Oculus Rift: The Story So Far (Update)

can do a whole new episode. Right that original episode published on August. If you want to, well, you don't need to go looking for it, because we're about to play it. We're about to play it, however, just to give you an idea in the timeline of where this occurred. Yes, so since August two thirteen, a lot has happened. So once we have played through that episode, stick around. We have a lot to say about what's been going on

since then. So, without further ado, here's the original episode. Today, we wanted to talk about something that, uh technology that really made a big splash in late two thousand twelves and really in two thousand thirteen, something that got a lot of people excited. I guess you could say it kicks started the virtual reality craze again in the US. Oh my goodness. The Oculus Rift. So yes, and as of June they announced that they had just raised sixteen

million in private funding. Sixteen million dollars, which isn't shabby for a company run by a twenty year old guy. Okay, let's not focus on how young this guy is. Now, that's amazing, that's that's this is a tinkerer, who is who is of the people? And uh in eighteen years younger than I am. Yeah, no, he really is. Though. He's one of those guys who worked out of his garage, messing with stuff that interested him and was able to leverage that into something that is really taking at least

one section of the gaming world by storm. So we were will be talking a lot about video games, but in this case, it's a it's a peripheral for video games. So all of you people out there who hate video game topics, this is still cool. It's virtual reality. Now, before we get into a discussion about Oculus Rift and particularly, I wanted to mention just sort of a history of virtual reality. Uh, kind of Jonathan's history of virtual reality. So this isn't in our notes or anything. This is

from my own personal, completely unofficial. He is making it up as he goes along. Dinosaurs will be involved, Okay, well actually yes, well technically it's not a dinosaur. Pterodactyl is not a dinosaur, but it's close. Um so virtual reality. For those of you who were alive in the nineties and remember this kind of stuff that it started to really kind of get buzz in the early to mid nineties. This was one of those terms that was promising to turn computing on its head. It was changing the way

we thought about computers. It was gonna be immersive. You were going to be surrounded by the computer data. You would be part of this experience. It would no longer be this separation that was created by a screen and a keyboard and a mouse. And this was partially due to science fiction. It was largely due to science fiction. Yeah, because because the actual technology at the time was not not up to part none, none, up to the expectations

that were generated as a result of both science fiction. Also, I mean, obviously Hollywood had a big deal with how this was portrayed and and it was never really realistic in the Hollywood version. Also, if you watch any of those movies that had a lot of virtual reality elements

to them, they look awful by today's standards. When you talk about the graphics quality, well, there were showcases of that early computer generated right, but it was still even though they look horrible by today's standards, they still looked amazing compared to what was capable what we were capable of doing with virtual reality at that time. Also, it was really expensive because this was all a technology that had to be built from the ground up, specifically for

the purpose of virtual reality. Now here's a hard, cold fact about technology. If you're designing something that is brand new, as in no one has built this kind of stuff before, there's a huge amount of money that goes into that to to build them development enormous amount of money, and virtual reality did not you know, it generated a lot of buzz, which was good in the early days, but then the reaction to what was actually possible was such that a lot of that interest and a lot of

the support drained away very very quickly. So you're left with these people who were doing valuable work in the field of virtual reality. But because there was this bubble that burst early on in the development of the technology itself and the industry, they were left with very little

to work with once that bubble went away. So also, I feel like at the time, people we were focused on the entertainment issues of it and weren't really thinking forward to UMU, to the possible medical purposing and and therapy purposing. At least anyone outside the actual industry was

not seeing those that. You know, there were people who were working in the industry who's actually saw some really cool applications, some of which we have actually seen happen over the course of the several years that have in between when virtual reality was a buzzword and today. But people who were looking at it from the outside, the general consumer, they were looking at it as video games or sometimes you know, I think it got pigeonholed, is

all I'm saying. Yeah, there were there was a smaller, smaller segment who were thinking virtual sex and uh, but I mean those were like the those were like the two applications. It was either you were playing a game or you were having some sort of weird virtual romantic internal Yeah. Yeah, that that's scene in Demolition Man happened. Yeah, that was a thing. Yeah, yes, it was a thing. Uh if you if you haven't seen that, I don't necessarily recommend it for for a snipe Sander Bullock picture.

You know it's it's it's fun. It's a fun film. I'm not anyway. So anyway, getting getting back into virtual reality so to speak. Uh So, as time went on, the virtual reality community began to really like the people who are really working on trying to develop things like sophisticated head tracking technology, sophisticated display technology, and input various

user interfaces. Uh. What they began to do was they began to appropriate stuff from other industries, mostly the video game industry, because video games were progressing and they were starting to introduce new types of controllers. So, for example, when the Nintendo WE launched and they had the WE control with the multiple access gyroscopes in it that allowed for very specific kinds of interaction with the console, the video or the virtual environment. By now it's called virtual

environment's not virtual reality. Because virtual reality had sort of a stigma attached to it. The virtual environment. People were thinking, why don't we take that, like literally, We'll go out and buy a Nintendo WE and take apart the controller and use the technology in the controller to help develop our stuff because it's less expensive than developing one on our own or buying one of these very specific types

of parts that are only made for virtual reality. So that kind of sets the scene for what happens with the Oculus Rift. So let's go and first we'll just talk about what the Oculus Rift is. It is a headset that has two screens in the headset, one screen for each eye. The two screens both render a very

similar image from a from a game. Yeah, on casual glance, you would think that it's the same picture, but they're from very very slightly different angles, just like your eyes are to right right to to give the illusion of depth when your brain puts the two inches together. Yeah, and we'll talk more about what's actually going on there a little bit later in the podcast. So it's this

headset and it has motion tracking. Uh so essentially your head's motions are interpreted by by hardware in this headset sent to a computer that is taking that as input and then processing it within a game engine of some sort and sending back the response so that the images you see are based upon the movements you're making. Right. I mean that's basic head tracking technology. But it was, and it's this is this is what's interesting to me.

This is not new, Like I said this, this started way back in the nine needs, but a lot of the software side was very primitive, and so the pictures you would get would be very very basic. Like when I said that whole pterodactyl thing. One of the early games was your this blocky figure moving around a blocky landscape being chased by a blocky pterodactyl and you had to just kind of run around and try and shoot other people using a blocky gun that fired get ready

for it. Blocks. Uh, it was not it was not that immersive. I mean, it was interesting that your head could move, you know you it did track your motions, but it wasn't immersive in the sense that you felt anything was realistic. And there was a latency issue. And we'll talk about latency later. To latency is like the death sentence for virtual reality systems. So, uh, it wasn't a new idea, but this was a new way of of approaching it, and it was all made possible by

other industries. It wasn't the fact that the virtual reality industry had advanced to a huge degree. It was because of things like smartphones and tablets. So let's talk about um, kind of one of the most famous failures in virtual reality first, because because this is one that uh the founder of Oculus Palmer Lucky has mentioned before, which is also from Nintendo. Yeah, the Virtual Boy. Back in nine. This was one that the little headset would display red

vector graphics. I think maybe not the first, but one of the first games to feature Warrio was on the Virtual Boy. Uh, so he was able to survive Virtual Boy, even if the product itself did not survive very long. Time magazine gave it a review that was not positive. They actually said that, uh, that it was migrain inducing and uh and so there was a lot of bad press about the Virtual Boy and it didn't sell terribly well.

