I stumbled on this thread where Palmer introduces himself to this forum and his interest in HMDs. It is a piece of history and a great read. It is easy to see why Cybereality ended up on the Oculus team.

viewtopic.php?f=120&t=4123

VRMatthew

lol - that is awesome

TL;DR version:

At the bottom of one 2009 post in that thread, Palmer says this: (emphasis mine)

"I will research 3D some more, looking at the threads here on past DIY HMD projects, looks like they never really got past the idea stage. Once I figure out how to drive these things, I might be able to help a bit. "


The next response is this:

"You go Palmer! Build the future! The planar stuff can be done side by side with your nose up to the glass, but that sucks. What I saw at siggraph you have top and bottom monitors with the glass aligned that way, much better and cooler and much more ergonomic! If the iz3d monitor hadn't been so cheap, I may have went that way. Palmer where do you live? You get something together similar to that leep vr and do a full FOV HMD and I think you can make yourself a lot of money with people here willing to buy. I think leep wanted 10K or so, but maybe if you can get it down to 2K or so you may have many buyers."

And Oculus Rift was born.

This could actually be a piece of history one day.

That's cool, thanks for the link. I'm sure these forums get a mention in the history of VR a few decades into this.

Curious how many regulars here knew anything about VR before these forums. I didn't. MTBS3D has been a great resource and wellspring for VR.

Best. Thread. Ever.

I suspect most of the old school regulars had more than a passing interest/experience in VR, but also suspect that many of the newer ones were attracted here by the Rift. Its cool to see this massive resurgence of interest in VR!

Personally, I've been playing around with VR and 3D since I first hacked some shutterglasses (nintendo? been too long) in the early 90's. Think I might have gotten the schematic from some early 90's VR book that came with REND386 and which had some fresnel lenses with cardboard frame that you attached to your monitor to give you increased FOV. However, I only got a personal VR setup about 3 years back when I bought my Z800 (which, TTT, I can't consider true VR - FOV is too low for immersion most of the time).

its cool too that other old thread when John Carmack starts talking with Palmer...

This won't be a piece of history until the Rift has succeeded to bring VR to mass marked.
It still could fail to become the next big thing in consumer electronics.

Blasphemy! Boo this man! BOO!!!

Even in the event that Oculus does not succeed as a business long term, Oculus will still go down in VR history somewhere, even if it takes another 5-20 years to really get recognized. Think Apple. So no matter what, Oculus and this very community I am confident to say, started the final push to making VR happen. Thank you!

Seeing is believing and the minute I put on the Rift I knew we finally crossed the event horizon. I think this event horizon was crossed somewhere in this historical thread as it was the final catalyst to start the avalanche it seam (Palmer may have a different event horizon though). Now that is truly history in the making, especially once Oculus is as big as Apple/Google etc. They have all the makings of a great company. I am half geek and half a business and from my perspective, they are going to outwit the larger corporations. Partly by simply reading our ongoing posts and gaining insight from a virtual think tank group of thousands (technical/legal/patent/marketing ideas etc.). They are reading this, because they get it, whereas many are still in the old 1950's derived thinking. Even if some guy from Microsoft/Sony read the same forums, their internal bureaucracy, despite all efforts, will likely be their Achilles Heal.

What do others think?

Actually, Marulu makes a good point. The long term success of the Rift is still unsure. They are a great company (Palmer has always been one of the nicest guys on this forum to interact with), with a great product, but there are still hurdles they need to overcome. The biggest issue I can see is not the technology, the resolution, etc, but the nausea caused by it with many of the applications.

Perhaps Oculus needs to develop a Rift certification program or similar, whereby they can put their seal of approval on games they believe are using the technology correctly. Otherwise, we may well end up with some substandard games that people will get annoyed with, due to them causing nausea, or just being a suboptimal experience.

I vaguely recall Palmer stating that even if there were no further sales of the Rift, it would be the most successful VR HMD ever produced (in terms of number of units shipped).

Yeah, it's really amazing how far things have come in just a few short years. I've been a huge VR buff for while, but it always seemed like the kind of thing a small number of isolated people worked on in their basement. It's only recently we've seen this huge influx of a community surrounding VR (well, mostly the Rift).

