pouët.net

This also has entertainment, have a used GCW0 I bought from ebay, but my pledged one, even 2nd day of pledge, hehe not arrived yet. Not sure and it's months.

Still, it's always sad to see [small company you care about] gobbled by [random giant despised conglomeration].

It's great to know that the people at [small company] just got rich beyond anything you could imagine, not so great to know that nice new product is going to be ground to dust by the corporate treadmill.

(Yeah, I know, they're going to give oculus complete freedom, nothing will change, intact they're now even more free to do awesome stuff. Just like the million other companies this happened to, that then went on to be wildly successful in their new freedom.. so successful they quietly shut down a few years later :)

Why do you think it'll be ground to dust? If anything, the buy made sure the thing will actually hit the shelves and might have some commercial potential instead of going the ouya way.

Also, it was like 300 million and the rest in Facebook shares. From which 150 payed now and 150 upon the delivery of certain improvements.

And I played around with a rift for a bit and the dev kit was far from consumer ready.

In this particular case, nothing, and I hope it continues as planned. If I'm a bit pessimistic it's because of the number of small companies I've seen swallowed by bigger companies, and the large percentage that got ground up.

Tbh, most of them weren't even "ground up". E.g. Quite often the company is bought for the talent of the staff (which would definitely be tempting with oculus). The new company doesn't give a shit about the product, it just wants to get those people through the doors then tempt them with a bunch of more relevant problems to work on.

Just saw this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/31/review_durovis_dive_htc_oculus_facebook/
I like the idea of this a lot :D It's cheap, for one, seems OK hardware wise too. And it works with a phone.. that has some pretty big advantages actually. The phone already contains accelerometers, gyroscope, compass. And a lot of games already include support for using them as controls. And it's all on device, there's no cables, and minimal latency.

I wonder if it needs a particular screen size to work well though?

i still wonder how healthy it is for your eyes to have a screen so close to your face ;)

luckily for you its not a crt.

Does any one of you remember a weird vga mode that did 256x256? it was very easy to do a get/put pixel using a 16bit register (al: x, ah: y that sort of thing). It looked like death (cropped) but worked!

"You'll get square eyes" , my mom used to say.

navis: wrong thread? :D

Exin: A relative of a friend has actual square eyes. He had something wrong with the pupil (it wouldn't open I think, so everything was always dark). He had some eye surgery to open it up, but the end result is a square pupil :D

maybe navis has square eyes (256x256) too!

sorry, what the hell, wrong thread!

Yes, 256x256 Oculus VR, pixels bigger than your car! :)

I went to Ocufes in Osaka and tried many Oculus programs.
http://www.ocufes.jp/2014/03/518/
http://www.ocufes.jp/2014/01/396/
It was organized by oculus developers, not by specific company.
Oculus have wide view angle and I could see difference of depth of objects in scene.
But it doesn't have enough dots. It looks like watching 256x256 screen.
(Real resolution is 640x800 per eye)
Oculus have wide view angle so it needs many dots to make good VR.
And then, real life will become obsolete.

I hope FaceBook doesn't restrict Oculus SDK only for developers who have FB account.

If HMD like oculus become popular in near future and many demo support it, will audience (still watch demos on big screen without HMD) or (use HMD and organizer broadcast videos to them) in demo compo of demo party?

Maali: I don't know how healthy it is, but there are lens between eye and screen so that objects in scene looks like far from physical display.
Your eye don't need to directly focus on physical display.

tomohiro: there's going to be a strange situation perhaps, where mobiles have 'retina' displays (pixels are too small to see, the screen looks perfectly clear) and high end PCs have ultra low res VR. (Where 1080p is still really low res - I seem to recall John Carmack saying something like 20k x 20k res was needed for convincing VR, plus a GPU capable of driving it ;)

One thing I wonder though: if somebody made a VR headset with 20k resolution and you couldn't see the pixels, what would it be like? There's still one feature missing, depth of field. You can't focus your eyes on different parts of the scene, because the pixels are a fixed distance from your eye. I'm curious about what effect that has, would it cause an uncanny valley sensation?

Btw, nvidia demonstrated an interesting thing - a VR headset with lenticular screens. That solves the depth of field problem, and makes it possible to have much smaller headsets since you don't need bulky optics. But the resolution was something like 200x120 :D

200x120 should be enough for everyone!

200x120 on a screen big enough to fill your whole field of vision would make everything minecraft.

I was quite impressed when my 10 yo. daughter wanted to talk to me about this as she had heard about it and thought that altho it was cool that the oculus team made a lot of money they had kinda ripped off the kickstarter donators.

It was a good april fools :)

Can someone explain exactly how the kickstarter backers were ripped off? Didn't people get devkits or their t-shirt or whatever the dumb reward for their free money to Oculus was?

@okkie: they weren't. For some reason people think that by backing the project and receiving hardware, t-shirts etc. they are somehow entitled to have a say on how the company will be managed. As if they are investors (which they aren't in any sense of the word really)

I never quite got this kickstarter thing. So you give them your mony and they give you back some dev hardware and a tshirt or somethin without any equity share?!?

Kickstarter was never meant for the projects it's used for these days.

The basic idea behind croudfunding is that you want to do something, some art thing maybe, and need money upfront to get it done. Then you go and ask people to throw money at it in hopes that they, too, want to see that thing done. Perks came later, turning it more into a pre-order machine than what it used to be.

So sure people threw money at oculus because they wanted the project to happen. But I think people wanted it to happen as a garage company, hobby level thing, and they're angry because oculus is no longer "their" thing, but a "facebook" thing instead.

A lot of people confuse kickstarter for being investing; it's not, at least in the typical sense.