It was one of the tech's biggest flops. I remember it being a blip on on on my radar and then almost immediately disappearing right up there with the Nintendo Power Glove. Oh yeah, if you had the Power Glove and a Virtual Boy, you are a huge Nintendo fan. You look like a cyborg, but you're probably throwing up a lot and you maybe had two games to play. Yeah, that's also true, so Palmer Lucky. He looks back on this history of virtual reality and he is absolutely fascinated

by it and wants to get involved in it. But let's learn a little bit more about who he is. First, Like you said, Lauren, he's twenty years old right as of right this very moment. Um He's uh, he's he's from Irvine, California. Um, he self identifies as a hacker maker both both at the same time. Probably. Um. He was homeschooled. His dad's a car salesman, I believe. Okay, he went to as you know, he for school for

for college. He was actually studying journalism. He in fact said that one of the things he wanted to do. He was always interested in taking things apart and learning how they worked and then trying to put them back together. And you know, he had kind of typical smart kids success rate at things still working when they were put

back together after he had taken him apart. But he um, he said that he wanted to go to journalism school to learn to become a writer so that he could tell people he could write articles, like really good articles to explain how stuff works. He wanted my job, Palmer Lucky wanted my job. Well, I'm really glad that he took his own job instead of ours. Yeah, because we'd be all of a job and neither of us would

have invented the oculus rift fact. Yeah, because he his plan b ended up ended up being a lot more successful. Being pretty okay, Um, but yeah, he was. He was. He was into some some interesting pursuits as a child. Yeah, originally it was all about blowing stuff up, shocking stuff or setting it on fire, like like like Tesla coil guns. I read about some way coil guns. He built coil

guns as a kid. He actually said at one in one interviews, it's a miracle I am still alive because he was building stuff like anything that would involve destruction through electronics was really fascinating to him. Typical kids can't can't blame him, you know, like probably like some little

I don't want to be an armchair psychologist. But in general I notice that kids and I do not I don't separate myself from here, have occasionally power fantasies because so much of their life is Hell's determined by other people exactly, So this is sort of a self determination, self empowerment kind of things. Some of us focus on dinosaurs because dinosaurs are bigger than our parents and therefore

are more powerful. Some of us focus on tesla coil guns that can melt our parents faces off if we ever had that desire, which, by the way, he did not. Let's be clear, he was not. He was not planning on on zapping people. He just wanted to build stuff anyway, well as far as we know, but he did. He did wind up doing something constructive as well. He uh, he started up an iPhone repair business, didn't he. Yeah, he sure did. As a teenager, he began to eat

when the iPhone came out, he was fascinated with that. Immediately, he took one apart and learned really what made it work. And so he because of his his practical knowledge of electronics that was, you know, largely self taught, he ended up having a successful iPhone repair business. He also would jail break people's iPhones, so if they wanted to have an iPhone that could run other types of stuff on it that rather than just what Apple would allow you

to run a boot with whatever. Yeah, he would actually do that for a fee, and apparently it was pretty successful. So so successful that he might have made around thirty six thousand dollars in a single year, which you know, as a teenager is a pretty good many humans. It's a pretty good salary for for for something like this is this is his version of a lemonade stand. That's a pretty successful lemonade stand. Yes, as of two thousand nine, when he was sixteen, I believe that was when he

began looking into purchasing virtual reality equipment. That's when he kind of had had had been online and had seen some stuff and was getting interested in the subject, right and and that was also he's done interviews where he's talked about how the industry changed dramatically, Like back in the early days. Besides things like Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which

were really the exception, those were the few. There were only a few things that were ever consumer based technologies that the average person was would be expected to purchase right right, even today a few years later, the very low end virtual reality equipment runs around a thousand bucks of pop I think um and and a lot of it um. A lot of the more professional gear was

running up near a hundred thousand bucks. In fact, one of the things he found he found a piece of virtual reality equipment that was pretty rare at the time it was first produced cost ninety seven thousand dollars. He bought it for eighty seven bucks because, again, the VR industry just kind of out. Yeah, so he was really interested to seeing, you know, in seeing how these things worked, how did they track head head motion, how did they

feed video in? And a lot of these early early VR equipment pieces are enormous, right, They require things like some kind of rig exactly, they require a rig so that their support because if you were to just wear it yourself, it would be so heavy as to be uncomfortable. Some of them would be too heavy for you to

even effectively move your head. So a lot of them would have these rigs that would allow you to have suspension from from like uh uh, not the ceiling, but it would the rig itself would extend beyond where you would stand, and there'd be chords that would help support the weight of the helmet, so you wouldn't have full three sixty degree motion either. If you were to try and turn all the way around, eventually those those cords are start to wrap up, yeah, and you'd have to

turn back the other way. So he was interested in purchasing as many of these as possible to learn what made him tick. Yeah, he he was thinking about creating more immersive game interfaces and uh and and experiences and but but none of this stuff was really what he was looking for. He was he was kind of hoping to to salvage something together for himself, honestly, and um, and none of it was working, right, So, but he

learned a lot during this period, Yeah, and um. And as of twenty eleven, he was working at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, which I believe is in military associated facility from a lot of the stuff they did was for the military Specifically, he was working in the Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Program UM, sometimes called virtual IRAQ, which helps veterans who have PTSD use VR therapy to to get over their post traumatic stress disorder. Yeah.

In fact, this is one of the most fascinating uses for virtual reality. And I've I've actually talked to there was Um, there are people over at Emery, and there are people over at Duke who run labs that use this kind of approach, and I've talked about it for use with PTSD have also talked about it for use with things like phobias, and the idea is it's this immersion therapy where you immerse a person into certain situations that might trigger anxiety or stress, but they are they

know that they are in a safe environment. They know ultimately deep down that they are perfectly safe, that they are not really in that. But it's immersive enough for people who have a severe fear of flying. I've heard that it's extremely successful, something something along the lines of you could do a virtual visit to an airport. And the interesting thing here is that the scientists have discovered that the graphics do not have to be photo realistic

at all. They don't have to be you know, to the point where you would look at something and think that's identifiable as Dullest International Airport, for example. You look at and just say, there's a building and there's the representation of a plane next to it, that's the airport.

