(Kind of loud. But be sure not to miss his awesome reaction at 4m20s.)
I have the original devkit, and it's amazing. You can even interface it with Google Street View. There's nothing like typing in "Eiffel Tower," tilting your head back, and staring up in awe.
In fact, I'd say no one here has experienced Street View until you've seen it with an Occulus. It simply cannot be described how incredible it is to look around with your head instead of dragging your mouse!
His "awesome reaction" is the same reaction he has made hundreds of times to various scenarios in many games. It's his schtick. Hardly a ringing endorsement for the Oculus device. (Although I do hear that they are fantastic.)
How is the camera shaking like that not going to make you sick?
That would be my number one fear about occulus. If it makes you motion sick, it would be a damn shame to know something like VR exists but you cannot play it unless you are fine with feeling like a dog for hours after a session longer than 30 minutes.
I had the same reaction when trying on the Rift a few days ago for the first time. However, the guy that developed the app i was watching said you need to grow your 'VR-legs' and after a couple of hours the motion sickness will go away.
I've tried the Oculus for a weekend. I'm relatively unimpressed until 1080p or higher becomes available. It's currently too low resolution. Blurring and scanlines interfere too significantly with the suspension of disbelief.
I'm fascinated by the A16Z investment strategy. It looks like they will put in any kind of money into companies deemed as winners (GitHub, Oculus), with some small investments thrown in here and there just so they're still considered a VC and not a private equity fund of sorts. I think it's going to work very well for them in the long term, and possibly change the investment landscape for future VC funds.
Either you go huge and buy a stake in the winners at all costs, or you go wide and super early like YC. It does leave a large seed/series A financing gap someone will need to close, and I suspect their returns won't be as stellar as those in the extreme ends of companies financing.
We invested in Oculus after we saw a demo of the new prototype. For me, it was up there with the first time I saw Apple II, Mac, the web, Google, iPhone etc.
I have no doubt about Oculus - I just wonder how the startup landscape will look if your model proves successful and other large VCs begin implementing it, instead of their more traditional returns model. Being that only the largest, most successful funds can partake in this huge money game, this may significantly reduce the overall market capital available for Series A investment and create an even narrower funnel.
I'd argue you're actually seeing the emergence of a "new series A"/"first money in" investor category. Often angel investors who raise seed funds or small venture funds fit in this category. These include (but not limited to) Mike Maples/Floodgate, Aydin Senkut/Felicis, Hunter Walk/Homebrew, Aileen Lee/Cowboy, Michael Deering/Harrison, and several others. Also see Heavybit for a recent category-specific innovation. Also Union Square, Foundry, Upfront (Mark Suster) do a lot of this. I think there may be more high quality investors at the early Series A tier than ever before, but many of them are new.
What about potential negative side effects[1] of VR ? Some of them are quite serious(depersonalization and derealization which are pretty serious mental illnesses). Combining those side effects with the probably addictive nature of VR should be done with caution. Is there any thought given to this issue before massively marketing this technology to the public ?
Asking innovators to exercise caution because they might exacerbate the hikikomori phenomenon is like asking defense attorneys to exercise caution because they might exacerbate the rates of criminal activity. In both cases, that's not what these people do. There are obvious ethical lines, but it's not like these guys are building viruses in a petri dish.
>> but it's not like these guys are building viruses in a petri dish.
Why compare them to one of the most extreme things humans can do ? Why not compare them to the food industry(under some regulation , and there's a debate if should have more) And Doctors (a single doctor can harm dozens/hundreds of people max , while an innovator can hurt million)?
Erm, addictive nature of VR? What about the addictive nature of video games themselves? The Quora article there describes a kind of escapism; perhaps more immersive than video games already are, but tbh I don't think there will be that big of a difference in the end.
This has been a continuous refrain from neo-Luddites regarding information technology well before I started noticing it near 40 years ago.
Yes, VR is more immersive, depersonalizing, and derealizing ... but I don't think it will prove much worse than large-screen high-res video games, or even textual social media, are now. Those prone to the implied problems are already getting their "fix". Heck, TV sucks up near 40 hours each week from the majority - and that was reached with grainy 720x400 resolution media with few options for interaction. VR provides diminishing returns for information addiction.
