Oculus Co-founder is Leaving Facebook After Cancellation of 'Rift 2' Headset (techcrunch.com) 81
Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus, announced today that he is leaving Facebook. From a report: Iribe is leaving Facebook following some internal shake-ups in the company's virtual reality arm last week that saw the cancellation of the company's next generation "Rift 2" PC-powered virtual reality headset, which he had been leading development of, a source close to the matter told TechCrunch. Iribe and the Facebook executive team had "fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time," and Iribe wasn't interested in a "race to the bottom" in terms of performance, we are told.
What's that word (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like there's some kind of large separation between him and Facebook, a, what's that word... nope lost it.
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Re: What's that word (Score:2)
Defriended!
Re:What's that word (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it means that high performance VR loses as a whole. Oculus, for all its problems, funded a lot of software development for high performance VR. With them refocusing on crippled low power VR instead, that's even less resources in the niche of high performance VR, and it's a niche that is already suffering severely from lack of software.
Re: What's that word (Score:3)
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Absolutely. Samsung just launched an updated Odyssey+ which isn't a huge upgrade in terms of specs but could be significantly better in practice thanks to better comfort and especially the anti-SDE screen if it actually works. Oculus/Vive fanboys will try to claim that the limited volume of hand tracking is a dealbreaker but outside of a few specific games it's a good tradeoff and doesn't cause any issues.
If a proper gen 2 adds two more cameras, wider FOV and eye tracking, they'd have a serious chance of ov
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The deal breaker is the fact that the visual quality is awful, because of phone grade hardware. When you have powerful PC grade hardware sucking up hundreds of watts of power still being barely sufficient for fairly low quality 3d imaging, low power version is just terrible.
Which is why all those "make your phone into VR device" addons sold really well, got played with for a few days and are now overwhelmingly collecting dust or are in the trash bin. Hardware sells because it's really cheap and makes promis
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The Odyssey is a PC headset so you're free to throw a kilowatt of CPU and GPU power at feeding it. You might be confusing it with Gear VR which Samsung also makes and is just a holder for the Galaxy phones.
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Odyssey has nothing to do with VR. It's AR. The only VR Samsung makes is mobile phone one based off oculus' mobile VR tech.
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Are you in Canada, because I'd love some of what you're smoking :)
https://www.samsung.com/us/com... [samsung.com]
"Mixed Reality" is just MS branding for the whole thing, this is just a VR headset.
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Like I noted in my other reply, I didn't realise they went for full VR with this one. Last I saw it, it was like many other AR headsets. A seethrough setup with some kind of a projector, designed to add elements to environment, not create an entire virtual environment. At this point, I usually stop paying attention to the efforts, because I'm not interested in AR.
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Ah, nm. They actually made it into a proper VR headset. Had to doublecheck, since I last I saw the dev efforts, it was literally a seethrough AR set, not a fully closed one that can function as VR.
I'll take a look at it. Thanks for the tip.
Re:What's that word (Score:4, Insightful)
It means they got a good look at a 2080 GPU and cold harsh reality sank in.
A single 2080 can't drive a 4K HDR at 90Hz, so if they built the obvious upgrade for a Rift, it was going to render at lower resolution anyhow, for _years_.
Asking users to install two 1k$ graphics cards takes the whole deal out of mass market. Makes money only for Nvidia. Will still likely only render relatively simple scenes.
Someone will succeed on small scale. Price will be kilobucks.
Porn is key, as with any new media. Cheap VR is good enough for VR video.
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Play typical PC game, lean back in recliner, computer on table over chair, TV streaming ,music in background, pretty view in windows, snacks and hot cocoa in reach, really comfortable. Virtual reality best played standing up, no chair, closed off from music and can't see pleasant view, scattered snacks and hot cocoa spilled everywhere, not very fucking comfortable at all. Now exactly who are you selling virtual reality, surely it could not be computer gamers like me. Sure fun some of the time for a short wh
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'Standing up' is your mistake.
Sit down, but you need real tactile controls. So a setup for driving, a setup for flight sim. Who has room? VR is _much_smaller_ than some of the geeked out setups though.