And once you get into the immersive environment, which usually takes around half a minute to a minute long for you to really get acclimated, assuming that everything is working properly on the technical end, then you start to have the actual physical reactions you would if you were in the real situation. So, for example, one about a fear of heights. I remember specifically reading about this, actually talking about this to some of the people at Duke and

Emory Um. You might have a simulation where you're on the top of a tall building. The building does not necessarily look like a real building. I mean, it might look like almost a cartoonish example, but the person would start to have that same physiological response as if they were in the real situation. And it was part of this this uh, this therapy to expose oneself to these situations in a safe environment to get acclimated. It's the

psychological principle of facing your fears. Essentially. There's there's a lot more technical terminology I won't go and there's a lot of a lot of other elements to this therapy. Obviously that you don't want it to just be cruel and be like, hey, I heard you're scared of spiders. Here's a big harry spider. That's not that's not therapy. That's cruelty. It's it's extremely guided therapy and and there are many parts of it and uh, but but but

it's excellent, really interesting work. Yeah, and so Lucky was working on this. He was, this was part of the stuff that that he was involved in. And he he will be the first to tell you, by the way,

he's a hardware guy, he's not a software guy. And in fact, there's some great interviews that he's done with other members of the software community, of the video game community where he says the success of the Oculus Rift, the early success that has had before, it's not even a consumer product yet as of the recording of this podcast. It's there's developer kits that are out and that's about it. Yeah, you cannot you cannot as a consumer by this and

expect to use it. With a ton of games there right now, there are two games that are really I think I think three as as of this podcast. Okay, so the third one has has recently joined in the past week. But it's not like you can't plug it into your console either. This is PC only right now, with the hope that maybe one day it'll it'll be available for multiple platforms any rate. He he actually says, uh, you know, point blank. He says, the success of this

would not exist without the software side. But that's not my world. I can't program I can build this hardware. So uh he he really was using that expertise while working over at the Southern California's Institute for Creative Technology, right, and he threw I think that he was a member of a couple of forums, the names of which I am completely forgetting. So somebody right in and tell me correct my complete lack of a word to give you,

Mr Lucky. First of all, I object to have to call you Mr. You're eighteen years younger than I am. But if you're listening, just to just right in and tell us what they were. Um. And he developed this plan um too. You know, he really wanted to to build a kind of kind of a personal hobbyist kit of VR headsets and do it yourself. Yeah. Yeah, So so he planned a Kickstarter to just create a hundred

enthusiast kits. Um you know that that you know, contributors would would get the pieces of a virtual reality headset and put it together themselves and be able to play around with it. And um. But but this got the attention of John Carmack. Yeah. And if you don't know that name, then you haven't been playing a lot of ID Softwares games. Yes, he's the co founder of ID Software. He was the lead programmer on like Wolfenstein three D and games Okay it was a series and was just

the first one. Wasn't a very good quake player. So like, once multiplayer got into introduced and I realized that, hey, people react very differently than computer controlled bad guys, my my kill death ratio was out the window. Oh I'm not. What I'm saying is I'm not good at these games, and what and what and furthermore, that you don't like games that you can't be better than other people at. Oh I hate that. That's just in general. By the way, if you ever have the opportunity to play a game

with me, just turn it down. Just and I'm including like board games, card games, maybe a role playing game that did I mean, if you're playing clue, do you just flip the table at some point? Actually I'm very good at Clue. I am really good at Clue. But so he got the attention of John Krmack, um and uh and and and and Karmack was kind of like, hey, so this is pretty cool. Can I buy one of these kids from you? And and Lucky was like, I

can give you one of those, no problem. Um so so Lucky said him a prototype, and Karmac just ran with it. He demoed it um with a Doom three b f g at E three right, and that that made everybody think, Wow, I have never experienced doom like this. This is a really immersive first person shooter experience. The VR is working. Uh, it is exciting. Where can I get one of these? Right? It exploded and I mean

everyone was excited about it. Yeah. So uh, you know, getting back to this idea of the developer kit one units, what that reminds me of is Wozniak in jobs, because the very first Apple computer was essentially the same sort of thing, like we'll send you the parts, you build a case, and you've got yourself a computer. That was the Apple one. So that's exactly what Palm are Lucky was. He that was kind of like that was He was like, this is gonna be like a little side hobby for me.

I'm going to do this. And at this point where the press gets a chance to see it and Karmack he sees the potential for this well beyond a hobbyist you know, tiny tiny project. He sees this has potential to be a legitimate video game peripheral and this was a goofy prototype. I mean there, you know it's I'm I'm pretty sure that he was like duct taping straps to it so that people could demo it at E three. So right, this was a little jankie. I like to say, yes,

that is the technical professional term. So what was Lucky's reaction to this sudden increase and interest and the possibility of actually having a feasible company as a result. Um, basically he dropped out of the journalism program at Cali State University. Not a surprise. That's following in the footsteps of so many giants in the technology industry. By the way, staying school kids, not all of us can be Palmer Lucky,

right right. If you are Palmer Lucky, go ahead. But I mean, if you have a genuinely terrific idea that has gotten someone of the ilk of John Carmack interested in you, that by all means with life's responsibilities like I am. But but so from from this response at E three, um, you know a lot of people in the industry started getting into it, and um, and as soon as they did, he started Lucky started taking prototypes

to other folks like like the people at Valve. Yeah, Gabe Newell example, and uh and and got people like Gabe Newell to participate in this new Kickstarter project that he was putting together for what we know as the Oculus Rift today. Yeah, so this is really the founding of Oculus as a company. So Oculus is the company that is creating the Oculus Rift. And in fact, you can think of the Oculus Rift as being their first product and um and so now the plan had changed.

It was no longer going to be let's offer up one hundred dev kits that this one guy is personally putting all the pieces together, putting them in a box and shipping them off to the hundred or so people that have backed it. Now it's let's put together a plan to create a more um slightly not a consumer level product, because it's still like if you take a look at one of the Oculus Rifts headsets, it does not look like like a finished product. Yeah it doesn't.