It may look like that, but that's not quite how we look at it :-). We think about it as trying to back the winners for sure, but being stage agnostic in our approach -- focus on identifying the best companies with the most amazing people and the biggest opportunities, and then invest regardless of stage. Internally we run very different evaluation processes for seed vs A/B vs growth of course.
Warren Buffett could be considered conservative, and having a generous aversion to all things tech. a16z, OTOH is almost on the opposite side of the spectrum when compared to Berkshire Hathaway. And yet, they both appear to following a similar fundamental principle:
Invest in truly exceptional companies and people, at a good price. Rather than a good company, at an exceptional price. [1]
My only fear is the Oculus management/investors. They could be great, but they seem not so great so far. An investor took over as CEO already and started calling himself a co-founder? That's a huge red flag. The real founder Palmer Luckey seems like the prototypical hacker-founder. Naive and noobish maybe but probably less so than most and obviously super passionate.
I wonder if John Carmack wouldn't be better off just launching a competitor to Oculus. Wherever he goes the magic will follow, and it'd be nice if he was the ultimate boss like he was at id Software.
I'd just really hate for him to get bogged down in a bad environment, kind of the way Linus did with Transmeta, and be forced to resign at some point and start over after wasting years of productivity.
The A16Z guys can probably help avoid any massive stupidity, so that's a nice benefit to this investment.
Weird. It really seems like the management team is incredible. A CEO with multiple wins under his belt (and whom the founding team has worked with in the past) and who has raised almost $100M for the company? The brilliant inventor that invented the Rift – and John freaking Carmack? and Marc Andreessen on the board?
And their investors are Kickstarter, Spark and a16z. Isn't literally the ideal thing to prove the concept with the crowds, then take money from a vc with a proven record of successes, and then take more money from another vc with a proven record? (I wonder if they had any other term sheets for their b)
Wherever he goes the magic will follow, and it'd be nice if he was the ultimate boss like he was at id Software.
It's quite arguable that the best time for id was back in Romero's time, through Quake 1. Carmack was an excellent steward technologically, but from a business standpoint I think they were far outstripped by Epic in terms of being a business based on technology licensing.
Sadly they were also outstripped by Epic in terms of games. Id didnt really have a hitgame for a decade while Epic had the hugely popular Gears of War series and their success with Unreal was on par with Quake.
While i also believe that Ids best time was in the 90ies when Romero was there, its not that he made anything noteworthy since he left.
An investor took over as CEO already and started calling himself a co-founder? That's a huge red flag.
Except it isnt. Brendan Iribe has been working in the Computer graphics/games industry for ages, co-founding Scaleform (video game UI system) and then working as chief product officer for Gaikai (really impressive video game streaming technology). Oculus also has other co-founders who worked in the same companies. The fact that Luckey, who is 20 years old, gave the CEO role to Iribe makes perfect sense. This is not the next social networking website after all, they want to transform the world with hardware products.
A "prototypical hacker-founder" may well need someone to come in and help with the business stuff. Scaling a hardware business is a lot different to a software one.
And I'm not convinced Carmack likes being in charge. He might well he happy if he can just hack.
Don't forget their COO is Laird Malamed who helped with the Guitar Hero hardware. They have already been able to do the right thing with their initial batches and it looks like this is the right step forward for mass-producing the hardware for the consumer version.
Palmer choose Brendan as his partner to help transform Oculus from a project into co-founding a company because they wanted to work together. To characterize him as an "investor" seems strange since he is an entrepreneur. And suffice to say Brendan, Palmer, and Carmack are voting with their time.
Carmack has been talking about working on it for for well over a year now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw-DlWwlXHo.
When I saw that last year, I thought it was already his company.
At least that. And much more on the valuation. These are bets on teams, and with leading (bleeding?) edge technology, the CTO is the most important person in the room.
I really think we're moving into a VR/Augmented reality renaissance.
