There's been some recent interesting news involving Oculus and VR in general.
Facebook announced today (3/25/14) that it is planning to buy Oculus VR for $2 Billion which will be a boon for the company. The reality of VR now has some real funding behind its back to bring it to fruition for consumer use.
Several weeks ago Oculus VR announced the discontinuation of the popular prototype dev kit - the
Oculus Rift that I posted about above due to supply issues. But I think that was just simply PR deflection. A week later they announced the public release of
Oculus DK2 or "Development Kit 2". This is a far more improved version over the first one which based more on their "Crystal Cove" Prototype which they showcased at CES, GDC, and other electronic/gaming expos.
With DK2, we finally get z-space motion tracking thanks to the external IR camera and additional sensors built into the headmount unit. What this means is now we can lean forward and peak around corners in VR space which previously couldn't been done on the Rift. This adds an additional dimension of immersion, it was sort've the missing piece to trick your brain into thinking it's experiencing simulated "reality" and greatly reduces "motion sickness".
Another thing they added was a low persistence HD OLED display @ 960 x 1080. OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) is the latest tech being deployed for display and TV sets. It exceeds traditional LCD (including LED backlit) displays being far more energy efficient and more vibrant in color range with deeper black levels. An example of this technology you can find in first generation PS VITA (phat) and some of the newer HD/UHD (UltraHD) 4K displays as this technology is the running candidate to replace plasma (and eventually LCD). By using OLED, they will have eliminated the "screen door" effect and images will be much more sharper.
They're deploying something called "low persistence" in their displays. What this does is eliminate judder or frame lag (a sort've ghosting or after imaging with moving pixels - motion blur). With low persistence, the image is shut off for a short period of time during its process cycle. The image simply goes black during the switching cycle which all happens in less than a millisecond. Originally it was thought that just by having a high enough refresh rate would solve the problem of judder kind've like what you see with some modern HD TV's which produce that "motion flow" or "soap opera" video effect by interpolating frames. However, with the display being so much closer to your eyes, they conducted a study with Valve and determined that its better to deploy this technique of using low persistence instead. Your "mind" so to speak fills in the details and what results is a truly lag free display.
Interesting though, roughly around the same time as this announcement, Sony announced their VR plans for consoles with "
Project Morpheus" for the PS4.
It's basically utilizing the same principle of technology behind the Oculus without the low persistence display. Aesthetically it looks better however and gives us an idea what a consumer version will look like. Both devices however are still very much in development phase but it really isn't that long off till we see consumer versions from both sides and perhaps even others. So the future of VR - jacking into the Matrix - (Lawnmower man if you're old school) is getting closer to "real" reality.
Anyways, I'll be report back later in few months when I get the Oculus DK2 in hand to review.