The advantage 'standing up' has is it constrains what the idiot developers can do to your POV. Lots of standard 3d gaming camera tricks, cutscene turning flyins etc, that make VR users puke. In stand up they also make users fall over.
Keeping up, up is 90% of the battle. Why some categories just VR bette
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Why not compare it to typical play, rather than just video games? That's generally done standing, walking, and/or running, but is becoming increasingly uncommon in part due to the increasingly compelling digital experiences available, and in part to diminishing easy access to opportunities for it.
So, why not get the best of both worlds? The convenient, compelling digital experience, and the health-and-endorphin simulating physical activity? We aren't designed to sit around all day after all, it does horri
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Nope, but they have decided not to do it because jogging is boring, high exertion, bad for the knees, and/or the weather's lousy or there's nowhere nice to run nearby.
There's a reason standing/walking desks are a thing, no reason playing video games should be constrained to sitting on your ass either. Heck, the incredibly popularity of the Wii showed that a lot of people are quite interested in playing more physically immersive video games. Personally I'm eager to play some decent tennis, shoot pool in ni
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AFAIK, a significant portion if not outright majority of active VR gamers are simulator players. Eurotruck, DCS, etc. Those people are in fact sitting down.
How come I always see this coming ahead of time? (Score:1)
I called it. Told you so... blah, blah, blah. Not that vindication here is much comfort.
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No, not because I'm a genius. I mean, I am, but that's beside the point. It doesn't take genius-level intelligence to predict Facebook is gonna strangle every throat they can grasp.
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New upcoming Rift is phone grade low performance VR. This has nothing to do with high performance VR like Rift. You're confusing same brand being used for a completely different product for the same product.
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Problem being you already had that for two years. It's called "your phone with that thing you slot phone in and put on your head".
And it's awful, which is why majority will play with it for a few days and then never use it again, other than maybe watching a movie.
TFA updated (Score:2)
While Facebook did not deny our report that the “Rift 2” being developed under Iribe’s PC VR team had been canceled, the company reiterated to us in a comment that they are continuing to invest in PC.
So, Rift 2 still cancelled, next PC product kicked back to "future plans" stage, but they're not closing down the PC store just yet.
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All that is closer than you might expect...
Omnidirectional treadmills [youtu.be] are already here. Getting them https://youtu.be/fvu5FxKuqdQ?t... [youtu.be]">small enough for the home use getting close. The major hiccup (other than cost) is prediction algorithms that keep forces on the user low [youtu.be] with a reduced area.
They have some pretty amazing VR gloves prototypes [youtu.be] that are capable of simulating temperature changes and let you feel and grip virtual objects. Obviously a ways away for the consumer as costs and size are an issue
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Yep, like WhatsApp.
Re: Should have thought of that before selling to (Score:2, Insightful)
The Zuck only wanted the technology platform as a means to program zombies and NPCs with more propaganda beyond the FB app txt app. Enhanced gaming?? Yeah, no, that's someone else's chicken to fuck. Not having it at FB
I hope... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'l bet right now that Iribe will imminently announce his own VR company, with Karmack at the technical reins, with every intention to release producs that will blow the fuck out of Facebook and their crappy VR strategy.
I've never been a fan of Oculus.. I personally think they/their products are underservedly overrated by a bunch of fanbois, as the Rift is actually very mediocre compared to even the Vive, especially its roomscale tracking solution. That said I hated seeing one of the largest VR companies end up just making more anemic GearVR clones such as the Oculus Go and whetever else Zuckerberg seems to want.
More competition and more innovation in the VR sector is better for everyone. I'm very much looking forward to attending a Pimax backer meeting in LA tomorrow and trying the 5K+ and 8K. How is it that a small Chinese company can be coming out with groundbreaking stuff, when HTC and Oculus are both at best doing low-risk little iterative improvements?
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What is going to render for it?
Current GPUs aren't up to the task in a straightforward way. Rendering 4K VR, at a high frame rate, today means thousands in GPUs.
Unless someone can make eyeball tracking and smart rendering work.
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I'm a Pimax 8K backer, input res is 2560x1440 per eye. (it get upscaled to native 4k per eye by the headset hardware)
Tests have shown that a last gen GPU (gtx1070) is bare minimum. 1080ti is more realistic. Current gen 2080ti (cost is about $1200) is more than fine.
