3dxchat oculus rift dk2
This in contrast to how traditional virtual reality displays worked where a very complex (and expensive) set of lenses was used and a set of dedicated special purpose displays. One way to make everything look normal would be to make everything in the room a corresponding amount less red. It's a bit hard to explain well, but imagine that you wore glasses made of very light red see through plastic. The trick is to cancel out these artifacts in the software. Colours have different wavelengths, and depending on the wavelength the lenses are bending them different amounts, so you get lots of weird colour artifacts (imagine little mini rainbows all over your vision). The lenses simply 'trick' your eyes into making the focus of the display be at infinity (really simplified explanation), thus you're able to see it sharply. Behind the lens piece (turned off on the photo) there is a perfectly normal mobile phone display. Below you can find a photo of the 'back' side of the Rift with the left lens piece taken out. Now, before we get back to the DK2 itself, let me give you a very quick run down how the Rift works technically, and how it's different from more traditional Virtual Reality displays. Oh, and those huge pixels and stuff? Nobody cares about those by that point. During the rest of the ride you might cry out a couple of times, fall over and over again, tell yourself it's not real over and over again or close your eyes entirely. During the first part of the ride there is a huge drop and your body tries to make up for the angle of the cart and you fall backwards, getting caught by the person giving the demo who helps you stand straight again. at which point the rollercoaster ride starts and your eyes automatically shift their focus back to the situation at hand. It's not hard to see the individual pixels and you're surprised you didn't see them up till this point. Realizing it's all not real you next shift your focus to the pixels on the screen. Something in your brain decides it has to check whether you can see yourself and you will either bend over to look at your own legs, or you lift up your hand in front of your face: it's not there. In the distance you are able to see that you're on some kind of roller coaster ride through a medieval castle, but you still have some time left before you will be going down. For a short minute you forget that you're wearing the rift entirely and you look around yourself exploring your environment. At which point you notice that you're standing inside a cart on rails heading up a slope. When you put it on you notice that the view doesn't fill your entire vision, and that it looks a bit as if you're watching through some very very big binoculars. It looks and feels quite a lot like a set of ski goggles through which you can't look. You find yourself standing in the middle of a room and in your hands you're holding the Oculus Rift. For the rest I am going to write up how it feels to try out the rift for the first time: If you've got the chance to try out the Rift already you can skip this section.
Positional tracking with near Infrared CMOS Sensor 60 Hz $350 ($400 inclusive which makes for €300)ġ000 Hz absolute 3DOF orientation (gyr/acc/mag).
It however is publicly available for purchase to anybody who's interested, but mind you, as a normal consumer it is definitely advisable to just wait it out for the consumer version which should be released in less than a year. The DK2 is the second development kit released by Oculus, meant for (obviously) developers.
Now, to put it mildly I am personally very interested in VR, so I could write up lots of articles about the past, current and future VR scene, and quite tempted to mix up a lot of those things into this review, but I will try to limit myself purely to the DK2. It all started with a simple prototype which got into the hands of John Carmack, followed by a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign and as a very sour cherry on top of the cake it got sold of to Facebook. So, by now nearly everybody has heard about Oculus, a company who is trying to bring Virtual Reality back to life and releasing it's own headset to make that vision reality. Time for a nice write up on the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2.