It's not sleek and sexy. It's exciting to use, but when you look at your like, wow, it looks like a black box that you strapped to your face. It is because it is, Yeah, that's what it is it's not it's not something that you would think, oh, this is something that you could easily market beyond this niche audience. Right. The Kickstart fund was for development kits, right. So the goal of that Kickstart fund was about two was exactly

two D fifty thousand dollars, two hundred fifty dollars. So, Lauren, tell me did they make it? They made it times ten, approximately twenty four hours they had already made the god and then went went on to raise precisely two million, four D seven thousand, four hundred dollars. Yeah, it was a lot of money they brought in and that yeah, so's it makes it one of kickstars big success stories, right right up there with some of the I mean clearly not on the level of say the pebble, but

it's it's way up there. It's it's on the it's on the Holy Cow, look at what's possible into the spectrum as opposed to the ah. So that's what really happens when you yes, yeah, they they wind up having UM nine thousand two backers, over seven thousand of those

where development kit purchases. Right, So it was only at certain levels or above that you would actually get a developer receive a k R. Yeah, the first one hundred people to pledge at the two level to understan five dollar level would receive a developer kit at at a discount because the developer kits in general go at three pop. Right, that's how much they are currently selling for on on

their side. If you go to oculacy, you can, by the way, if you want to, you can buy one of these anyone, but you don't have to have some kind of paperwork. You don't need to know that the password is sword fish. You know, you don't need to know what do you still recommend receiving a Rabies shot? Yeah, yeah, I'm kidding. No, No, Rabies is associated with oculus raft that I'm personally where so far when we get that to the eight Days Later video game, you know they'll

be rage. But at any rate, Yeah, get some stuff they don't want you to know in here, uh plug Yeah, the three So you can actually buy one of these yourself. But if you do that, you do that knowing that your your actual use of it's going to be pretty limited if you're not a developer. If you are a developer and you want to practice, you know, try and

create stuff that works with the Oculus Rift. Clearly, that's an investment that would make sense for you if you're an average gamer, unless you are intending to play one of the three titles that is currently compatible with the Oculus Rift, it doesn't make sense because it's not, like we said, it's not at consumer product level yet. This is this is on the way to becoming a consumer product. Yeah, so after after one d people could back at the

two level, that was it. It was sort of an early bird special and if you weren't part of that, then you had to go at three hundred dollars or higher to get at least one headset. At the higher levels you could actually get more than one headset at a discount. So the solution here to to creating a viable product is the partnership with developers, the partnership with game companies, because this is kind of like a specialized video display that only works with stuff that's been built

to work with it. So it's not again, it's not like you can just plug it in and run any kind of software and then you are in the middle of it. It has to be optimized for it. And we'll talk more about why when we get into how it's actually working. But always important to remind people because it is an exciting thing. But I don't want everyone running out and dropping three dollars and then being disappointed that they can't play you know, Super Mario and be

running through and knocking the blocks. Although that would be awesome, That would be awesome. Uh So moving on, Uh, the Kickstarter campaign was a success. We could say that, I think that's safe to say, it's safe to call it that, and he Lucky would continue to show this off at

various conferences and conventions. I first heard about this when they showed it off at C E S. I might have heard about it once or twice beforehand, but I I knew that it was present at the showroom floor at C Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to play with it. Then. I didn't get a chance to play with it until three played the heck out of it. Right. Yeah that that that kick started campaign had run from

August to September. So yeah, so so moving up to when um, they were they were just going like, we have all the money, and we have all the support and and let us let us and then they got then they ended up getting that the additional private support, as well as more orders that came in after the Kickstarter was complete. Um atteen they beat out both the PS four and the Xbox One for the Best Hardware

Peripheral Game Critics Award. Not surprising, it's it's got a lot of potential, and beyond just the virtual reality realm, there are a lot of people who are interested in in appropriating some of the same sort of technologies that Lucky used to create augmented reality headsets. So this would be more like the what we hear about the potential for Google Glass or other various glasses that are supposed

to incorporate augmented reality. At some point they're talking about using something along the same lines as the technology used for the Oculus Rift. Not clearly the way the Oculus Rift is created with these these screens, the solid screens in front of your face, that's not ideal for augmented reality glasses. If you're gonna be moving around in the real world, because you're not gonna see you're gonna see a video representation of the real world directly in front

of you. I think most people would imagine that the augmented reality version would include clear display that you could see stuff printed on I could I could see a very similar set of technologies going towards that kind of display. Um. But but but we'll get into the factual technic stuff. And just so some other interesting developments happened that one of them absolutely tragic. That happened just before E three

June one. Yeah, that's when Andrew Rice, who was one of the graphics engineers, one of the original team members at Oculus, was involved in a car accident. He was it was actually the car was fleeing a police chase when it collided with him, and uh and he passed away as a result of that accident. And I mean that was obviously this was a very tight small development team, right It's it's still, um I believe under thirty people. Yeah,

that's that's that's tiny. Or when you're talking about something that has it's raising sixteen million dollars and has this kind of reach, right exactly. So that obviously that was felt deeply within their their own company and across the community. And this was the other thing about Oculus, was that,

uh and and something they continued to do. They update regularly, They blog about the development process, they blog about the people involved, So there were backers who felt, you know, personal connection, So that was that was a very tragic moment um. They also on August seven, so not too long before we record this podcast. We're recording this in

on August fifteen. Um. And uh, but on August seven, John Carmack stopped becoming just an evangelist for the company and started to work for the company as the chief technology officer in fact, yep ct O. And uh he also is uh still continuing his work with other companies as well. It's not like he's quit everything just to work exclusively for Oculus, but now he is on the company payroll. And yeah, as of July, they had seventeen thousand developer kits out, so they were actually delivering upon

the backing. That's thing else I should point out. Because their Kickstarter Kickster has a little bit of a I don't know if if you could say that Kickster has a tarnished reputation, but certain the idea of having a Kickstarter campaign has a little bit of a tarnished reputation only because there have been cases, particularly when it comes to something like promising a particular type of technology, where the delivery has either been delayed or even canceled, and

it has caused, uh, people to kind of have a negative reaction to Kickstarter in general. So this is actually a positive story in the sense that here's a company that held the Kickstarter campaign unless than a year later according to their website, like yesterday. If if you buy a dev kit right now, it'll be shipping sometime in September.

That's a pretty quick turnaround considering that this is still I'm sure this is still one of those things that doesn't have a truly seamless manufacturing process yet because it's still in the developers um and and they are set to open a Dallas office very soon. Ye possibly right now. Go check you're in Dallas. Let's know if it's open yet. Yes. So now let's talk about how this crazy thing works.

