Hasta La Gadget!

There’s a bit of chatter surrounding the Valve event series going on this week inside the virtual reality landscape, starting with what’s called SteamVR. This system was introduced in beta … Continue reading

We’re sure there are some of you guys out there who would love to get in on the Oculus Rift action. After all based on what we know and what we’ve seen, it is indeed a cool piece of technology. Unfortunately it is not available commercially at the moment, meaning that if you wanted to get your hands on one, you’d have to fork out $300 for its development kit, which is probably $300 ore expensive than what some are willing to pay. Well the good news is that if you don’t mind an alternative, Dive unveiled an Oculus Rift-like device at CES 2014 which can be had for $89, although we’re not sure if it might provide the same experience.

Basically how dive works is that it is worn strapped to your head, but instead of having separate displays built into it like the Oculus Rift, Dive will instead rely on your smartphone to act as a display instead. There will be lenses built into it which is said to provide some kind of 3D effect, but according to the folks at Android Central who managed to check it out, they said it was not the same as the Oculus Rift. However like we said with Dive being priced at $89, it is a cheaper alternative to the Oculus Rift and for those interested in getting their hands on the device, you can do so by heading to its website for the details.

Dive Is The $89 Alternative To The Oculus Rift original content from Ubergizmo.

CES is a grind and a deluge: a long hard slog where you take meeting after meeting about all kinds of TVs and tablets and smartphones that are largely indistinguishable, stay up late into the night going to even more …

A couple of days ago, we reported that the folks at Oculus Rift would have a new kit to show off at CES 2014, and sure enough they do. The company has taken off the wraps of their latest Oculus Rift kit which they have codenamed “Crystal Cove” for now. As you can see in the image above, the Crystal Cove kit remains a prototype for now, but it does come with some improvements and new features that may or may not make its way into the final product. So what sort of changes are we looking at? Well prior to Crystal Cove, wearers of the Oculus Rift had no problems turning their heads and the screen would turn with them as well.

However with Crystal Cove, what Oculus Rift has done is introduce position tracking. Thanks to an external camera that is able to track points on the headset, it will allow users more natural movement of their head, such as leaning forward, with the visuals in the headset following your head movement as well. Along with improved latency, the folks at Oculus Rift are hoping that this should reduce motion sickness. Speaking to Wired, the company’s CEO, Brendan Iribe said, “We still may change how it’s done, but we feel great about the positional tracking system. It’s been a year in the works, we’ve tried multiple different approaches, and this delivered the experience we were looking for.”

We have yet to try this out for ourselves so we can’t speak to Oculus Rift’s efforts, but based on those who have managed to take it for a spin, the results are largely positive. There’s still no word on when Oculus Rift will be made available commercially, but hopefully it won’t take too long because companies, such as Sony, are looking to compete with their own offerings.

Oculus Rift “Crystal Cove” Kit Revealed original content from Ubergizmo.

Every time virtual-reality company Oculus brings a prototype of its Rift headset to a show, it takes another big step forward. And the protoype at this year’s CES may be the biggest leap yet.