Yes, it’s true: Valve announced today that Team Fortress 2 will have a new “VR Mode” that supports the Oculus Rift, available this week! Team Fortress 2 is one of our absolute favorite games (it’s Palmer’s most-played game on Steam!), and we’re really looking forward to playing it in VR with you. We couldn’t ask for a better developer showcase. Engadget has all the details, including a great interview with Joe Ludwig, one of the engineers at Valve who led TF2′s...
When we launched the Kickstarter campaign, we said we’d bundle a copy of DOOM 3 BFG Edition with each development kit as an extra “Thank you.” Unfortunately, we’ve been informed that DOOM 3 BFG Edition will not support the Rift development kit by the time we begin shipping. Since DOOM 3 won’t be available, we’d like to try and make it up to you. Replacement Rewards If you were supposed to receive a DOOM 3 BFG Edition, we’ll replace it with one of the following rewards: - $20 Steam Wallet...
Every day people ask us, “Have you read Ready Player One?” If you’re unfamiliar with the critically acclaimed novel, Ready Player One is about the exciting power and possibilities of virtual reality. Around Oculus, Ready Player One has become required reading. We can’t recommend it highly enough. In February, we were lucky enough to have Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One, by the office to check out a demo and meet the team. If you haven’t had a chance to read Ready Player...
The last few weeks have been incredibly busy at Oculus HQ while we put the finishing touches on the entire platform: the Rift development kit, the Oculus SDK, and the Developer Center. As we close in on the much anticipated launch, things really couldn’t be more exciting. There’s plenty of good news to share, so let’s dive right in. Latency – VR’s Nemesis This past Friday, John Carmack, legendary technical director at id Software, published an excellent write-up detailing the challenges...
After a long, exciting week at CES, we packed up and flew directly from Las Vegas to Hong Kong to oversee the pilot run at the factory. We lived on the factory floor for just over two weeks setting up production, assembly, and QA for the developer kits. The result? We produced over 40 complete Oculus Rift “pilot run” developer kits and we’re on schedule to start shipping the full kits in March. The first unit from the developer kit pilot run. None of this would have been possible...
What an incredible trip to CES 2013! An enormous thank you to everyone who stopped by for a demo, to all the fans who supported us during the show, and most of all, to you, the backers that made this happen! What’s especially cool is that our CES demos were built on the same software stack that developers will be using come March (Oculus SDK, new Oculus VR™ tracker, and Unity and Unreal Engine 3 integrations). There are plenty of fantastic articles from the show, but we wanted to share...
We want to kick off the New Year by sharing a few details on the Oculus sensor’s hardware and software that allow for immersive, low-latency head tracking. Parts of this update will dig in deep on technical aspects of the sensor, so strap in! For the game designers out there, remember that a thorough and passionate understanding of sensor fusion is not required to build great VR games with the Rift, although it certainly can’t hurt . Every Millisecond Counts When it comes to latency, every...
Now that we have the developer kit specifications locked down and our manufacturing process underway, there’s a lot more information we can share with everyone. We are putting together a series of updates for our backers about the changes we’ve made to the design and we thought we’d start with the display. The panel we were using in our prototype was a 5.6” LCD with a resolution of 1280×800. This screen is a great size for a VR headset and it has an impressive pixel density for...
When we launched our Kickstarter campaign in August, we hoped to sell a few hundred kits to game developers and virtual reality enthusiasts around the world. Instead, we were blown away by the overwhelming response from a community of almost 10,000 backers, who raised nearly $2.5 million dollars to help us develop the Oculus Rift. Designing, sourcing, and manufacturing thousands of developer kits is no small feat. Since our Kickstarter, we’ve been up against the wall, working around the clock...
We wanted to share a quick update on what we’ve been up to: New Office We finally moved into our new office in Irvine, CA with more space for the ever-growing team. We’re still getting setup, but the office is coming together nicely, with a full hardware lab, 3D printing room, even a small mo-cap VR space for testing and calibration of tracking hardware. Manufacturing Update We’re putting the finishing touches on the tooling for the first version of developer kits now, trying to squeeze...