We mentioned a little bit about it already. Yeah. The way that you see in three D vision with your eyeballs is that is that you know they're they're slightly offset. They are not in the exact same place on your face. Because we can't be a cyclops. You could be if you really tried, yeah, or film the misfortune befel you. Yes, Uh, this this does happen to to to some people. There there are many medical conditions in which you only have the use of one eye, and and that is where

you do not get stereoscopic stereo. You know, in can duel yes, um and uh and yes so so so combining two images that are very slightly offset, your brain goes, I can, I can see this in three dimensions. Right, So instead of us both getting two sets of images, that remain two sets of images in our brains, which would be kind of an interesting experience, I'm sure, but

also maybe disorienting. Uh. This this two sets of data get combined into one set, and that's what we think of as the world around us as far as vision is concerned. So this helps us judge things like how close or far away an object is. There are other things that helped to like like just just comparing the size of something, Like I know that that Josh Clark

is taller than Lauren. So if I look and I see that Lauren appears to be taller than Josh, I know that Josh is approximately a mile away and Lauren's probably in front of me. Uh, that's just la that's a science fact. Actually, you make old jokes. I make short jokes, uh um and and and this is also how how a lot of special effects end up working by by tricking your brain into into thinking of the

force perspective perspective. So Lord of the Rings in the Hobbit, obviously those are ones that you would think about where where because because the video itself is being shown to you on a two dimensional well until we get to the three D movies, and on a two dimensional surface, you can trick people by having this forced perspective thing. But in in an actual world situation, because you've got these converging lines of sight on objects, you can use

what is called parallax. That's the idea of these two lines that eventually do converge onto something that give you an idea. Yeah, and and that's your focal point that gives you an idea of how how close or far away something is. The further away an object gets, the more parallel these two lines become, so that it becomes less of a useful um tool for things that are

really far away. So if you're talking about two buildings that are way off in the distance, you might not be able to tell which one is larger just based on that alone. Without you know, previous knowledge of building A is twice the size of building B. But if it's closer to you, parallax comes into play. So that's

the idea, right. Each screen gives a slightly different view of whatever it is you're looking at in the realm of the virtual environment, which in this case are games and uh and that way, it gives you the illusion that it's that you are right there and that the world you are in actually has depth. Now, there's no eye tracking software here, but there is head tracking hardware, right, So it's not it's not keeping track of where your eye motions are so you can look around. It's not

like if you're wearing just goggles. The goggles themselves aren't tracking your eyes, but they will move as you know, if you as you move the direction of your face, same sort of thing. So it's using sensors to detect that kind of motion, whether it's pitch, roll yaw, tilt, all that kind of stuff. It's detecting all of that as as input for changing the way the display appears in front of you. This display being an LCD screen in a plastic mask, it's it's about an inch away

from the user's eyes. And um and right that that that screen is is divided by a small berry. It's a pretty big screen. I think it's like a like a hundred and ten degrees diagonally. We'll get into that in a second. But it uses a few other tricks to create realism as well, Like it warps slightly the edges of the images and corrects that in the goggles

a little bit. So, uh, you know, the digital rendering I'm saying is is warped a little bit at the edges, and then the goggles correct for it, which is basically how how your eyeballs work because they're curved, right. The idea here being that you don't want it to just look like you are, yeah, that you're looking at a flat world that has depth behind it, but there's nothing

around you. It also packs the pixels more tightly directly in front of your eyeball than around the edges, which, again, because our eyeballs are curved, um, it gives a human

like round nous to an image. It also helps you know, it keeps keeps you motivated to focus directly straight ahead with your eyes as opposed to keeping your head still and moving your eyes around because it's it's kind of mimicking that sense of when I look ahead that whatever clear whenever I'm looking at his folk is in focus, and then everything else is kind of in peripheral vision, petering out a little bit. Sure, Um, there there are

a few limitations that are currently being addressed. There's a certain screen door effect which in which right now users have been finding that they can see through the pixels of the LCD screen because they're not there's not enough of them. They need more needs higher resolution, yes, um and uh and I think that they're trying to add

gays tracking, which would be really interesting. That would allow you to actually uh dynamically change these elements we talked about where you've got those pixels that are uh in the that are concentrated right in front of the eyes. If you could be able to move that dynamically so that the you would have this effect where if I'm I'm walking and I'm not turning my head, but I dart my eyes to the left and it is able

to move in real time with that. Uh. And we'll talk a little bit about prediction software in a bit that kind of helps with that. Then that could make it even more immersive and more and feel closer to being natural in fact. And again, while it's hard to say that being in a virtual environment is ever kind of a natural thing, after that initial adjustment, you do start to feel, you start to move within that virtual environment.

You don't really necessarily think about your real world surroundings as much unless you know something changes that that diverts your attention. Say that you have a anxious Jack Russell terrier who jumps on your lap. That might you know, unless that also has happened at the exact same time in the video game that could pull your attention away, right, Or let's say that you bang your knee into a table because you were walking forward as your character in

the game Forward. And by the way, there are people who are working on various setups that are not meant for consumer use either, but they were interested in combining the oculus rift with other things so that you would have even more immersive control in various games like the was the group that did the virtual paper Boy, where they had it hooked up to a resistance bike training bike where they by peddling the bike, they would propel

the video game character forward. They had a first person perspective as if they were playing paper Boy, but from the paper boys point of view, and then they had a connect sensor protecting their arm motions to be when you fling of newspaper. So what they did was they hooked up the Oculus Rift to a an exercise bike, resistance training bike, and by peddling the resistance training bike,

they propelled the virtual character forward. And then they had a connect censor that would detect arm motions so that when you throw the papers, yeah, that would be the control, that would be the indicator for the game to throw the papers. And you're seeing it all from the paper boys perspective as opposed to that side view that you had in the original Arcade game. So that's just one example.

There are other people who have kind of developed the multidirectional treadmills so that you could walk on the treadmill and this would propel you forward within a virtual environment. So there's a lot of already, you know, a lot of talk already about incorporating the Oculus Rift into other types of setups of this nature. Now, granted, that goes

beyond what the average video game player would experience. Sure, so we don't recommend you get up on your feet and walk around while you're wearing one of these things, because you're not going to see your actual environment, you're seeing a virtual environment. I I've heard a few, a few, um, you know, not sob stories, but but just stories of of of like caution, you can totally knock over wine

glasses while you are flailing about with this thing. Kind of similar to the to the warnings you would hear from the original WE Remote. People were flinging them into their television sets and you would see a picture of a WE remote emerged from an old TV set and you think mistake, Yeah, wrist strap. So um. But interestingly enough, you can still use the oculus rift even if you have poor or no vision in one eye. M yeah, the screen will still work. Sure, Sure you won't again,

you won't get the stereoscopic three to national effect. Um. But Richard Eisenbey's writing for Kotaku recently described what it's like playing with a single eye because he had a bad laser surgery experience. But um, yeah, the doctor's expectaful recovery. Um. But he said that the three D effect was slightly flattened and that his depth perception was off, like you do when you only have one eye work, um, and that motion blair was increased, but that it was still