MTBS has always been great, and always had the hacker ethos, so it makes sense that it started here. But it's really amazing how it exploded.

Hopefully we can maintain and increase the hype in the near future as we reach mainstream audiences. I mean, the Rift is widely successful for us in the VR scene, but it's still nowhere near mainstream numbers yet like the Kinect or the iPad, etc. If we get there that would be awesome, though.

@ CyberReality: Thats so true about how it has exploded! In fact, MTBS has almost gotten too big in some ways now with all this Rift interest! I can no longer keep up with everything just reading all the 'new posts'.

I think there is a very good chance that VR will be HUGE this time around. Oculus is in an exceptionally good position, but I do think there is still quite a bit to do, both in software and in hardware, before consumers are going to be happy for more than the short term. While I don't see that the consumer Rift could really fail (I believe there is definitely another VR boom coming), its possible it might end up as just another wave of VR, being classed as 'neat, but a gimmick', if there is/are no killer application(s) that will drag everyone in. I'm talking the difference between it merely being a thing for simulator lovers, VR heads, and experimental gamers this time around, compared to being the next platform, which everyone is talking about and saying 'YOU HAVE TO GET THIS' - which I believe it can be if you guys continue to play your cards right.

Some of the biggest things that still need work IMHO are human factors stuff (nausea, requiring focus and IPD adjustment, etc), and controllers and control schemes.

Hard to be mainstream before the product actually exists

There's no such thing as a sure deal, but if there ever was, the Rift making it big if/when it finally releases would be one.

It's Carmacks presentation at E3 that caught my attention. I trusted his endorsement a lot and it re-awaked my desire for VR ever since. Since then I think I've read pretty much every thread on these forums and I learned so much. It's been extremely gratifying. Thanks to everyone participating in the discussions and showing off their work. Being in the presence of such a large group of talented people is humbling.

I really miss all the DIY projects and R&D. Remember when the most popular sub-forum was the VR Research & Development area? Ha! I mean there are still some good things around - the Omni, Positron, Krenzo's RF system, and a few others come to mind but those updates are so infrequent now and drowned out by the ocean of Rift chatter. Now that's not to say that analyzing Rift tracking numbers and shipment schedules and debating every conceivable high-res phone as the next possible Rift screen isn't fascinating But I miss the culture of VR development instead of VR consumption that permeated this board a year ago.

I agree and I'm about to talk about Virtuality again here.

You would have bet the house on Virtuality being the dominant VR company at one time. Much of what they did is still very valid even today so there are NO guarantees here. Granted Virtuality failed because they were dragged down by the collapse of their main market (arcade systems) but they spent millions in R&D and worked on development projects with all the names being touted here as potential competitors in the VR market to Oculus. They had solutions to all of the items mentioned in the last line of WiredEarp's post.

People frequently say they were unimpressed by what they experienced when they had one or two goes on a Virtuality system and that they were rubbish, I completely disagree, I saw thousands of people have a great time with some guys (and girls) spending nearly the whole night at a corporate event playing dozens of times. If someone had a poor time in the system it was probably because the operator didn't explain the operation properly or they didn't listen. I had many kids go 'yea. yea yea' when I tried to explain it to them and they were usually the ones who got out and either said that was rubbish or said nothing and ran off after playing a particularly poor game. You could equally say that for the Rift when people first complain about things like 'screen door', the narrow field of view and motion sickness.

If you played a Virtuality machine several times (thousands of times in my case) and actually got to understand what was going on and just play the game then they were amazing. Yes the graphics looked poor but then so did the majority of PC games back then, there were no mass produced 3D chips, high resolution screens or advanced middleware to ease the development of games it was all clever use of hardware and programming. People forget and still do that this was all real-time with no canned animation.

People freak out about the Sixense Hydra Tuscany demo saying it's amazing and the way forward. I agree it is brilliant and for the price unbelievable but Virtuality had all that and more 20 years ago. Your weapon and hands were connected to your arms and torso by proper IK, if you looked down you could see your body, you could turn the gun and point it at yourself, you could look across and see the other player and talk to him. They had a tracked joystick that had pressure sensors to control the fingers and of course the air powered shotgun with recoil.