Yeah you need to be able to pay to play, but that's how it is with most hobbies. Actually, $1200 is pocket money compared to maximum possible expenditure in most of my other hobbies.
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All that depends on the scene complexity and graphics resolution.
A 1080ti is barely good enough for a Rift. A 2080ti _isn't_ twice as powerful.
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From what I've heard, upscaling is the best thing to do, you get the visual benefit of the smaller pixels without the problem of being underpowered for the resolution.
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I tried both the 5K+ and the 8K pimax today ( both have 1440p X 2 input , the 5K+ has native res panels, 8K does upscaling to 4k panels). I was not alone in concluding the 5K+ looked better. There were maybe 15 people at the demo, and not one said they thought the 8K looked better.
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So, the pimax is doing the upscaling, I think the newest generation Nvidia would likely do a much better job of it.
It'll be a long time before a lot of games can play at 8k native with a good frame-rate especially because they'll be aiming at getting a good frame rate at 1080p and increasing visual quality at that resolution. Which is why I think it'll be up to video card manufacturers to use fancy interpolating techniques to fill the gap. Downside with Nvidia's new DLSS is it needs to be supported by each
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well I sort of agree, after trying the 8K and the 5K+, I suspect the 8K would look better with more intelligent upscaling, however I suspect putting smart upscaling on the GPU would probably drag it to its knees, just like superscaling can. No-one is really writing games from scratch any more, so I think making DLSS widely supported is really up to the game engine makers to incorporate it in a way that game developers don't need to worry about explicitly implementing, or even see, they just effectively get
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no-one is even aiming at 120hz. The generally accepted standard is 90hz.
60hz gives very visible judder.
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Eye tracking and foveated rendering already work perfectly fine, they just aren't included in any of the mainstream production headsets yet. I think fixed foveated rendering is also supposed to be supported in Oculus Go and Quest, which only renders full resolution in the sharp central area, and lower res in the periphery where the optics cause a lot of distortion anyway. No reason this can't work on other desktop headsets too, and I think it's supposed to be included in the new Unreal engine.
The good news
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> Current GPUs aren't up to the task in a straightforward way.
At the Pimax demo I went to today, 8k was working just fine with a 2080ti. 1.5 supersampling and no judder at all evem im Elite dangerou. I believe the 5k+ system was using a 1080ti and it was fine running SkyrimVR too.
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as the Rift is actually very mediocre compared to even the Vive, especially its roomscale tracking solution.
But the Quest is completely wireless and is only limited by your place space. No tethers, no external trackers, just the headset and controllers. Yes, there is a performance compromise but as Superhot has shown, there are compelling things to do with VR that don't require a crazy beefy computer.
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'Compelling'
Porn.
Porn is always the killer app.
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...If you're a mouth-breather.
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Quest is limited by phone grade hardware, in niche where modern powerful PCs eating hundreds of watts are barely sufficient.
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- Carmack seems very happy with mobile VR. His skills at pushing the hardware to the limit really shine on mobile. Abrash maybe?
- The Rift and the Vive are roughly on the same level, though I prefer the Rift. The Vive Pro is a little bit better, but much more expensive. They all can do room scale tracking just fine now, though the Vive is a bit easier to set up.
- The Pimax has many issues. Optical distortion in particular. And it is extremely demanding GPU wise, I am not even sure a 2080ti can run everythin
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> The Pimax has many issues. Optical distortion in particular.
Utter crap. I just spent about 4 hours today with the 5K+, the new 5K business edition, and the 8K, and a large range of different games. None showed any sign of optical distortion.
> It is not revolutionary at all,
Baloney. The FOV alone blows the fuck out of anything Oculus or HTC have made so far, and the resolution is better too. Its also lighter and far more comfortable. t definately feels like the next gen, unlike the Vive Pro.
> we
Look for Remote PC Beaming (Score:1)
Well Shit (Score:2)
Facebook obviously thinks standalone VR and walled gardens are the future. With no competition at the high end (aside from maybe Pimax), the next Vive is going to be quite a bit more expensive.
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Even though it's not as good, other vr is still a competitor. It's a matter of owning the space. Now isnt when you profit on vr. it's once you win the wars.