Got an Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2. Ask Me Anything

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fobwashed

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Hey duders. I pre-ordered a Dev Kit 2 a while back and it got here today. I just started tinkering with it and am already pretty blown away by what it can do. If anyone has any questions about it, go ahead and let me know and I'll answer to the best of my ability =]

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FinalDasa

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#2 FinalDasa  Moderator

I wear glasses. Without these glasses I can't see very far. I need these glasses.

Do you think someone could either wear glasses while wearing the Oculus? Or are there enough lenses to use that someone like me could probably find a decent substitute for my glasses?

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nightriff

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Did you have to use your facebook account to use it in anyway?

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tildebees

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can I try i t

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MooseyMcMan

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When you put it on, how much do you feel like RoboCop?

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fobwashed

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I wear glasses. Without these glasses I can't see very far. I need these glasses.

Do you think someone could either wear glasses while wearing the Oculus? Or are there enough lenses to use that someone like me could probably find a decent substitute for my glasses?

The set came with a pair of lenses that are supposedly for "very nearsighted users" and one that's for normal to slightly nearsighted users. It looks like you can also push the screen back far enough that you should be able to use your own glasses with the headset.

Did you have to use your facebook account to use it in anyway?

nope

can I try i t

maybe

When you put it on, how much do you feel like RoboCop?

I guess this'd depend on the game. I'd love to see some stuff in the future where it emulates actually wearing a helmet or visor with a sweet HUD to match =]

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cornbredx

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The most logical question, for me, is what difference can you tell between this and the last dev kit?

I only had brief, hear say, knowledge of the first outing and it sounded like the biggest hurdles so far were motion sickness related. Has this been resolved?

I don't really have a lot of questions other than that. I just always enjoy reading about oculous because I still believe it's going to be amazing when it finally does go to market.

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I_Stay_Puft

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#8  Edited By I_Stay_Puft

What is the resolution support for the oculus rift dev kit 2?

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Klarion18

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How heavy is it? And on a general comfort level easy to wear?

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bacongames

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Have you tried stuff at the recommended framerate of 75-90+, 60, and 30 to see what the results are?

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RonGalaxy

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#11  Edited By RonGalaxy

@finaldasa said:

I wear glasses. Without these glasses I can't see very far. I need these glasses.

Do you think someone could either wear glasses while wearing the Oculus? Or are there enough lenses to use that someone like me could probably find a decent substitute for my glasses?

I would think occulus would be a problem for nearsided people, not farsided people (since the screen is right up in your face. Then again, Im not really adept at science shit, so I'm not really sure how it actually works or who it might present an issue to.

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mikey87144

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How much of an improvement is it over the first one?

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Shivoa

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@finaldasa said:

I wear glasses. Without these glasses I can't see very far. I need these glasses.

Do you think someone could either wear glasses while wearing the Oculus? Or are there enough lenses to use that someone like me could probably find a decent substitute for my glasses?

I would think occulus would be a problem for nearsided people, not farsided people (since the screen is right up in your face. Then again, Im not really adept at science shit, so I'm not really sure how it actually works or who it might present an issue to.

The lenses actually put the screen at infinite depth (this is basically anything 30m+ where the light is as good as parallel for government work) so that's why you get B lenses with the kit (for people who can't sharply resolve parallel light when their iris muscles are totally relaxed and so need a slight angle/the screen to be closer). This also means you don't get eyestrain from using them as your muscles (that change the shape of the iris) are relaxed because that's natural for focus at infinity.

I got my DK2 recently and have ok but not great vision (I wear glasses to have great vision because we have the technology so why wouldn't I want 20:12 vision) and have found the B lenses are better for me (I can use the A lenses and wouldn't complain if that was the only option but it's not as good as with the Bs in). The reason why Oculus recommend contact lenses is that the further away from your eyes the lenses in the headset are, the lower the FoV you get so if you make enough space for glasses then you'll lose some peripheral vision and have a less than ideal experience.

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mrfluke

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#14  Edited By mrfluke

@fobwashed: is it still pretty scrambled when plugging it in to a console?

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fobwashed

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#15  Edited By fobwashed

The most logical question, for me, is what difference can you tell between this and the last dev kit?

I only had brief, hear say, knowledge of the first outing and it sounded like the biggest hurdles so far were motion sickness related. Has this been resolved?

I don't really have a lot of questions other than that. I just always enjoy reading about oculous because I still believe it's going to be amazing when it finally does go to market.