Interestingly one of the big things today is talk about motion sickness, I don't recall more than a handful of of people talking about motion sickness in the Virtuality systems, it just wasn't an issue. Currently I'd say Oculus aren't even one quarter of the way to what Virtuality produced, I'm sure Palmer and the guys have and will come up with some serious developments but this re-emergent VR market is still very immature and niche.

The idea of putting some form of 'mask' on to play a game will be alien to 95% of the casual gamers who own consoles and they are the ones who need to be converted and want to go down to their local store and buy the 'add on' or 'bundle' for VR to become mainstream, we're a long way from that.

Don't get me wrong I am more than pleased at this new interest that has more or less been single handedly started by Palmer, indeed I'd given up on ever experiencing the same levels of immersiveness at an affordable level again in my lifetime. I've seen stuff come and go and as we know it was mostly all rubbish and highly priced rubbish in some cases. This is the first time for a long time I've been encouraged to spend time and money on VR. For the price this stuff is amazing, I've spent tens of thousands of pounds of my money on Virtuality and other VR hardware as well as £20k+ or so on Superscape software and its dedicated hardware so I do think I'm reasonably qualified to comment

I spent hundreds of hours demonstrating VR to non believers not just gamers but also business users and I can assure you it's a difficult sell and continues to be, I'm sure there are others on here who have done the same.

I'm sure the casual gamer will be blown away by an Oculus and the immersion it offers, as they were when they played a Virtuality system but the leap to being impressed once or twice at a show or a demo to actually buying one and creating a real and sustainable market is still huge.

We still all have a very big job to assist Oculus in getting VR out to the masses.

+1

I hear you Brant and I am somewhat guilty of switching from creativity to distracted waiting since the Rift KS. I have a few ideas I would still like to try but as Palmer himself said, he created the Rift because he couldn't buy one, now we can. The Omni is the next thing to remove a lot of discussion from the R+D as it is the cumulation of a lot of threads from the R+D forum. The flood of 'noobs' to the forums since the Rift is similar to what happened to the MMA forums after the first Ultimate Fighter series

Anyhow in the influx has brought heaps of new talent and idea's becoming reality so its still a win

Hah - wow.

Time does fly! Thing is it's been a proper whirlwind and even if things fizzle a little bit, MTBS will still be here, just with more ideas and more tools!

It was always a great site to get ideas and creativity from; people here are the most friendly and are not scared to teardown or solder on!

The success of the Rift to date is enough to prove that even simple hardware can go an awful long way with some compatibility and backing! (hell - wasn't that Bill Gates original modus operandi?) - we are gonna see some awesome changes and some truly fascinating and life-changing implementations of VR.

This superb link was the start of a very cool journey; like I said here: http://www.wastedspace.co.uk/cms/2012/0 ... ulus-rift/ "Rift: “To burst or cause to burst open” This is exactly what palmer has done with the VR industry."

I know the feeling of all of this stuff, done it before. The fun of tinkering gets drowned out by the eaters and their demands -their capacity to involve themselves at what given level they are at.

I was doing the projection mods on a pure consumer oriented board with no history of tinkering or DIY. totally backward to this situation. Thus, I had my lights punched out in print, as a running argument - for years on end. Either scar up and keep walking, or die crying from all da nasty barbs thrown. i did end up creating a atmosphere of tinkering and a vestigial high end Home cinema projector modification market,and a thriving DIY video screen market/forum(s) But, well, lotsa blood, lotsa pain. Brushed (painted) by others as a bit of a pariah. That's what it took to get the job done.

Reasons for saying all of that is....Hopefully these sort of things don't happen to Palmer. My problem was speaking to people when they were getting a bit demanding and bent out of shape. I note that Palmer has avoided that (high level of presence and speaking to everyone). Probably for the best.

I personally think that this is still in the beginning stages and many layers of mods and changes (mods/diy, mods to finished products, etc) will be happening before this settles into an established market and pattern.

It's a tough road to walk - and although he's been in a privileged position of technical placement, he's had the brush offs and the barbs thrown along with the rest of them/us!

You just need to look at his posts to see how clear and head down on research he was; like a rat on steroids getting out of a maze!

