity, but I highly doubt there will be Java support. There's just no good reason for it.

That would be a pity since The rift would lose the possibility to be compatible with Mojang's games (Minecraft and 0x10c, for example), and I'd love to play Minecraft with the rift

There is no reason why someone else couldn't write support for other languages. This isn't going to require very much low level support, if any at all.

Trust me, Minecraft will support the Rift. Notch is enthusiastic about it. Java can talk to C/C++ programs, and so someone may have to write a wrapper to interface with the Rift.

My date with the Rift… Thursday 17th, 7 pm, Cologne, Germany 

Ok, as mentioned before here is a short summary of how the Rift felt when I used it with Doom BFG.
I just would like to mention that my only HMD alike VR experience (at least in the last 15 years) was a Sony HMZ-T1 with a self-made optical head-tracker and FreeTrack. I sold the HMZ after playing around with it for 4 weeks. It was just not what I expected for gaming. Nevertheless, I liked it for watching 3D movies after I did a helmet mod.

The Rift:
Compared to the Sony, the Rift was:
Much lighter, easier to put on the head, easy to get focus, much less eye stain, and of course you are “IN THE GAME”. The game scene is literately wrapped around your field of view.
The lower resolution was noticeable, but not a deal breaker. It was adding some blurriness, but I did not notice big squared blocks (maybe I was also too excited to notice ). I only noticed that you can see the end of the screen when moving the eyes to the left and right end of it. But this is only noticeable when you really completely turn your eyes and focus on it.
It was amazing to see the scenery and opponents at the correct aspect ratio as you would expect from your real world. The tiny monsters from your monitors are suddenly big and much scarier.
When walking down the stairs while looking down on them, I really felt the depth! It was so realistic that I felt like falling down because I approached the stairs in the game, but did not move my feed in real life. That caused some confusion for my brain, but I guess you will get used to it over time.
The first impression was breathtaking.
I did not only enjoy the rift, but also meeting and talking to Palmer and Nate. They really deserve to have success with this!

Haven't seen this posted yet so here's yet another interview/video of the Rift in action.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/16/oculus-rift-hands-on/

And as many have done before, they get some of the details wrong. But I think the main things to note for most of us are:

1. The SINGLE cable running from the headset
2. The box that it appears to be attached to.


Looks like Power, USB, DVI, VGA, S-video and component. This would be great for implementation with a slip ring on the ceiling only having to deal with one cable. Not sure if this is final or not, but interesting nonetheless.

Love the hand-written logo on that box. Nice touch.

And the box itself held together with electrical tape. Classic hacker stuff.

Hopefully they'll put that unit in a closet somewhere and not lose it. I have a feeling somebody is going to want it for a museum someday.

Man seeing all this awesome coverage of the Rift has me super excited to be apart of the future of how we perceive and play video games. I'm super stoked for my devkit to arrive!

This sounds very, very exciting for applications that don't need 6DOF, i.e viewpoints where the player remains static and the world changes around them, ala 3DOF in racing and flying sims. Great to read that the FOV is not much of a problem. I hope that the consumer version is able to maintain that while upping the res a little bit.

Unless the tracking hardware has changed, I'm pretty sure the Rift would have trouble with a racing sim. It doesn't have a way to correct for facing 'forward'.

So you would need a key to correct for forward that you press occasionally, or possibly the average of your view over time could be considered forward (might be okay if head movement is limited and typically forward).

Most likely... That's been a problem with most head tracking products so far. I guess if it had a static source to define a centre point reference things would be OK but then you'll always have some centre drift anyway due to using non-fixed mounting systems (i.e. not duct taping it to your head)!

I made that box! I had to figure out how to put LVDS and USB over HDMI, but it wasn't too hard. We even had two extra pins in case we wanna add some LEDs on the head mount or something, I dunno.

Palmer was actually saying it'd be really cool to get a 19-pin slipring and attach the head mount to it. Might be something fun to play with once we get our office.

@Dycus: Nice work. Cool to have you on-board here.

With the new single cable design, it would be really useful to have a usb port on the headset itself. Then we could attach extra tracking hardware or cameras to it without further reducing freedom of motion.

It would be a modder's dream if we could, for instance, build a magnetometer into something like a usb thumbstick and just plug it into the top of the headset.

So everything from the Headset is going through HDMI to the box? Are there any slip rings that you know of or could recommend that would have the ability to be used with an HDMI cable? Or if there are any sort of slip rings that have HDMI inputs on both ends? And if not, would this be something you guys might look into making available as standard or available option, seeing as there might be a fairly significant market for it once the dev kits get shipped. I'm talking to a slip ring manufacturing company now and seeing if they have something in stock that could be used with this. And if not they may be able to create a custom one. Is the final dev kit going to be using HDMI as the single cable? Or are you guys still looking into other cabling options?

