Oculus VR Founder on Recently Unveiled Oculus Rift S: I Can't Use it, and Neither Can You. (palmerluckey.com) 55
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, shares his thoughts on the recently unveiled Oculus Rift S: Rift S is very cool! It takes concepts that have been around for years and puts them into a fully functional product for the first time. Sure, sure, I see people complaining about how Rift S is worse than CV1 concerning audio quality, display characteristics, and ergonomics -- some of the tradeoffs are real, some are imaginary, and people should really wait for it to come out before passing final judgement. [...] My IPD (interpupillary distance, the distance between my eyes) is a hair under 70mm and slightly skewed to the right side of my face. One of my best friends has an IPD of 59mm. I don't know what your IPD is, but both of us were perfectly served by the IPD adjustment mechanism on Rift CV1, a mechanism that was an important part of our goal to be compatible with male and female users from 5th to 95th percentile. Anyone within the supported range (about 58mm to 72mm) got a perfect optical experience -- field curvature on the focal plane was matched, geometric distortion was properly corrected, world scale was at the right size, and pupil swim was more or less even.
Sharp imagery from edge to edge of your field of view was the norm. The small handful of people with an IPD outside that range would not get a perfect experience, but at least they would be in the right ballpark. IPD skews in different directions by gender, race, and age, but we managed to cover almost everyone, and we were proud of that. This is not the case with Rift S. Like Oculus Go, it uses two lenses that are set about 64mm apart, perfect for a perfectly average person. Everyone who fits Cinderella's shoe will get a perfect experience, anyone close will deal with minor eyestrain problems that impact their perception of VR at a mostly subconscious level. Everyone else is screwed, including me. Imagery is hard to fuse, details are blurry, distortion is wrong, mismatched pupil swim screws up VOR, and everything is at the wrong scale. "Software IPD adjustment" can solve that last bit, but not much else -- it adjusts a single variable that happens to be related to IPD, but is not comparable in any way to an actual IPD adjustment mechanism. This is the main reason I cannot use my Oculus Go, even after heavy modification on other fronts.
Sharp imagery from edge to edge of your field of view was the norm. The small handful of people with an IPD outside that range would not get a perfect experience, but at least they would be in the right ballpark. IPD skews in different directions by gender, race, and age, but we managed to cover almost everyone, and we were proud of that. This is not the case with Rift S. Like Oculus Go, it uses two lenses that are set about 64mm apart, perfect for a perfectly average person. Everyone who fits Cinderella's shoe will get a perfect experience, anyone close will deal with minor eyestrain problems that impact their perception of VR at a mostly subconscious level. Everyone else is screwed, including me. Imagery is hard to fuse, details are blurry, distortion is wrong, mismatched pupil swim screws up VOR, and everything is at the wrong scale. "Software IPD adjustment" can solve that last bit, but not much else -- it adjusts a single variable that happens to be related to IPD, but is not comparable in any way to an actual IPD adjustment mechanism. This is the main reason I cannot use my Oculus Go, even after heavy modification on other fronts.
weren't we supposed to have 100 million (Score:2, Interesting)
VR headsets in use by now?
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
better start thinking about what seasoning goes best with shorts
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With all the nerds out there purchasing multiple headsets there could actually be close to 100 million VR headsets in the wild.
The only company to release actual sales numbers so far is Sony and they've sold 4.3 million PSVR headsets. PSVR certainly isn't great, either, so I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers have sold many more than that.
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I spent a few years in collage, and all it taught me was cut and paste.
Have you forgotten how to use quotes? (Score:1)
"Oculus VR Founder on Recently Unveiled Oculus Rift S: I Can't Use it, and Neither Can You."
This "headline" means that somebody (supposedly the article author) is telling the Oculus VR founder that "I Can't Use it, and Neither Can You". That's hardly what was intended. Learn basic English.
(And this is ignoring the whole Confusing Issue of Typing Texts Like This...)