very immersive and actually didn't cause any queasiness. Right. And one of the big causes of queasiness is this idea of latency which I mentioned earlier. Latency if if you know, the name kind of gives it away. What latency is is it's a delay between when you take an action and when that action is displayed to you. Now, in the case of head tracking software, that would mean that if I turned my head to the right, the display

would reflect that turn on the screen. But if there's a delay between when I turned my head and when it happens on the screen, my brain thinks, woe, something is mess up you. Right, Because it's it's actually better than instantaneous when you're seeing it in in real life because your your your your brain is filling in information that it doesn't already have yet. Um, it's there's some

predictive stuff going on in your brain already. It's and it's handling a lot of input from a lot of different sources, everything from your inner ear to what's coming into your eyes to what you're you're sensing like by touch. So All of these things go into telling your brain what is going on around you, and when those things don't match up, your brain is like, something's not good. Let's trigger the stomach to empty all of its contents as rapidly as possible, or at least that seems to

be the case. It seems like a bad reflex. But but if you've ever been, say on a boat, and you have that sensation of you know, the ground you are on is moving, but because you're moving with the ground, your vision isn't reflecting that, right, You're not, Especially if you're on the inside of a boat and you can't see the outside at all. Your brain is just saying, this is weird because everything it looks still from micro expected. But I'm feeling like you're moving all over the place.

Let's turn on the vacate the stomach flip switch and see maybe that will make it better, right, somehow that will fix things. I don't understand the physiological part of this, but this is what seems to happen. So that one while we're plugging out shows Yeah, stuff to blow your mind. Listen to it. It's awesome. But yeah, the this idea

of the mismatched data that comes into you. It often ends up making you feel a dizzy, nauseous, you know there's or nauseated I should say, I mean you might be nauseous as well, but nauseated, um, then you you you know it's it's unpleasant. And so latency is a big, big contributor to that. So getting latency down where there is as little delay as possible is a goal. Now. Oculus says that they developed a reduced latency technology that got it down to two milliseconds to send the information

from the headset to the software. Now that's a one way trip there. Remember there's a round trip that we have to take into account here. It's not just the trip to the software. The software has to crunch the numbers from whatever data it's receiving and send back the appropriate response to the screen. So it takes longer than two milliseconds for all that to happen. Oh and humans can detect the latency of around fifty milliseconds, maybe even

fewer than fifty milliseconds. That's no time at all. I mean we're talking a fraction of a second. Now. According to Steve Lavelle, using the rift and playing a game at sixty frames per second. Latency is right around thirty to fifty milliseconds, so just right below or at that threshold. So um, that includes the time it takes with the sensors to pick up the motion, send that motion out the port, go into the game engine as a command, and then yeah, so I mean that's that's the full trip,

that's the whole round trip. And if it's able to do that reliably at that speed, that's good. And we you know, I expect that that's some thing that they're going to work on improving to make sure that there is as little latency issue there as possible, especially as video games start to push that limit of sixty frame sixty frames per second. Uh, if they are pushing to make it even more frames per second, then clearly you have to worry about that latency issue because that's more

data that's going through these ports. Like we said, the sensors, the motion sensors detect yaw, pitch, and roll, and they use what is called sensor fusion, which is not a type of cuisine as I first thought, but it's actually a technique to combine all the data that's gathered from these various sensors into virtual virtual actions within the context of the environment you're in, the game you are in UM and then Steve Level also wrote an incredible blog

post that is really really technical if you are interested on the software side of this and about how to reduce latency to to the minimum levels. I highly recommend it because it's it's fascinating, but it's way too technical for us to go into here. But this is where he was talking about predictive techniques. So prediction is exactly

what it sounds like. The game engine starts to predict what you are going to do based upon what you are doing right now, oh wow, and and so so it starts to render out what you're going to need to see next before you actually need it. And and the goal of this is not to give you a vision of the future, but rather to remove that latency,

to make it as small as possible. So if the predictive techniques are good, then it means that you have a very smooth experience, very little motion blur, no latency. If it's bad, it means that like if you suddenly turn left, but it starts to go right because it thought you were going to go right, then that's going to just exacerbate the problem, so predictive technology has to be really sophisticated for it to do more good than harm.

His blog post goes into great detail about how they are using this to try and create a really immersive, comfortable experience with the Oculus rift, and like I said, it's really really great. The Oculus blogs in general fantastic read, but they are very technical, so read at your own risk. So let's talk about what the actual hardware has. So the according to what's in the developer kit right now, keeping in mind the consumer version is going to be

different from what is out there right now. It will very likely change indeed. Uh so, um yeah, so so we've got we've got six degrees of freedom that that yeah, um for for the head tracking. Um that hundred degree diagonal screen that we were talking about, which is um nine degrees horizontal, ninety degrees horizontal field of view. So you know those the screens are are Physically they're small, but because of their proximity to your eyeballs, they look

pretty big. It builds your vision. Um. It's a d v I video input Digital visual interface ACE input. So this was that that INUT interface, by the way, was originally developed by the Display Working Group. Uh. That's the kind of interface that allows you to hook up a display to a computer. So a lot of computer monitors and displays have this. However, it does have HDMI adaptation. Yeah, you can get an HDMI adapter to convert from d v I to h d M I, but you do

need to have that adapter. Does not have natively does not have an HDMI port to hook up, but you can. That's one thing I expect the consumer version would have, just because of the drive to move to h d M I, especially since a lot of video game consoles have that kind of thing. I expect that we will see h d m I native support in whatever the consumer version is. They haven't announced that, so don't take

that as you know gospel. That's just that's just my prediction. Um. Yeah, so you need to have either HDMI or d v I video out on your computer or in order to run this. Yeah, if you were like, but my computer only has FireWire, it is for PC only right now, Um that they are again hoping to roll it out to UM consoles and mobile platforms. They're also talking there there's buzz anyway that they're talking about expanding it to watching movies, serving the web, doing programming. Yeah, which in

the matrix, Yeah right, lawnmower man. Uh yeah, we just shows our own frames of reference for virtual environments, doesn't it. You say, matrix, I say a lawmore man like, um so, yeah, yeah, I wonder about watching movies because again, at that point, you're not really even talking about head tracking, right, There's no purpose for head tracking if you're watching a film, because the film is captured from a single point of view. I mean, unless you're presenting only part of a movie screen,

which I can't imagine being a satisfying experience. You're really just looking at something really close to your face. Unless you eventually get to a point where you are able to create a well, especially if if it's a three D animated movie, then this would be much easier to do. You could you could create a movie where you would be able to change your perspective as opposed to relying

upon the camera to define what the perspective is. Sure, just even even I think you know, if you've got one of the digital three D stereoscopic films that you just I mean, even without being able to move your head around, it would be Yeah, I can see that. Where you're talking about maybe watching movies that were designed to be in three D in the first place, maybe this would give a superior three D experience. I can

see that. And also it reduces eyestrain from looking at a three D screen because the the way that the way that these goggles work is, um, you're you're actually focusing on your You're relaxing your eyes to a to a distant point. You're looking. You're you're kind of looking through the screen, which is the default for your eyes looking.