I only breifly used the previous version at a Pax booth but I can tell even from my brief usage of both that it's a huge improvement. The "screen door" effect you heard about was legitimate in that it literally looked like you were using the previous version through a screen door. Each pixel was easily visible and there was a small black line between every pixel. Now you can still see pixels but the space between them is gone and the resolution is high enough that you shouldn't be bothered by it unless you're really looking. Beyond that, the IR tracking is amazing. Being able to sway side to side and it being reflected in the game world is intense. If you stand back from the sensor, you can even literally crouch and stand and your in game avatar is vertically moving that same amount of distance. In one of the demos, I could even lean forward and over a banister to look around and down to the lower level from above as you would in real life. It's really crazy.

What is the resolution support for the oculus rift dev kit 2?

1920x1080 I believe. Split that in two since it displays both eyes on one screen.

How heavy is it? And on a general comfort level easy to wear?

I haven't worn it for an extended amount of time yet but it seems light enough. The straps also feel pretty comfortable.

Have you tried stuff at the recommended framerate of 75-90+, 60, and 30 to see what the results are?

Unsure. I think I'm hitting the right frame rate and I know I've set the set to 75. As far as I can tell, it looks good.

How much of an improvement is it over the first one?

Huge. The resolution boost is fantastic and the IR tracking is unreal.

@shivoa said:

@rongalaxy said:

@finaldasa said:

I wear glasses. Without these glasses I can't see very far. I need these glasses.

Do you think someone could either wear glasses while wearing the Oculus? Or are there enough lenses to use that someone like me could probably find a decent substitute for my glasses?

I would think occulus would be a problem for nearsided people, not farsided people (since the screen is right up in your face. Then again, Im not really adept at science shit, so I'm not really sure how it actually works or who it might present an issue to.

The lenses actually put the screen at infinite depth (this is basically anything 30m+ where the light is as good as parallel for government work) so that's why you get B lenses with the kit (for people who can't sharply resolve parallel light when their iris muscles are totally relaxed and so need a slight angle/the screen to be closer). This also means you don't get eyestrain from using them as your muscles (that change the shape of the iris) are relaxed because that's natural for focus at infinity.

I got my DK2 recently and have ok but not great vision (I wear glasses to have great vision because we have the technology so why wouldn't I want 20:12 vision) and have found the B lenses are better for me (I can use the A lenses and wouldn't complain if that was the only option but it's not as good as with the Bs in). The reason why Oculus recommend contact lenses is that the further away from your eyes the lenses in the headset are, the lower the FoV you get so if you make enough space for glasses then you'll lose some peripheral vision and have a less than ideal experience.

The advanced eye position measurements in the config utility where you push out the yellow bars to the edges of your periphery vision may help with some of that loss. You sound like u know more about this stuff than I do so I'll take your word for it tho =]

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fobwashed

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@mrfluke said:

@fobwashed: is it still pretty scrambled when plugging it in to a console?

Haven't tried. Tho when you run it as an extended desktop and not inside an occulus formatted program, it's incredibly disorienting. Basically like looking at your computer monitor from 2 inches away... actually, that's pretty much exactly what's going on.

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musubi

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Did you shake Hatsune Miku's hand?

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mikey87144

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Extremely difficult question to ask but let's say this was being sold in stores right now, do you think this devkit would sell people on VR?

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Shivoa

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#19  Edited By Shivoa
@fobwashed said:

The advanced eye position measurements in the config utility where you push out the yellow bars to the edges of your periphery vision may help with some of that loss. You sound like u know more about this stuff than I do so I'll take your word for it tho =]

That is just using the way the edges of the thing you can see will change depending how closely aligned your eyes are to the ~63mm distance that the lenses are placed (think about if your eyes were really close together and looking through 2 holes, you'd not be able to see anything in the middle of the screen and so you can measure how far apart someone's eyes are by seeing how much of the screen they can see - important stuff when the typical range is 52 to 78mm and that distance is core to our feeling of scale in the world) but that will change all the rendering details. The current kit is using the 'where did you place the notches' measure to deal with changing the FoV for the user (note how the eye-lens distance is grayed out in the detail page but will change between 5mm and 15mm depending where you set the notch position).

I don't think 15mm produces a bad FoV (you're still getting plenty of peripheral vision - considering the old FoVs of devices was ~45 degrees and Rift is going for 90+ this is still better than even the closest of PC monitor glued gamers can normally expect), but the closer the lens is to your eye the better and I can't see anyone managing to get the headset over some glasses without it basically being set to the most distance position. I do have a low profile set of glasses (which I use for wearing under things like 3D movie glasses and the nVidia 3DVision branded active shutter glasses for my 3D monitor) that are much better at fitting than my normal pair but even then I'm going to be constantly worried about scratching the lenses by wearing them (so have the headset dialed to most distant if I do use that - it's much easier when taking the things off and on while coding and testing to always have glasses on).

