The oculus rift vr headset has been one of the most intriguing projects as time has gone on, and with E3 just passing for the company, they revealed some major news surrounding consumer production for the platform.
The Rift’s lead in active VR game development might also merely be an outgrowth of developers’ generally larger familiarity with Oculus’ headset. A full 77 percent of developers in the survey said they had tried the Oculus Rift, compared to just 46 percent for Google Cardboard, 31 percent for GearVR, 21 percent for PlayStation VR, and 19 percent for the HTC Vive. As developers become more aware of the Rift’s competition, those platforms may begin to see more developers actively working on them.
Zuckerberg was in the Menlo Park Facebook headquarters, in the office of C… Sheryl Sandberg, with his deputies, chief product officer Chris Cox and chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer. They’d picked Sandberg’s office because it had blinds, unlike the glass rectangle where Zuckerberg works. Zuckerberg’s fishbowl office makes sense for a man who has dedicated his career to helping people share aspects of their lives, but the sight of the Facebook C.E.. with a screen on his face was at that point best kept a secret.
And now here it was: the Oculus Rift, which Facebook will begin shipping to customers early next year. It isn’t the first virtual-reality (V.R.) headset to hit the market, but at around $1,500 for the device and the computer you need to run it, it will be the first that is both sophisticated and relatively inexpensive. (Oculus helped create a much cruder $200 face mask to be used with Samsung cell phones.) It’s also the first headset that doesn’t give users motion sickness.
Tull is also a proud investor in Oculus and believes that the impact of virtual reality, no matter who wins, will be much more significant than past breakthroughs such as HDTV and 3-D movies. Once you see virtual reality done well,” he says, you take off the headset and say, ‘There’s really a chance here to do something completely different.’ ” Will consumers, who just a year ago failed to embrace Google Glass, buy these new face-mounted displays? Hollywood and Silicon Valley seem to think it isn’t even a question anymore. The race is on.
The prototype he was showing me was called Toybox, the name being a nod to the slingshots and firecrackers and maybe also to the fact that virtual reality itself, despite the hype and the billions of dollars at stake, is still in a juvenile state. The goal is to have two people in different locales feel—really feel—like they’re in the same place together,” said Luckey. How does it work? A sensor is trained on each player, who wears a headset with a microphone, and two handheld controllers to sense the arm movements. All of this is transmitted as a ghostly blue avatar into the other player’s headset.
The VR Blog | Enter An Occulus Rift Giveaway 