It's it's any any kind of eye strain that you get, you would think, you know, it's an inchway from your eye that's going to lead to terrible eyestrain, but but actually looking at your computer screen foot away from you causes a lot more eyes strain than these The idea being that this is like looking through a window as opposed to Yeah, but any it's kind of interesting. Um

so the screen, Yeah, it's um currently eight hundred. But that's that's if you combine the two screens, right right, Uh, yeah, it's what what what's at six forty? Yeah? Yeah, the up six forty by hunder Prye, which is that's close to the resolution of seven, which is twelve eighty by

seven twenty. But but again, this is a thing that could change for for consumers, right, And also, I mean, you know, obviously higher resolution means better pictures in general, but there's also something you need to consider that the closer you get to a screen, the less resolution matters. Right, So unless your screen is getting larger and larger and larger.

So let's say you've got you stay with a Let's say that's your tvOS forty in Right, Depending upon how close you sit to that television, seven and ten ADP might not be that distinguishable. Now if you sit if you sit further closer and closer to it, then you're gonna notice. If you sit further away, you're those differences

fade away into nothing. So if you could have a seven twenty P and a ten ADP set side by side, but if you're fifteen feet back, they look the same, assuming they've both been calibrated for that room and etcetera, etcetera. But if you're talking about an eight inch screen, first of all, invite me over because I want to watch movies and play Halo. But then it obviously will matter more,

you've got more screen space. The resolution is spread out over a greater landscape area, so you've got to have higher resolution or else you will start to notice it at regular viewing distances. Was something that's one inch away from your eye. Uh. While they could probably increase the resolution and it would be maybe noticeable, I don't know that they have to stress it too much, all right, I think it's I think mostly the issue right now

is that screen door effect that I was talking about. Um, the headset itself costs costs ways a little bit less than half a pound or a little bit less than a quarter of a kilogram. Nice, so it's not too terribly heavy. Another huge advance over older VR software hardware, anything that you're trapping to your head and nice to have it light. Yes, Um, and the dead kits right

now cost three hundred bucks of pop, I've heard. I've heard that they're trying to keep it with the final commercial product within the three to five dollar range, which you know, when you're considering that most consoles cost around

that much, makes sense. They don't want it to go higher than the console that it would sure, Sure, and it's still a significant improvement over Again, the thousand bucks or so a pop that that current or the hundred thousand dollars if you're talking about the the specifically made for the VR industry equipment that was back in the nineties. Yeah, so so it's not like it's it's not going to

be inexpensive. It's going to be an expensive peripheral. Now if you're if you're used to either building or buying high end video game rigs, this is you know, two small dispense compared to what your ten thousand dollar rig was. Um. So this kit is not just the hardware. There's the software developer kit too, So this is the software side. And again remember Lucky is not a software guy, he's

a hardware guy. Uh. The Software Developer Kit contains all the information you would need to be able to develop stuff specifically to display on an Oculus Rift and to work with this motion tracking hardware. And that contains all the libraries you need, the headers, the documentation, the samples

for integrating the rift with games. It also includes two different game engines, the Unreal Engine and the Unity engines, and those are widely available game engines that a lot of companies use as the basis for the physics and uh and number crunching engine of whatever game they're running. So there are currently three titles that are compatible with the Oculus Rift. One of them is Team Fortress Too, which is a squad based first person shooter game moves

an incredibly frenetic pace. The other one that was originally announced as being compatible was Hawking, which is a multiplayer mech combat video game by Adhesive Games. The third that they just rolled out, um I think, I think in August, right before we right before we recorded this podcast, was Half Life Too, Half Life Too, because I really want I do not at all want actually the experience of having a head crab jump at my face. Don't having

it be more realistic? Don't you want the experience of watching a gravity gun work right in front of your face and launching things at high velocity? Also, I mean that gives me hope that the next title will be Portal. Can you imagine Portal first person like you are in the world of Portal. That's what I'm waiting on because those two, those two universes are connected Aperture Science and and and Black Mason, Black Mesa. As we all know

from the Jonathan Colton song. They are connected, completely connected. So come on, guys, let's get our Let's get our Oarculus riff version of Portal. I that sounds that sounds a little bit sickening, but wonderful. I would love it, can you. Yeah? I don't know what that would be like once you start moving at those in insane speeds where you do the vertical portals. I would need to get one of those psychologists to come to my house while I played, so that I could turn it into

a height therapy related I can. I can imagine that. Yeah, maybe that game wouldn't work out on the long run. I'd be willing to play it until I started. No, no, no, I want that. I want that right now. But I'm terrified. But those are the titles available right now, not Portal, but Half Life to Team Fortress too and Hawking. So we'll see those expand obviously, but even so, like again, just to stress yet again, this is of course the

developer side. Once this becomes a consumer product, you I would expect there to be support for at least twenty titles because if there's if there's not, then you know, it's hard to justify the expense in the mind of the game, or like I'm willing to pay three five dollars on this piece of technology and I can play twenty games on it and that's it, or not fewer than twenty, you are that would be if you can only do less than ten than that might be like

why would I pay that much money for that thing? Although lots of people, lots of people have, lots of people are excited about it UM, there there is no

official release date. Yeah. Yeah. The company's stance is it will be ready when it's ready, which is I think the most responsible way to go about it, because otherwise, what you'll do is you'll create a deadline that you know something will pop up that you could not have anticipated that will either cause you to miss the deadline, thus inviting the ire of all of the internets, or you will start to sacrifice things in order to make the original deadline, and the product will be less than

what it could have been. So I think that taking this approach of we aren't announcing a date, We're getting it as soon as possible, but we want it to be good when it launches, I think that's the right choice, especially when you're talking about hardware UM, because I mean, you can't. It's it's harder to update that. I mean, you can do firmware updates obviously, but but in place it's harder. Yeah. Um and and yeah yeah, like like

we said, there's no official price yet either. Um. You know, obviously they want to they want to keep it affordable, and we might see it being used in well, I'm sure we'll see it being used in virtual reality h fields beyond gaming. Yeah, yeah, you know the kind of stuff that they're talking about it being useful for, like like surgery training or um or or architecture and design, which is really kind of cool. That's this idea of being able to take a virtual tour of a building

that hasn't even gone beyond the blueprint stage. That's kind of interesting. And of course the medical uh techniques that we've talked about already, this exposure technique. Um. And you know, the VR industry still exists, although they call it virtual environments. For the most part, it still exists. But they do go to the video game industry all the time for all the equipment, so I expect we'll see that continue. Alright. So that was the story as far as it had

progressed in August of tooths thirteen. But back in March of two thousand fourteen, there was an event that really shook up the whole Oculus VR world news item. Yeah, it sent ripples throughout the force, like the destruction of danteen. Yeah it was Dantueen. No, no, it wasn't Datu was Aldan right, because the Dantueen was too far from an effective demonstration. But anyway, so, yes, there was this big event.