Have to agree with you about the revelation of this implementation of IR tracking: the 1-to-1 of it is incredible. I've enjoyed stereoscopic gaming (on and off) for almost 15 years now (Google 3D Revelator - PC gamers have been enjoying our dumb niche stuff and hacking it to work with as many games as possible for a long time) and played with TrackIR things but the Rift DK2 is the first time I've felt I could not think about my head while getting the sense I could reach out and touch something that wasn't there. Steroscopic has allowed me to look into my screens before but any slight head movement broke the illusion, TrackIR was never advertising precise 1 to 1 motion; with DK2 then moving your head reinforces that illusion.

@mikey87144 said:

Extremely difficult question to ask but let's say this was being sold in stores right now, do you think this devkit would sell people on VR?

I'd say it's not ready for prime-time yet. It's good (there are clearly things that can be better and the kit still has the feel of dev-focussed so expect bugs, crashes, and sometime arcana to get stuff working right) but the software for it isn't there so there would be next to nothing to sell a user right now (this isn't helped by DK2 being different enough to require a recompile to the new SDK so all the DK1 demos out there won't work right now). The current SDK demos show what can be done with hitting 75Hz and using the current best practices for make the lag go away. Some of the 3rd party demos that have been hacked together or commercial games with beta support indicate what can go wrong if you miss that (30Hz does not feel good to me - any head motion feels like the world is constantly jerking due to the saw motion; laggy does not feel good to me - unless you're making a very drunk simulator then lag is bad!)

If you want to be able to look at a virtual space and feel like you're almost there if it wasn't for the somewhat pixellated presentation then the DK2 is pretty good. After 5 minutes you stop noticing the pixels. But right now the virtual spaces you can look around aren't much interesting to look at. Give it a year for games to be built which can handle the specific development requirements and it'll sell your average gamer or even your parents. Considering they got this kit out for $350, it's impressive how far this has come. Expect the next 10 years of GPU development to go on getting to 120Hz per eye, 4K or even more done with greater and greater virtual spaces to explore and at the same time lighter units, tracking that lets you walk around, and low latency, reliable wireless signals.

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I'm really curious how much more playable ArmA would be with the new resolution. It was great for close quarters but you can't exactly spot a guy at 600 meters on the side of a hill with it, ya know?

I'd ask if you have ArmA to try that with, but I know it's not that simple, having spent many many hours rarely succeeding to achieve ArmA compatibility with the DK1.

But damn if I don't want to exist in that world...

If you happen to have access to a Nexus 5 or a screen with similar pixel density, how does the screen door effect of the DK2 compare to that of putting the lens from the DK2 up against the screen of said phone? Because I remember doing that back when I still had my DK1 and it had almost no noticeable screen door effect as I recall. That may be a bit of an exaggeration but it was definitely more than enough to be happy with for the consumer launch.

@mrfluke said:

@fobwashed: is it still pretty scrambled when plugging it in to a console?

Haven't tried. Tho when you run it as an extended desktop and not inside an occulus formatted program, it's incredibly disorienting. Basically like looking at your computer monitor from 2 inches away... actually, that's pretty much exactly what's going on.

Only if you move your head at all with the oculus, you go insane pretty much instantly. Never headbang with a static view presented to you in an oculus....

God damnit I need one. Why did I quit my job when I did. Gotta wait till after pax to order one of these DK2's. Sounds pretty awesome. Especially that positional tracking.

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jArmAhead

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#22  Edited By jArmAhead

I'm really curious how much more playable ArmA would be with the new resolution. It was great for close quarters but you can't exactly spot a guy at 600 meters on the side of a hill with it, ya know?

I'd ask if you have ArmA to try that with, but I know it's not that simple, having spent many many hours rarely succeeding to achieve ArmA compatibility with the DK1.

But damn if I don't want to exist in that world...

If you happen to have access to a Nexus 5 or a screen with similar pixel density, how does the screen door effect of the DK2 compare to that of putting the lens from the DK2 up against the screen of said phone? Because I remember doing that back when I still had my DK1 and it had almost no noticeable screen door effect as I recall. That may be a bit of an exaggeration but it was definitely more than enough to be happy with for the consumer launch.

@mrfluke said:

@fobwashed: is it still pretty scrambled when plugging it in to a console?

Haven't tried. Tho when you run it as an extended desktop and not inside an occulus formatted program, it's incredibly disorienting. Basically like looking at your computer monitor from 2 inches away... actually, that's pretty much exactly what's going on.

Only if you move your head at all with the oculus, you go insane pretty much instantly. Never headbang with a static view presented to you in an oculus....

God damnit I need one. Why did I quit my job when I did. Gotta wait till after pax to order one of these DK2's. Sounds pretty awesome. Especially that positional tracking.