A damned shame (Score:5, Insightful)
I would really like to know the reasoning behind that decision. It's not like a lens-adjustment mechanism is going to be break the bank, though I suppose it might cut into profits a bit to maintain that psychologically magical "less than $400" price tag.
I mean, you take a product that works perfectly for 90% of the population, and then make the next otherwise-upgraded version and make it only work properly for 1% of the population? While everybody else has to deal with degraded visual quality. That's pure stupidity, and Palmer speaking out would seem to suggest that it was a corporate decision that he strongly disagrees with as well.
Reminds me of ergonomic chairs on planes, buses, etc. Without the ability to adjust the settings you end up with a chair that's quite comfortable for the few percent of the population that happens to be almost average-sized, while being a torture device for anyone sized substantially differently. What was wrong with a boring, flat chair? It's not perfect for anybody, but it's a huge improvement over improperly-sized ergonomics for almost everyone.
Re:A damned shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Though to be fair, there were other things that seemed tiny (like placement of a support or a cable length) but could produce multi-hundred dollar differences in manufacturing cost due to how it would change things like logistics or tooling, so sometimes stuff that seems like it should be cheap can make huge differences.
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You've already answered your own question, I am sure. Bean-counting,
I'm quite sure that this decision has already lead to another HR decision too. When the CEO of a company that specializes in only one line of products cannot use the brand new "for-the-masses" product, and warns that many other people cannot then you know there is a problem.
They should scrap this product and come back with v2 with the required adjustments. They're going to get owned in product return costs otherwise.
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He was the founder, but don't think he was ever CEO. He hired Brendan Iribe for the job in 2012, when his kickstarter exceeded $1million, and long before the buyout by Facebook. And Iribe stepped down last year when the CEO of Oculus position was replaced by a Facebook VP of VR
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. It's not like a lens-adjustment mechanism is going to be break the bank,
Well there's the lense adjustment, but more critically those headsets have two smaller panels instead of one big panel, which is presumably more expensive than the single panel. Of course a Quest is going to have two panels and a 'flagship' mobile processor and still be under $400....
At this point I'm ignoring Oculus software. Not only is it lockin, it is lockin to an ecosystem that *explicitly* doesn't want a high end device. If they don't want to do the better hardware, they should just open up support
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I go with VR should be fitted by an optometrist, zero adjustment in the device, the lenses et al, all ground and set by the manufacturer before it gets to you, just like any other specifically fit glasses. People might think that is all too expensive but, it means the glasses can be as compact and light as possible, all the bulk required for adjustment mechanisms gone. You pay once for a fitting done by a professional and those settings recorded and used next time. VR by default should also turn off motion
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Utterly unworkable because most of these HMDs are going to be used by families.
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FTFY, HAND. Personally, I always offend these professionals by insisting on getting these settings (e.g. my eyeglass prescription) written down on their headed note paper (so I've got their phone number too) then keep them in the spectacle case with my old pair old specs - which is now my spare pair.
To further annoy them, I use metal frames which I can re-glaze when I've got 2 spare pairs. Which means
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Excellent strategy - I've got nothing else to say about your post, but apparently it's time for my semi-annual dig at your sig:
Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that humans are small rodents. Both our family lines have gone though some pretty major changes in the last 66 million years, and it makes no sense to say that we are now what we were then. Heck, why stop at what we were a few tens of millions of years ago? By the same logic both humans, birds, and trees, etc. are all single-celled orga
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Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that rats are small rodents.
Bird-like dinosaurs existed in the Cretaceous.
Humans did not.
Small rodents did.
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There were certainly similarities to modern birds, but they were decidedly NOT birds yet. The differences between them and modern birds are on the same order as the difference between those rodents and modern humans. Larger actually - humans are pretty much the same the exact same body plan as those rodents, just distorted. Birds evolved beaks, lost their teeth, developed hollow bones, and many more such drastic changes over the same time period. We both mostly lost our tails, so I think we can call th
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Birds did evolve beaks, and lost their teeth. That's hardly a large-scale morphological difference.
Some "dinosaurs" (vernacular, not scientific) aren't very closely related to birds at all. Some, like the Dromaeosauridae would be identified as a flightless bird, if you ignore the teeth. Some later ones weren't even flightless.
