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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If you’re looking for more virtual worlds to explore using the Oculus Rift, MTBS3D forum user StellaArtois has developed something that might strike your fancy: a Minecraft mod dubbed Minecrift that bakes in support for the virtual reality headset. The modification still needs refining, but it already incorporates head tracking and warping. Not only did the intrepid forum goer grapple with the OpenGL API to devise the solution, but they also created the altered software before their own Rift dev kit arrived, relying on others to provide feedback for tweaking.

Mojang has has expressed interest in the VR headset and already has one in house, but official support for the Rift doesn’t seem close at hand for Minecraft.”Would take a lot of work to get it working for Minecraft, but not impossible – especially with the new launcher,” Mojang dev Nathan Adams tweeted yesterday regarding the Rift. Click the first source link below to give the mod a shot or head past the break to see it in action.

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Via: Road To VR

Source: MTBS3D, @Dinnerbone (Twitter)

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

The engine that powered the vast majority of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3’s hit games, Unreal Engine 3, is getting a development kit update to support the soon-to-be-released Oculus Rift VR headset. Of course, the model of the Rift that’s soon-to-be-released is intended for developers, so the Unreal Engine 3 UDK update is right on time; it arrives at some point in “early April,” soon after the headset itself arrives for Kickstarter backers. Beyond UDK integration, full UE3 licensees will also get an update for integrating the headset into their games.

That said, if you snagged yourself a Rift dev kit and have no intention of actually developing games with it, the upcoming UDK release also includes a “VR Mode” version of the software’s sample Unreal Tournament game, as well as a summer version of the Epic Citadel demo we were shown at CES 2013. Paired with Valve’s offering of Team Fortress 2 VR Mode, that brings the grand total of playable things with the Rift headset to … five or six (depending on what you define as a “demo”). Upcoming PC mech shooter Hawken is also promising Rift support, though it won’t launch until mid-December. The Oculus folks are saying that Rift dev kits will begin shipping to Kickstarter backers this month, with orders fulfilled by mid-April.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD

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