No idea if there are any sliprings for HDMI. My guess would be a big fat no.

We're only using an HDMI cable between the box and the headset right now because it has the right number of pins and twisted pairs of wire. We're not using HDMI ports in the dev kit or consumer version. I think we're getting custom cables made.

If you want a slipring, you're probably gonna need something with 18 or more pins. No idea what kind of connector or the final number of pins we'll be using, so I can't give you much more info right now.

Sweet deal. That's good enough for me. I shall dial back my search for the time being, until more concrete details become available. Thanks so much for the quick feedback and response. I really do think there would be a lot of people interested in a slip ring solution, as this would be the perfect way to really enjoy looking around the world without worrying about tripping on anything. Especially if using a wireless controller and headphones. Man I can't wait!

I've ordered one of those cheap 24 track capsule sliprings (I posted the ebay link a few pages back), I'm going to make up a combined DVI / USB / Audio cable and test it out on an old monitor. I think shielding might be a problem, hopefully it's not a sealed unit, I'll let you know how I get on.

@Dycus - the separate IO box is a good idea, I don't really want to have the driver board on the HMD either. I'm surprised you got the LVDS output running so far, that HDMI cable looks pretty chunky, did you have problems with thinner cables? Do you know if the pre-devs kits come with the large 7in1 driver board, with the RF tuner etc?

Design the cable with as many extra pins as you can early in the design, so you can leverage them later without too much trouble.

And if you don't use them yourself, I'll be happy to make use of them! Leave them in for the dev kit, and if there's enough money, a leaner cable for the consumer version can be designed (but remember, that one will probably be modded more!)

Thanks for coming around here, Dycus!

Nick - It's kinda funny, because I never even grounded the shielding on the cable. Then again, we didn't test it near any microwaves, so who knows...
All I had to do was make sure the twisted pairs on the LVDS cable were on the twisted pairs in the HDMI cable. We even had one extra twisted pair; that was used for USB data.
When I was testing the range, I hooked up a 6(?) foot cable and a 2.5 foot cable through a female-female adapter, and it worked perfectly. It could probably go a lot further. You just have to make sure you're using passive HDMI cables, or it's gonna screw up everything.

We actually had one of these that it worked perfectly with (the 2.5' one), so thinness isn't an issue. We just didn't have a long enough cable that was really thin.

The dev kits will only have HDMI and DVI video inputs. The crazy driver board was just what we had at the time. in fact, it's easy to trim them down to take out all the analog inputs, but I didn't wanna risk it with our last working driver board.

Zalo - Thanks!

This may not be the proper place to ask this, but I'm wondering if John Carmack has indicated if the doom 3 BFG will include independent gun tracking to head? I've been looking around to see, and there seems to be hints that he has played with it, but no actual confirmation.
It would seem to be something really important for making the game more immersive to me, and I would think fairly easy to implement in code. I mean, in terms of API support for it.
Has anyone seen/heard any confirmation of this?

Yes, apparently it's only vertically however, so looking left and right will swing the gun left and right but you can raise and lower the gun independent of your view.

hmmm... that's cool, I guess. Where did you get this info from though? I thought I'd read all the articles on this. lol

I've seen Carmack mention it a few times in various videos. That's basically all the info i've compiled from watching him talk at various interviews and stuff.

Yeah, I remember hearing that in some of the videos also.

Hey Guys! Just as I promised here is my feedback about my encounter with the Rift from Gamescom!

You can notice the low resolution but as soon as your brain makes the switch (accepting the virtual reality to be 'reality') you forget all about it. That switch happened to me 2 seconds after I put the rift on my head. Amazingly immersive, Nate & Lucky where talking to me but they might as well started talking to a wall because I was no longer in a meeting room, I was in a flipping scary spaceship! Coolness level = 12/10.

Also I'm nearsighted (-2, -3) and was using the rift without lenses/glasses and had no real issues with it.

Because it was so immersive, I really had to restrain myself from walking around, I just felt the need to start walking & explore that spaceship I was in, totally forgot I wasn't really there, hah!

There was also another guy testing the rift ahead of me and he couldn't handle it. After a couple of minutes he shouted 'stop stop get me out!"
I talked to him afterwards and he said it was so intense, so immersive he panicked & got very scared. (Doom3 isn't exactly super mario after all)

Now, if a early prototype can create emotions like that imagine what the finished version will be able to do!

After chilling down a bit he did try it for a second time, this time he did it sitting instead of standing and that went a lot better for him. Standing
is definitely more immersive.

Bottom line: yes it's not perfect but you can clearly see that this prototype will evolve into something that will blow everybody's mind, no question about that. Better be ready for the VR revolution everybody, it's gonna be one hell of a ride, woohoo!