If you've got 10 minutes to thumb through this 20 minute video this shows off whats possible with augmented reality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc_TCLoH2CA If we can get that into a pair of sunglasses in the next 10-20 years I'm pretty sure we'll be living in a wildly different world than we are today
There was an interesting comment on that youtube video too. (Shocking, I know.) When watching content for the OR on a monitor, you can actually see it in 3D by crossing your eyes so that the two pictures overlap. It's a bit taxing and obviously... rather less immersive than the Rift, but it does work and is fun for a few seconds.
Edit: experimenting with it a bit, I've found an easy way to do it is to full screen and sit a good ways back from the screen. (I went about 5' from my 27" monitor.) Then hold your hands up in a sort of window about a foot in front of your face. The idea is that looking through a window between your hands, each eye can only see the picture opposite it. Not seeing the other picture makes it a lot easier to focus on the composite one.
I thought the multi-monitor simulation setup was very impressive, you can imagine all kinds of non-gaming applications for this! Any environment where you need to be utterly focused and shut off from distractions (turning a potential negative of VR into a massive plus), with multiple monitors (e.g. Trading floors in wall street, coders) would benefit hugely from this. The company could make an absolute fortune solely from selling to wall street, and replacing traders 2,3,4+ screens with a single VR headset.
I'm ready to ditch my LCD at work and use this. I hope the higher resolution version is good enough to code on. I'm happy to see that there are already some window managers: http://hwahba.com/ibex/
The higher resolution one is all I'm waiting for before I pull the trigger and buy one. I want to use this when I'm in bed. My girlfriend will be able to sleep without the light from the computer screen bothering her. I'll probably also be able to switch to using my Kinesis Advantage keyboard as well since I will no longer be married to the laptop because of the screen.
I have the developer prototype and I am hugely excited for the short term gaming and entertainment potential.
However, as a working device, something needs to be solved to reduce eye strain.
After using it for 5-10 minutes, I feel like I've been in A Clockwork Orange. My eyes are spread wide and incredibly tired after that short period of time.
Until you try it, it's hard to explain how close the lenses are to your eyeballs. I accidentally poked my wife in the eye by adjusting the distance improperly.
I'm all for the idea of something like this for long term work, but I believe a different approach will need to be taken, or a significant amount of work needs to be done to make it sustainable for 2-4 hour long shifts.
The developer kit is, I believe, 379grams (~0.835lbs). This is similar to the weight of a typical hardhat, albeit distributed unevenly toward the front. The consumer version is intended to be lighter. If a counterweight could be provided, I would expect the neck strain to be limited.
Also or alternatively, a good-sized, well-sealed helium balloon can lift 50+ grams...
That is a quote from the Oculus website and therefore cannot be taken too seriously. They are engineers not ophthalmologists. The problem I see is the lens in between the screen and eye, which might cause strain.
I do hope their statement is correct, but it sounds too good to be true.
Wearers of spectacles or contact lenses have a lens between their eyes and whatever they are focussing on nearly all the time during their waking day. It doesn't cause eyestrain and I've always been assured by optometrists and maybe once an ophthalmologist that wearing lenses for myopia doesn't worsen myopia: iirc it's focal distance that matters, and apparently the Rift keeps the focal distance at infinity. Of course Oculus is talking its book, but I'd be surprised if they have no-one who understands the ophthalmology of the lenses-and-screen configuration they're building into their product.
I'm not an optometrist/ophthalmologist by any stretch, so I can't comment on the physiology, but I can say that the most remarkable thing about the Oculus experience is the sensation of infinite depth -- and infinite depth 360 degrees around you.
I think this is the really surprising thing for people who haven't tried it before -- you think it will be like looking at a screen up close, since you've looked at screens your whole life, but it's nothing like that at all.
When the resolution is fixed, probably the one big downside to using the Rift for this kind of thing will be the narrow field of view: compared to a multi-monitor or big-monitor-up-close setup you'll be forced to rely more on head movements instead of eye movements to look around.
