Hasta La Gadget!

Oculus announced its first round of funding today, wherein the company secured $16 million from investors specifically aimed at putting the Oculus Rift in consumer hands. The nascent virtual reality hardware company has repeatedly said its end goal with the Rift is to make it a consumer product; currently, only folks who backed the Rift on Kickstarter and those willing to spend $300 on a developer kit have access. A handful of games support the Rift, though more and more developers are promising not just support in their games, but entire games built from the ground up with VR in mind. An HD version of the headset was also introduced at last week’s E3 gaming show.

Oculus’ new business partners apparently see enough financial potential in the Rift to not only invest heavily, but to also take on board positions — both Santo Politi of Spark Capital and Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners are now on the Oculus board of directors. “What Palmer, Brendan and the team are building at Oculus so closely matches the Metaverse that we had to be part of it. Working with them to get this platform to market at scale will be enormously exciting,” Rodriguez said of today’s news.

The company launched last year with a Kickstarter campaign targeting $250,000 — the project eventually raised just shy of $2.5 million, and now sells its Rift dev kit outside of the Kickstarter campaign.

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We’ve been impressed with Oculus Rift from the start, and have been following the VR headset closely ever since. The developer edition has been in the hands of devs for a couple months now, and while Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell have certainly received rave reviews of the headset from many, they’ve also heard lots of feedback about ways to improve it. The number one request from users and devs? A higher-resolution screen than the 1,280 x 800 panel in the dev device. Well, after months of research and tinkering to find the right hardware combination, team Oculus is finally ready to show off a Rift with a 1,080 x 1920 display, and we got to demo the thing.

Before heading into the land of 1080p, we got to explore a demo built with Unreal Engine 4 in the existing dev headset. After looking around a snowy mountain stronghold inhabited by a fire lord in low res, we switched to the exact same demo running at 60 fps on the HD prototype device — and the difference was immediately apparent. Surface textures could be seen in much higher fidelity, colors were brighter and less muddied and the general detail of the entire environment was greatly improved.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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Gordon Freeman, in your head. Well, that’s the plan, with Oculus now offering official beta support for a headset-based Half-Life 2. There’s a few known issues to iron out already, including an overly-dim UI and issues with the zoom. But even at this early stage, it appears to lack any gameplay deal-breakers we’ve seen elsewhere. As mentioned by Valve’s Joe Ludwig on the Oculus developer forums, however, the current build is a bit rougher around the edges compared to the Team Fortress 2 beta that launched earlier this year. Developers with the necessary Rift hardware can pick up the files on Steam or follow the developments on Oculus’ own forums — but no comments about headcrab hats and wearables, okay?

Filed under: Gaming, Wearables

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Via: Ubergizmo, Oculus3D (Twitter)

Source: Oculus VR developer forums

It’s not clear if Icelandic game studio CCP is extending its crazy MMO, EVE Online, into the world of virtual reality, but the company is working on some form of EVE-based VR application using the Oculus Rift. CCP teased the concept during the keynote event at its Fanfest event this afternoon, showing off what looked like a modern Wing Commander-style space shooter set in the world of EVE (similar to the first-person shooter extension on PlayStation 3, Dust 514), built using the Unity game engine. EVE fansite The Mittani notes from a hands-on demonstration at Fanfest that the game is currently 3v3 dogfighting employing the VR headset and an unnamed “console-style game controller.” Sadly, it sounds like the project is little more than an internal curiosity at this point, but color us unsurprised if this pops up in a more polished form down the line. We’ll add a video of CCP’s presentation to this post as soon as it goes live — we were marveled by the gorgeous visuals and gameplay promise of a space shooter which employs VR.

Several games are currently in development for the Oculus Rift, and Valve’s Team Fortress 2 already supports the device. However, the headset that’s currently available is a development kit, and not meant as representative of the final retail product.

Update: We’ve added the video from Fanfest below the break!

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software

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Source: Twitch.tv

Oculus Rift’s Tuscany demo was built with a good ol’ fashioned keyboard and mouse setup in mind, but now it’s unofficially scored support for motion controls. Sixense, the outfit behind Razer’s Hydra, has cooked up a custom version of the Italian-themed sample for use with their controller, and it gives gamers a pair of floating hands to pick up and manipulate objects. Originally shown at GDC, the tweaked experience is now up for grabs, and can even be played by those who don’t have a Rift — albeit with just the controller’s perks.

Booting up the retooled package offers users a new 3D menu, giving them options for arm length, crouching, head bobbing and a crosshair. It’s not the first project to combine Rift with Hydra, but it certainly helps illustrate the potential of such a setup. Sixense says it plans to release updates and the source code, and it recommends folks sign up for their project-specific email list and keep an eye on their forums for word on availability. Hit the source links below for the download, or head past the break to catch Road to VR’s hands-on with the Hydra-friendly Tuscan villa.

Filed under: Gaming

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Via: Road to VR

Source: Sixense (1), (2)