Beyond that, the divergence between avians and theropods happened during the time when theropods were still extant. So morphologically modern birds
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Sure, it's only ever one very narrow family line that evolves into any particular descendant species. But Dromaeosauridae would hardly be considered a bird - it had teeth, no beak (it had a narrow snout), and no hollow bones, for starters. It was a feathered dinosaur of the branch from which birds probably evolved, but it wasn't especially similar to modern birds. The basic body layout was there, mostly, but most of the distinguishing features of birds had yet to evolve. It had feathers, but those appe
Number of variables (Score:5, Interesting)
Race is a social construct, so is gender (Score:2, Funny)
>IPD skews in different directions by gender, race, and age
What does he mean is skews by gender and race? Everyone knows these are constructs made up by white christian males to oppress the world!
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You insensitive clod! [npr.org]
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Usually information about group averages is not useful if you have direct information about the individual in question, yet
gushathon blues (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been reading about VR for years, and this is the first time I've ever read anything that cut to the chase. Awesome! Now I can die happy, in my own bed, surrounded by ordinary walls, covered with drab wallpaper.
Oculus no longer relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
Oculus has always been twofaced about specs. Palmer and crew went on and on about how important minspec was so people wouldn't get "sick" and end up hating VR.
Yet the very first product Oculus did was 3DOF VR in form of a plastic box that clipped on to cell phones where any head translation results in instant nausea.
Now after THREE YEARS they are releasing an inferior product lacking the very features they previously touted as necessary.
HP Reverb is bare minimum of what Rift CV2 should have been and best of all it's not tied to FACEBOOK.
I'm still waiting for Nvidia or someone to release a serious next gen VR HMD. What is needed is at least 32k display with eye tracking and custom foveated display driver to make using it feasible. Bonus points for light field / dynamic focus depth.
It's pretty clear Oculus is out of the VR hardware business which is fine with me.
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Nvidia won't release a VR headset because they don't care about it. They care about AI.
https://research.nvidia.com/re... [nvidia.com]
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Does it say that Nvidia is releasing a VR headset in there somewhere? Only two of the articles are less than a year old.
You misunderstand.
I said "I'm still waiting for Nvidia or someone to release a serious next gen VR HMD. "
Parent AC replied "Nvidia won't release a VR headset because they don't care about it."
I merely offered evidence to suggest NVidia DOES care about VR in order to refute parents assertion. Never said anything about NVidia actually bringing a product to market. I have no idea if they are even considering it. Simply expressed hope they or someone with comparable R&D resources would.
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32K display!?
A 4K display is 4X of 1080p pixels.
8K is actually 2x2 4K displays, so 4X the amount of pixels again.
So correspondingly, 16K is 4X 8K, and 32K is 4X 16K. You're asking for a display with a resolution of 530 million pixels. At 8 bit color, you need 1500 MB of memory just to buffer one single frame. And then to transfer 133 GB/s just to display at the Oculus' 90 FPS.
Sure, nVidia is just a week from announcing that they've completely revolutionized several fields in one go.
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I assume you're also waiting for Nvidia to release the super computer to go with this 32k helmet so it can have sufficient FPS to not make you evacuate contents of your stomach on your keyboard within second of putting the helmet on?
There goes any interest I had in it. (Score:2)
I own an HTC Vive, and while I really like the VR experience I don't exactly have space to dedicate a room to VR. I can still do standing/sitting games but I can't do roomscale at all. The Rift S actually was an exciting prospect to me because it purportedly had no need for external sensors.. but my IPD is definitely not in that golden "average" spectrum, so I guess I'll be sitting the Rift S out and hoping HTC comes out with something.
Yawn, left-hander here. Yawning. (Score:2)
The furore about NASA not having enough medium-size space suits reflects on the same problem - many devices are only designed to fit a certain, small, part of the population.
Not that it matters, but my IPD is 72 mm - as I've known from having set up hundreds of binocular microscopes over the years.