Extremely difficult question to ask but let's say this was being sold in stores right now, do you think this devkit would sell people on VR?

I'm going to go ahead and say, with out having used it, that the hardware is probably just over the line but the software isn't there. It's going to take a full, polished, pretty VR game like Star Citizen to really sell the concept. Even if this thing was perfect it'd be hard to convince someone to buy it outside of the enthusiast community.

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@fobwashed:

How intimidating does it seem to be to people who are not video games enthusiasts?

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fobwashed

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Did you shake Hatsune Miku's hand?

Nope

Extremely difficult question to ask but let's say this was being sold in stores right now, do you think this devkit would sell people on VR?

No. It's too hard to set up and use for the general consumer. Demo kiosks on the other hand would prolly be enough to convince people tho. Taking this thing home and setting it up would be a nightmare to the average Jill and Joe.

@fobwashed:

How intimidating does it seem to be to people who are not video games enthusiasts?

Very.

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#25  Edited By Bollard

@fobwashed: Most important question:

What is the bit that rests on your nose made of?

The DK1 and its sharp plastic nose piece made me really not want to wear that thing, given how heavy it was.


@mikey87144 said:

Extremely difficult question to ask but let's say this was being sold in stores right now, do you think this devkit would sell people on VR?

No. It's too hard to set up and use for the general consumer. Demo kiosks on the other hand would prolly be enough to convince people tho. Taking this thing home and setting it up would be a nightmare to the average Jill and Joe.

@themanunknown said:

@fobwashed:

How intimidating does it seem to be to people who are not video games enthusiasts?

Very.

I actually set up a demo kiosk at my Uni for people to come give the thing a go on that roller coaster demo - and every single one of them was way into it. No-one turned down trying it. Then again, I do go to technology and science focused Uni, so the people there probably aren't representative of your average consumer.

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fobwashed

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#26  Edited By fobwashed

@bollard: My nose never touches anything when I've got it on. It looks like it's a carved out plastic area though.

No Caption Provided

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Bollard

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#27  Edited By Bollard

@fobwashed said:

@bollard: My nose never touches anything when I've got it on. It looks like it's a carved out plastic area though.

No Caption Provided

Thanks for that shot, it looks nearly the same. I talked to some people making the Sony Morpheus, and they also said that it doesn't touch their nose - but that's because the Morpheus has a big headband which holds it up. The DK1 of the Rift is soooo front heavy, without the overhead strap it is impossible for it not to rest on your nose, and sometimes it does with the overhead strap too anyway. Is there/do you use an overhead strap for this too?

I just don't get why they don't just stick a bloody bit of foam on it just in case! Like the stuff they have round the outside, it's not like it'd be expensive.

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Sin4profit

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Has the pink eye set in, yet?

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tourgen

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I've had the DK2 for a few days now too.

The chromatic aberration is much worse with the new lenses and software. They have to fix this. I don't think the new lens designs are good. The new lens design seem much more sensitive to eye position to get a good result. They also scratch more easily - tested on my 'B' lenses.

The horizontal FoV is lower. Besides the lens issues this is the biggest bummer.

OpenGL in direct rendering mode is kind of tricky but it's at least working on Win7 alright. They are doing some really weird and not-useful stuff inside the SDK that causes some issues in GL4 depending on how you are creating the GL context.

I think the new button-bar config tool and centralized service is a pretty good idea. However there are some real bad bugs in it right now causing hard locks and blue screen crashes in Win7. They are installing device drivers and their drivers are not ready for prime-time by a long shot.

The new positional head tracking with the camera is awesome.

75Hz, low latency screen in the DK2 is MUCH nicer with fast head rotations and movement. Provided of course the app is producing consistent 75Hz updates.

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fobwashed

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@bollard: Yea, I use the overhead strap when I wear the DK2. Maybe if you tighten it more, it'd keep pressure off your nose... Or worst case scenario, you build your own foam nose padding. If it's a widespread enough problem, I'm certain they'll fix it for the consumer version =]

@tourgen: Yea... the chromatic issues are super crazy. It seems like it's something that could be fixed on the software side though. I haven't used the first DK to know how much better or worse the current lenses are but I do notice that there's a definite sweet spot and my eyes are set in my head at measurements which make that spot incredibly slim. I did notice that putting in my pupil measurements helped...

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insane_shadowblade85

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Hm, I guess my questions are based on how comfortable it is to wear. Is it heavy and does any part of your head hurt if you wear it for long periods? (Think tight headphones for that question.)

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@fobwashed: you know, after playing with it another night I think you're right, it might be more of a software issue than hardware. The color separation is very bad in direct rendering mode but in extended mode it seems almost alright, at least at the center.

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What did you have for dinner?