A friend of mine was an early Kickstarter backer and brought his Rift around to my place try out with a few friends. We tried out Half-Life 2 and as soon as I put the Visor + headphones on I was blown away. My brain's "location neurons" were 100% fooled into thinking I was in the HL2 world. Within a few seconds I had lost the "background" feeling of being in a small room, and accepted I was in a large, open-aired train station (HL2 intro). Unbelievable.
The early Oculus DevKit certainly has some issues: no translational tracking gives me strong motion sickness, high persistence display makes the scene blur as I move my head, low resolution produces screen door effect. Regardless of these downsides, after 10-15 seconds of use I accepted that VR will be the "next big thing."
I was really skeptical about Oculus, but I had a chance to try out a demo by Amir Hirsh that combined an Oculus with simple Kinect-based limb tracking. I could look down and see my own hands and they really felt like my hands. I have no idea how this is going to work in practice (are we going to have to play games in large empty warehouses) but it is magical in a way that is hard to describe if you haven't had a chance to try it.
> are we going to have to play games in large empty warehouses
Large hamster ball on rollers. Infinite space to walk or run. Also, you don't need to track their motion or feet, you just feed in the data from the rollers, and you know how fast their character is walking or running, and in what direction.
I haven't tried it with that game, but I heard some very positive comments on people using it with Euro Truck Simulator 2 (already pretty realistic by itself on a screen).
Occulus Rift is going to be awesome for all these games where you are supposed to be sitting in a cockpit. For FPS, not so much (unless you have a giant hamster ball and tons of sensors as someone else mentioned).
Emphasis on the couple of minutes, about how long a normal person can handle the Oculus being feeling nauseous.
I had a friend lay flat on the floor for half an hour after a level of Quake 2. Brings back fond memories of my first days playing Wolfenstein 3D and experiencing motion sickness..
As a 3D-fan and owner of so many different displays since the VR-32, this one really makes me excited. They got that the studios are not the king of content, but the games engines are. Field of view trumps resolution when it comes to immersion and most other companies always tried to go for something that was focused on movies. I hope that this investment leads many companies to create true immersive experiences and lets 3D games break out of the 1st person shooter trap.
In the long run, both will come together, as we have seen with the development of Retina displays on Ipads. In the short term, your eyes will never be fooled by the current levels (even retina) of resolution at the yellow spot of your eyes, but your brain will always respond to field of view which does not need highest resolution.
Considering the incredible effectiveness of the current low-res dev kit, give it 3 years or so and the Rift will be second nature to most: 2 or 4k display, wireless, better optics, lighter, even lower latency, etc. If I had the money to invest I'd do it in a whim.
Oculus Rift is a paradigm shift not just for computer gaming but for a host of other industrial and technical services. I for one can't wait to incorporate the oculus rift when preforming invasive experiments on animals using an endoscope.
Pushing pixels to a high resolution display, under tight latency constraints, is going to stress even today's high-end systems. If they succeed at appealing to the mass market, I bet there will be a significant effect on the rate of system upgrades.
Just got my devkit and this was the first thing I noticed, I started to wish my 3 year old MacBook Pro had a faster GPU. First time in a really long time that I actually had the urge to update my system, haven't felt something like that since the 486/Pentium days.
I think there's the potential for a renaissance of super-high-end gaming-class PCs for sure. As well as a reason to radically enhance the 3D graphics computational power of smartphones and tablets.
I think 4K will be the minimum necessary to have a real VR experience. I mentioned it in another comment: suspension of disbelief is everything, but currently my eyes focus too keenly on the scanlines and my immersion is ruined. It doesn't help that all my consumer devices have retina-like quality, so I'm used to nearly flawless clarity in my displays. When I'm using the 720p Oculus Rift it just bugs me too much. 1080p will be better, but still not great.
I've used the low res dev kit and the immersion it provides it great.
I believe this will have a ton of applications from VR conferencing to going to virtual concerts to even spectating sports with an isometric view of the field instead of the 2d projection.
I wonder what does this mean to the Kickstarter backers. Sure, by legal means they donate to the cause rather than investing in it, but I think it's not really fair if they get nothing from this VC funds.
