October 07, 2024
It's the first low-cost Head Mounted Display suitable for real home virtual reality. It has extremely low latency and responsive head tracking. This reduces motion sickness which plagued early attempts at VR and adds a sense of immersion that was largely lacking.
It has an isolated (zero-crosstalk) stereoscopic display which uses image distortion and fisheye lenses to achieve an extraordinarily wide field of view. This is a big deal, it adds tremendously to the sense of immersion. You really feel like you are "in" the virtual space, and have an accurate sense of where objects are in relation to you, depth-wise.
It's quite comfortable. This is a big deal, most HMDs aren't. It is easy to develop for... Already the major game engines support it, and it has a very robust SDK and is easy to incorporate into games.
It's comfortable. Inexpensive. The stereo effect and immersion are amazing. But it needs more resolution and "tighter" pixels. This is more a business deal issue than one of engineering, the screen manufacturers need to get on board.
The current resolution of the developer's Rift is far too low. I'd like to see it 4x as high. (A high res prototype is being shown and the resolution limit is not an engineering hurdle as much as an issue with screen manufacturers who are focused on tablets and are hesitant to build low latency, lightweight, and hires display without an established market. Oculus is caught in a chicken-and-egg dilemma where they need displays to build the market while the display manufacturers need a market to build the displays...)
The Rift fully encloses the entire field of vision. This is great until you need to find a key on your keyboard. Some way to flip the display up briefly is probably going to be necessary.
The low latency is awesome, but still there. People move their heads very fast when observing an environment, and the milliseconds of lag have a tiring effect. I can use the Rift for about an hour but then need a break.
There are gaps between pixels in the current display. Because the display is literally inches from your eyes, this makes it feel as if you are looking at the world behind a screen door. This is another aspect of a correctable problem with current displays, which assume they will be used in tablets and phones within a few feet of distance. Fixable, but to keep the Rift low-cost the screen manufacturers have to build these screens in bulk, and until the market is large enough they don't want to.
You can't see your hands. Currently, there is much speculation about the possibility of mounting a "leap" style sensor to the oculus, which would allow one to "reach into" their virtual space and touch virtual controls. This is an exciting possibility but my own experiments with a Rift and a Leap controller suggest to me that there are some very fundamental and difficult problems to solve before this will work. It's worth noting though that both companies have been talking together... a lot.
The leap and the rift are a marriage I want to see. Both are amazing. But it won't be easy to make them play nice, because hands exist in a different reference frame from one's point of view.
Update: Improvements and Competition
Oculus demonstrated an updated prototype in early 2014. New additions include dual OLED displays raising the resolution to 1080p, a faster refresh rate and external optical head tracking replacing the internal accelerometer.
Positional head tracking is now possible (greatly adding to the sense of immersion) and latency has been reduced by a third overall which (combined with some software cleverness) results in significant improvement in terms of comfort and clarity with faster head motion. The "screendoor" effect has been reduced but not eliminated.
Oculus has still not revealed any deals with screen manufacturers so it remains to be seen how the display will change from this latest prototype.
Sony has entered into this space as well with their most recent version of the HMZ series, the HMZ-t3Q. The field of view is about 50% that of the rift and the head tracking is much more simplistic, however, their comfort issues have largely been resolved and unlike the rift, the HMZ also plays stereoscopic HD video with the experience being comparable to a 60-inch screen viewed from about 5 feet away.
I have their first version, the uncomfortable HMZ-t1, and even this early version displays gorgeous, zero crosstalk stereoscopic video. So while it is nowhere near as immersive, and much more expensive, it is much more versatile and unlike the rift, it's on the market.
And a final note should be made regarding the new player, the Avegant Glyph. This is a very early device that takes a new approach to display technology, "virtual retinal display." A single white light source is modulated via a micro-mirror array and projected directly onto the retina. The early reports from those who have tried a proof-of-concept prototype suggest that this new approach provides an unprecedented sense of realism and sharpness. The "gap" effects of traditional displays which are at the heart of the screendoor effect etc are eliminated, the experience reportedly is quite comfortable, and the display itself is, even as a prototype, quite compact. Avegant is definitely a company to watch in 2014 and 2015.
This competition is likely a good thing for all products, and it appears that HMDs have finally been made viable and lasting consumer products.
