Hasta La Gadget!

Although the Oculus Rift is one of the more ambitious attempts at making virtual reality accessible, its lack of peripheral version is all too familiar — it’s much like staring into a pair of portholes. Rather than let the disorientation persist unaltered, though, Hack A Day has taken matters into its own hands. Its Oculight hack puts an RGB LED strip inside the headpiece, with the colored lighting set to match the edge of the screen through Adalight code. The result is much like Philips’ Ambilight, but arguably more useful: the virtual world’s light “leaks” into the wearer’s real peripheral view, adding to the immersion. Oculight clearly isn’t for sale and needs a refined installation to create the ideal effect, but the readily available resources will let anyone with an Oculus Rift development kit build their own solution.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

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Source: Hack A Day

Epic Games isn’t just offering up its ubiquitous current-gen game creation tool Unreal Engine 3 to Oculus Rift developers, but also its next-gen tool, Unreal Engine 4. Epic Games VP Mark Rein told Engadget as much during an interview at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, repeatedly stating he’s “super bullish” on the Rift, all the while rocking an Oculus pin on his exhibitor lanyard. “Oh, for sure,” he said when we asked about UE4 support for the Rift. “We’re working on that now.” The Rift dev kit was demoed at CES 2013 running Unreal Engine 3’s “Epic Citadel” demo, and Epic’s offered support to the Oculus folks since early on, making the UE4 news not a huge surprise, but welcome nonetheless.

The next-gen game engine was being shown off at GDC 2013 with a flashy new demo (seen below the break), as well as a version of its “Elemental” demo running on a PlayStation 4 dev kit (shrouded behind a curtain, of course). Rein was visibly excited about that as well, unable to contain random vocal outbursts during the presentation. “It’s a war out there, and we sell bullets and bandaids,” he jokingly told us in an interview the following day. The quote comes from coworker and Epic VP of business development Jay Wilbur, and it’s fitting — Epic only makes a handful of games, and the company’s real money comes from game engine licensees. In so many words, the more platforms that Unreal Engine variants can go, the better for Epic (as well as for engine licensees, of course). “It’s a good place to be — we try to support everything we can. We have to place some timed bets on things that we feel are gonna be the most important to licensees, and also to us where we’re taking games. But because the engine is portable — it’s written in C++ — a licensee can take and do whatever they want,” he said.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD

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You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

Continue reading The Daily Roundup for 01.15.2013

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As someone who devours way too much science fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that I’ll be wearing giant VR goggles at some point in the future. (I’m patiently waiting for my jetpack, too.) Now it looks like I might not be crazy after all — Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, is hoping to take VR goggles out of the lab and put them into the hands of gamers at an affordable price.

The company held a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for its Oculus Rift headset last year, raising $2.4 million (nearly 10 times the original goal) from 9,522 backers. The company plans to ship its first developer kits in a couple of months, and Luckey dropped by the TechCrunch booth at the Consumer Electronics Show with an early version of the goggles.

He compared the experience to “having an enormous screen suspended in front of you,” which is true enough, but doesn’t quite do justice to what it’s like to put the headset on, watch the game respond to your movements, and feel like you’re moving through a real space. I’m eager to try it out in a real game, but it sounds like I might still have a while to wait on that front.

“It wouldn’t be really responsible for us to go out and say, ‘This is when we think it’s going to be done,’ when we haven’t gotten any developer feedback on what they think should be in the consumer version,” Luckey said.

The developer kits are still available for pre-order for a price of $300 on the Oculus site. When the consumer version is released, Luckey said he’s aiming to deliver it at the same price or lower.

Anyone who’s been wanting to make a game for the Oculus Rift headset, but hemmed and hawed during the Kickstarter run, now has a second chance. Oculus has kicked off its own pre-order campaign that offers the VR developer kit at the same $300 that it cost for the more proactive among us, or $345 for those beyond US borders. As an added incentive, the first 1,000 who pull the trigger still get a copy of Doom 3: BFG Edition to show what the Oculus Rift can do. Twiddling your thumbs will have cost at least a month — these new kits won’t ship until January — but the pre-order still means a head start over competing developers that haven’t yet seen the virtual light.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

Oculus Rift developer kits go up for regular pre-order, catch VR procrastinators originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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