I was an early backer of this project and thought the timeline completely unrealistic from the start.
Funded in September on the back of a render and an ugly prototype with John Carmack's seal of approval - ship in November.
Say what?
I'm sure a lot of folks will be miffed at the lack of communication about the shipping delay until now, but I'm thinking keeping quiet until they're able to set a hard date probably saves an awful lot of needless discussion.
1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4833987 2: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/11/27/1535206/doom-3-bfg-...
I was a bit confused about their comment on the display "We tested every available (non-proprietary) display we could get our hands on." At their volume most manufacturers would hand over details of connecting to their display.
You'd think so, but I have had a hardware firm refuse to let me look at the data sheets unless they got a commitment to an order of 300,000 chips. And that was even though I tried to flash working-for-a-big-player-in-the-business credentials.
On a funny/related note back when I worked at Google and was looking into compressing air during windy periods and then feeding it back through compressed air motors for energy and cooling, I tried to get specs and pricing from MTI, the French company that Tata Motors was said to be buying their motors from. In spite of being from Google and offering up the possibility of a very press worthy installation they wouldn't even give me the time of day. I figured they didn't actually have anything at that point and since Tata didn't ship their car for several years I continue to hold that belief. (I don't even know if Tata ever shipped their car, one option was buying cars and just taking out the engine)
On the other hand, the raspberry pi guys did a lot better than I expected.
It seems theoretically possible, does anyone know if it can happen?
Also take in to account you have weight on your head. In games, players often get a sort of tunnel vision and ignore whats going on around them, making it easy to ignore the lack of comfort.
He says that for full immersion you need an 120 degrees horizontal and 120 degress vertical 8k by 8k screen
For an HMD you only need "retina" resolution straight ahead. Peripheral vision can make do with a much lower resolution. I have no idea what the magic number is for retina HMD, but it'll probably be smaller than 12 million pixels. It's certainly possible that the 5" 1080p display used in the latest HTC could have a higher apparent resolution than putting 3 WQHD monitors on your desk.
And also keep in mind that higher densities are much easier to manufacture affordably in smaller screen sizes. There's a reason why you can buy a phone with a 440PPI, laptop displays with 220PPI but it's hard to buy a desktop monitor with more than 110PPI.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd much prefer controlling my character's body (i.e. where the gun points) with the traditional controller/mouse, and use head tracking to move my character's head/camera only.
I think it'd be less tiring that way, and probably more immersive too. As I'm moving around in the game world, I could easily look around without changing the direction I'm travelling.
In the case of having the head-mounted display, it makes perfect sense. The immersive experience in first person shooters would benefit tremendously from that separation.
I suppose it's a good idea to let game developers experiment with the various control schemes, just as they did early on with defaults key mappings. Eventually it landed as WASD, Ctrl for crouch, space for jump, etc. I remember using right-click to move forward, inverted mouse, ZX for strafing...
I just have the feeling that "looking where you want to aim" is the totally wrong approach and look forward to game developers settling on a quasi-standard of how it should all work, just as they eventually did with keyboard/mouse mappings.
The delay is disappointing but ultimately not surprising. I was shocked that they were going to have a fully manufactured product out by December. Not including the more than 2 months required to make the injection mold and then running into the month long Chinese new year holiday is pretty unfortunate.
edit: some info from palmer: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/13xmbf/update_on_ocu...
I understand how hard it is to predict a timeline for a product in development, but I would expect an apology instead of "We’re happy to be able to finally announce that the Oculus Rift developer kits will begin shipping in March 2013."
I am still excited to get mine in March, but this attitude from occulus makes me question weather it is worthwhile to spend much time developing for it.
It is easy to skim the email without realizing they are announcing a delay at all. This is the kind of statement that I would expect from AT&T, not a crowdfunded project.
and made the product worse (a heavier screen farther away from your head).
Don't be a jerk. :(
EDIT: Reworded unkind remark.
The reason a larger screen distance is worse is that the torque on your head is the product of weight, distance, and gravity, so an increase in the distance will cause your neck to tire faster.
http://www.technocular.com/tech-news/japan-display-inc-devel...
"Straight ahead" depends on where your eyes choose to focus at any one moment.
In terms of relevancy of course, the specs aren't all that it's about, having proper gaming controls and a qwerty keyboard in such a small device means that it's an entirely different kind of thing to almost everything else that's out there, and that's still the case. It's hard to overstate how important good controls are to the enjoyment of playing games. I certainly missed my train stop playing Speedball II (emulating the Amiga) and ended up miles away from home...