My understanding is that the kickstarter was for development kits, so, a significant portion of the backers were developers.
Isn't this investment by A16Z the most incredible reward possible for these developers who've put time and energy learning the platform and technology? At the very least, Oculus is going to be a major player in this field, if not the major player for the next couple years, so the opportunities for their products, and skills, just took a big leap today.
I'm interested in using Oculus Rift for telepresence (FPV RC vehicles, teleconferencing) purposes - anyone got any experience with this, or recommendations for stereo 1080p camera solutions?
Amazing how this gets downvoted. I was on the order page thinking "man it would be so awesome if I could just send them Bitcoin for this instead of having to link in my new credit card to PayPal". Yesterday Coinbase gets $25 million in funding supposedly able to make this trivial for merchants and vendors. Today another startup gets funding. HN supposedly the startup community has great animosity towards the one and not the other. Hilarious.
Buy both if you're a developer. If you're a consumer and have money to burn then buy both, otherwise wait for the 2nd dev kit/consumer version. As a developer it is one of the most exciting platforms to work on and watch your creations come to life.
Crowds are so funny. I swear there was one HN thread recently where the majority of comments declared the Oculus a mere substitute for ipecac syrup. In this thread, it's the coming of the New Earth. As someone who luckily doesn't experience motion sickness at all, is greatly looking forward to the hi-res Oculus, and frankly to a time when I can spend more time in VR than not, the optimism in this thread makes me happy.
This is speculative, but it seems to me like 99% of the motion sickness that happens in the Rift is because there's only rotation tracking--no motion tracking.
When we look around, we move our head subtly side to side and forward and back. The Rift dev kit doesn't do that--it just tracks what direction you're pointed in. My feeling is that causes a big chunk of the motion sickness.
The production unit will include motion tracking. As long as game titles take advantage of it, and don't do stuff like shake the camera, or move it too much, or do too many cuts, then I think 99% of people will be fine. For those titles at least. Other titles will push the limits.
I've had a lot of time with the development version of the Oculus Rift, and there's more things than just that which will cause headaches/motion sickness. Many things where the eyes and other sensors disagree will cause headaches.
In game side to side motion, rapid changes in heights, UI that is not fixed in world space, things that are too bright, taking camera control away from the player (slow horizontal rotation seems to be okay, vertical rotations cause immediate headaches in my testing), FPS lower than 60, etc. The FPS one is particularly interesting I was mirroring on a monitor, and I couldn't tell that the FPS was low(it was running at around 35fps), but in the Rift is was super obvious something was wrong.
I attended a talk for developers given by the founder recently, and he mentioned that stairs also are troublesome, and ramps work better right now. Something to do with how the brain has been trained to know the sensation of climbing stairs.
Like you, I have a strong stomach but I also couldn't use the Oculus Rift past 15 minutes before wanting to puke. I wonder if the new prototypes solve this problem.
This is speculative, but it seems to me like 99% of the motion sickness that happens in the Rift is because there's only rotation tracking--no motion tracking.
When we look around, we move our head subtly side to side and forward and back. The Rift dev kit doesn't do that--it just tracks what direction you're pointed in. My feeling is that causes a big chunk of the motion sickness.
The production unit will include motion tracking. As long as game titles take advantage of it, and don't do stuff like shake the camera, or move it too much, or do too many cuts, then I think 99% of people will be fine.
(Kind of loud. But be sure not to miss his awesome reaction at 4m20s.)
I have the original devkit, and it's amazing. You can even interface it with Google Street View. There's nothing like typing in "Eiffel Tower," tilting your head back, and staring up in awe.
In fact, I'd say no one here has experienced Street View until you've seen it with an Occulus. It simply cannot be described how incredible it is to look around with your head instead of dragging your mouse!
EDIT: Okay, if you're unhappy with that particular video, then this one might be more to your liking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7fz__6B-4#t=15m30s
EDIT2: Wow, that Dreadhalls game is terrifying. You actually don't even need an Oculus to get the full effect, just headphones. https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=3... (Windows / Mac)