Hasta La Gadget!

Back in March, Valve’s Joe Ludwig mentioned how important the company believes virtual reality tech is but ultimately left us hanging, unable to be more detailed without a firm plan on what it might eventually ship. Next year the blanks will be filled in, as Valve has scheduled two very relevant sessions during its Developer Days conference: What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years, and Virtual Reality and Steam. Better yet, the descriptions reveal that it will have a prototype of what stunning experience it thinks “affordable” VR hardware will be capable of soon, and the software it’s working on including “the Steam Overlay in VR, Steam store changes for VR, and our VR plan for Steamworks.”

The Oculus Rift has already done a lot to spark our imaginations and given a platform for developers to test out their VR ideas, but putting the power of Steam behind this tech could push it where next-gen consoles haven’t. After the departure of the castAR team, we’re very interested to see what Valve will do, and its developer days seem like our first opportunity to find out. The two day conference happens January 15th and 16th but it’s only open to developers — if you pop open the registration page anyway we won’t blame you.

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Source: Steam

Sure, you could try and measure the motion-to-photons latency present in various Oculus Rift virtual reality games using your naked eye, but the latency tester Oculus just put up for pre-order is much easier and far more accurate. As demonstrated by Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey in the video after the break, simply pop off one of the Rift dev kit’s two lens caps and pop on the latency tester. After plugging it in via mini-USB, the tester reads the latency per eye and outputs a number on the rear — voila ici.

Like with so many things Oculus, folks who put in their name early have first crack at the latency tester. The rest of us can put in our names now for pre-order and they’ll start shipping out in early October — Oculus tells us, “they’re sitting in our warehouse now, waiting for new homes.” If you’re looking to get in on the action you probably shouldn’t wait, as only a “limited quantity” is available for now, though more could be produced “based on demand.”

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Source: Oculus Rift

It turns out that Doom co-creator John Carmack is more than just a virtual reality fanatic — he’s joining the company that’s leading the most recent VR revolution, today announcing that he’s taking the reins as Chief Technology Officer at Oculus Rift. In an email from the folks at Oculus, Carmack was confirmed to be out at the company he helped found — id Software — and joining Oculus full-time as CTO. He will apparently still serve some role at id, as id’s parent company told Engadget, “The technical leadership he provides for games in development at id Software is unaffected.” We’ve asked both Oculus and id’s parent company for clarification.

Carmack said in a prepared statement that the first time he wrote code for Oculus, it stood up to many firsts he’s experienced in modern gaming: “the intensity of the first-person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods and so on.” Additionally, he believes VR “will have a huge impact in the coming years” — Carmack is the first announced big new hire at Oculus. CEO Brendan Iribe said in the announcement PR that Oculus is, “putting together a team of the brightest minds.” Carmack, as it turns out, was at the very top of Oculus’ list.

Carmack got his hands on the Oculus Rift dev kit headset far earlier than most, spotting creator Palmer Luckey’s still nascent creation in a VR forum online. After getting in touch, Carmack asked Luckey if he could check out a prototype, which led to Carmack showing off a ported version of Doom 3 at E3; Doom 3‘s Oculus Rift version was supposed to ship with initial dev units, though that was later called off. Carmack also runs a rocket building company named Armadillo Aerospace, which he recently characterized as “in hibernation.”

Update: Bethesda Softworks (parent company to id Software) responded with the following statement to today’s news: “John has long been interested in the work at Oculus VR and wishes to spend time on that project. The technical leadership he provides for games in development at id Software is unaffected.” We’ve followed up for clarification as to what that means for Carmack’s efforts at id. In the note from Oculus, Carmack is said to be heading up and working out of newly created Dallas offices for Oculus.

Update 2: Carmack tweeted a bit of clarity to his new role at Oculus among his other jobs, saying, “My time division is now Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!”

Update 3: Oculus offered yet another statement, this time saying, “John is working full-time Oculus. He is fully-engaged at Oculus as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). As you can guess from the title, CTO is never part time, it is a full time gig. John’s role at id is between John and id.”

Update 4: And finally (we think), id’s parent company Bethesda Softworks offered this final statement, “He’s still going to be working at id, in id’s offices.”

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD, Nintendo

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The Oculus Rift sure is super, super neat, but outside of mods to existing games, it’s still a bit light in the custom-made software department. And that’s exactly why Oculus is ponying up $50K in prizes and teaming up with IndieCade this October for a game jam competition specifically meant to bolster that software support. One lucky dev / team will snag the grand prize of $10K and a chance to debut their game at this October’s IndieCade Festival in Los Angeles — they’ll also head out to Orange County to meet with the team at Oculus, including wunderkind Palmer Luckey.

Should you wish to get in on the VR-centric action, you’ve got the following three weeks to get things going (starting August 2nd and ending on August 25th). And if you don’t have one of Oculus’ Rift dev kits just yet, you’ll have access to playtesting at various “playtest hubs” set up worldwide (NYC and LA locations are the only two confirmed thus far, with “more locations to be announced soon”). For the full stipulations on the contest, head below.

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The Oculus Rift company is barely one year old, but it’s already off to a strong start. Developers have kits from a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, said kit has support from the industry’s biggest game engine creators, and the consumer-friendly HD version is already being shown off to press (we loved what we saw at E3 2013 last week). And now the company’s got a solid $16 million in the bank backing up its next step: creating a virtual reality headset that’s significantly more mainstream than the $300 dev kit currently available. But don’t think that alters the young company’s promise of virtual reality on the PC platform; quite the contrary, as CEO Brendan Iribe told Engadget, “We’re really focused on the PC as the platform to bring this to market right now.”

He said that Oculus isn’t against bringing its VR headset to consoles, but that PC remains the primary platform. “We’re always looking at other platforms — looking at consoles, we’re also looking at Android and the mobile side in a big way — but right now we really are focused on the PC platform,” he said. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida told us last week in an interview that, “We’ve got a couple of the development kits, and I tried it out and I love it,” though he wouldn’t outright say if the PlayStation 4 will support the Rift. We’re betting “yes.”

As for what Oculus is doing in the short-term with the new infusion of cash? In short, it’s being used to staff up (the company’s still under 50 employees right now, mostly engineers). “We’re using the funding to ramp up on hiring more smart people, the best and brightest that we can find,” Iribe said. “The dev kit as it is now, that we’re shipping, will stay the same, and the software side will just keep getting better.” The vast majority of those new employees will be engineers — one glance at the company’s careers page quickly confirms this claim. Outside of new employees, though, Iribe said little will change in the company’s ongoing goal to develop “the very best virtual reality platform we can create.”

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