I still think it's funny, how everything he went through and tried and the cash he spent, time he spent and I imagine the relationships he bent - it all came down to a single low res side by side panel which many MTBSers had going ages and ages ago. This game takes enthusiasm, experienced & weighted backing and luck. Thankfully PT has the former and latter by nature and by name.

I don't think he is a natural speaker (perhaps he is now - certainly very very patient! ) but I do think his nature took him along; his enthusiasm - this is an element indicative to his first post and all those which follow.

Another Palmeresque "Piece of History":As we can see, things have gone sideways a bit with the "EXACTLY the correct size" display, because the original display was not available in sufficient quantity to meet the unexpectedly high demand for the Rift DK. Although the newer 7-inch display may not have optimal dimensions (introducing software complications), it does have better product specifications.

Complications which allows for partial overlap! Something DIYers simply could not do just 6 months ago!! <big grin>

I still think, although judged ares getting a little bit more ... erm 'common sense' - oxymoron of the day - that patents will be the biggest hurdle moving forwards; but the single display design is pretty empty and, I think 2014+ adding the word 'curved' will negate all previous possible complications; it was all about optics before.

English idiom/proverb: "Where there's a will, there's a way", and the Rift LCD panel change gave us the willpower to accomplish that goal.

I have a potential solve for the optics patent hurdle and made a move (spent a few $$) to obtain the optics components to do that testing. I have them in hand now.

I just need a rift so I can see the optical hurdles that need be jumped, and then i'll know if this potential solve will work and if it can be applied to the Rift's situation.

Well after getting the Rift, although I haven't tried a DIY Rift, I can confirm my original predictions (shared by those with some clue) and shouted down by the 'fan boys' when the awful PR job a about the new "better" 7 inch panel was released. The 7 inch panel is a pretty big fail, we are getting a tiny portion of the resolution we would have had with the 5.6. Anything over short distance is a blur so you can no longer see any 3d because the detail is too low.

Its would be worth modding a 5.6 inch screen into the Rift, but then we would have to use a custom warp for everything.

It still works for what it is, and may allow devs to be creative, if they can handle using it, just a shame the 5.6 inch screens or similar could not be sourced.

I agree after seeing all the screenshots that discard half the pixels. It could have provided better useful resolution if the demand had not exceeded supply for the smaller screen, or if more time had been available to source a similar replacement screen. And I also agree that this device as it ships now does perform adequately for its intended use as a developer tool, especially when used like I use it to get maximum FoV (even at the expense of less-than-optimal focus). I still consider this tool to be of great value for its price, and I am looking forward to future improvements in the consumer Rift.

However, seeing screenshots like this makes me feel a little sad:
viewtopic.php?f=140&t=17678
That restricted FoV is what I would expect from using the C-cups, and is exactly why I switching back to using the pre-installed A-cups.

@Okta: If you had tried the 5.6, you might not see it so black-and-white. True, the optical pixel density was higher but the motion blurring was also significantly worse on the original screen. And worst of all was the visible outside edges of the screen which appeared as black circular bulges on the edges of your peripheral vision (remember Carmack having to put black tape on the lenses to cover that). Personally, I much prefer the 7" because it doesn't have this issue.

Regarding that severely restricted FoV, I was using OculusWorldDemo (C++ Tuscany) from the newest SDK in my recent experiments, and I tried the Unity demo version of Tuscany last night. I was very shocked and disappointed to realize that I can see a LOT of the bottom and inner black borders even when I look directly at them in the Unity demo, and I can see a lot of ALL borders when looking straight ahead. Although the severely reduced FoV in the Tuscany demo is not as bad as the picture above, it is still HORRIBLE when you use your Rift as I do, with eyelashes brushing the A-cup lenses for maximum FoV.

The FoV of the OculusWorldDemo is drastically superior to the artificially reduced (binocular-like) FoV in the Unity demo. For those of us who have not degraded out FoV with our Rift adjustments (such as for wearing eyeglasses), the Unity demo REALLY needs its default settings adjusted for a lot more FoV. The current settings make me a bit sad, especially when the lens eyecups I am using come pre-installed on the Rift, and the experience can be improved so much just with a little software change that most people WILL NOT DO. The default settings should change instead. IMHO...