That big event, of course, was when the company Facebook decided it wanted the Oculus VR company, and furthermore than it wanted it two billion dollars worth. And so they said, hey, I'll give you two billion dollars to come and join the dark side. And they said, sure, No, I'm just being silly. I don't think Facebook is the dark side necessarily. But this announcement was met with some pretty extreme responses on either side of the spectrum. Yeah, there was a

lot of enthusiasm. Yeah, because it meant that Oculus rift now had an annoy or miss safety net, I mean all R and D money that they could possibly want a multibillion dollar company supporting them. So it wasn't like if let's say that their hardware implementation didn't work out the way they had planned. As a small company that was dependent upon investment, it might not have been able to bounce back from something like this. But with this big company, they can afford to take risks, right, So

that's a big thing. However, there was also a certain amount of trepidation. Yeah, because let's face it, Facebook is in the business of collecting all of the data about you. I mean, we we the services free because we are the product. Exactly, if you are using Facebook, you are a product that is being sold. And I mean that's the way Facebook generates revenue. If it didn't do that, then Facebook couldn't stick around, so not without forcing us to to pay them. Yeah, so this, this is that's

the other side of the coin, right. So some people like Minecraft creator Notch posted a tweet that said he would no longer want to develop a build for Minecraft for the Oculus Rift because he found Facebook to be creepy. So that, Yeah, there's a lot of pushback, especially among I think the hardcore fans of the Rift. Yeah, and and remember you know, the Oculus Rift off also was just going to be a dedicated PC device computer device, not a console related device, So that raises a question,

what does Facebook have planned for the oculus rift. Well, one thing that executives have said, and this is something that blows my mind. I mean it's it's hard for me to imagine what would be required to pull this off. But they envision a virtual world with one billion people in it, which which is essentially Facebook's user base. Yeah, and when they had a billion unique users or at least unique accounts. You don't know, necessarily significant difference, I suspect.

I'm sure there are quite a few duplicate uh there are people who are using different ounce but anyway, a billion users, uh more or less, and then putting them in this virtual environment as some way of communicating and making a social uh social platform that is completely immersive. That's that's huge. It's hard to imagine. Yeah, yeah, I mean i I'm picturing something like was described in snow Crash. Yeah, I'm just picturing like a a busiest day ever at

Disney World and you're just completely surrounded. I mean, obviously, if you're creating a virtual environment, you can create as much space or as little space as you want, so assuming you have the computer power to support it. But it does make me wonder when we would see such an implementation. Obviously, in order for it to be a billion users, you would also need to sell a billion units of Oculus Rift, and I don't think that's gonna happen.

Oh yeah, that's that's a sky high dream. But still the idea you can have enough servers to Oh, yeah, there's there's a lot of issues that we need to work out there. There's some there's some steps between where we are and where they want to be. But there's some other issues that we have to mention too. After the acquisition announcement, a company called Zenomax Media, which used to be the employer of one Mr John Carmack, you know, because he was working for in Software. In Software is

a subsidiary of Zenomax Media. Well, the company filed a lawsuit against Oculus VR, and they said that the Rift was based at least in part off of the VR work done within Zenomax, and it also relied upon the expertise of CarMax, including several systems that Carmack had designed for Zenomax projects during his time there. Yeah, and apparently,

depending upon who you ask, they had some conversations about this. Yeah, Xenomax claims that it tried to work all of this proprietary stuff out with Oculus after oculus is big Kickstarter success proved that they would be actually bringing a device to market um, but that oculust first failed to respond then offered Zenomax what they considered an unfair equity share, only only three percent, which was one point two million at the time or some sixty million dollars after Facebook's purchase.

About that they knew that that was going to happen um, which Zenomax claims that they countered, and for the more, claims that Oculus refused um, thereby pressing Zenomax into this lawsuit now Oculus VR. On their part, they said that one uh that Cenomax's demands were outrageous, that they were asking for way too much, and too said that there were there was there was no technology from Cinemax included

in the Oculus rift at all. And they also implied that it was pretty convenient that the lawsuit only came out after Facebook acquired Oculus, in other words, after they had all the money. Yeah, this enormous cash flow went into the company. So to be fair, there is some potential evidence available even to the public. For example a tweet from John Carmack in April which said, and I quote when you are in a worry and you know you wrote the exact needed code well at a previous

job re implementation. Greats. Yeah. But on the other hand, they also point out that the Oculus Rift SDK was publicly available and doesn't have a single line of Cinemax code in it, so you know, there's a there's a lot of conflicting information. The lawsuit is currently being considered, so we don't have any any results for that, certainly not yet. We we will not rerun this episode again,

but we all tried to update you guys. When that comes to ahead, maybe we'll just do an episode where hey, guess what, it's just a bunch of updates on a bunch of unrelated things. Here are fifty topics we've talked about in the past, and two sentences updating on each of them. Oh why did you that's a terrible number never talked about. It would be a pretty awful episode. It would be the most non sequitary, field filled episode

we've ever done, and we've done some doozies. But also back in March two thousand fourteen, another thing happened that that excited folks. Oculus unveiled the d K two Developer headset. So keep in mind, all the headsets the Oculus Rift has produced so far have been for developers who want to create games or other applications using the headset. There are no consumer versions of the hardware on the market yet, but this one increased the resolution of the two screens

inside the headset to nine sixty by ten eighty. They are O lead screens and they are supposed to reduce motion blur and also increase clarity, color, and contrast the three big cs that you want with your your screens. UH. It also includes a a external camera which is designed to help the headset track your your head movements, giving the wearer the ability to like look out over a ledge,

or around a corner, yeah, or underneath a table. So because the external camera can track the the orientation of the user's head in relation to their real world environment, it can translate into the perspective you would need in the virtual environment to UH to mimic that motion. So if I were to walk up to a table in a game and I wanted to look underneath it, to

see if there were any clues. I could actually squat down, been my head over and the because the external camera could track how my head was changing in orientation in respect to my real environment. I get that reflected in the virtual one. Pretty awesome, and there was some talk for a while about whether or not the the d K two would incorporate this. They showed it off at c e S and there wasn't any guarantee that the

d K two would have it. There's still not a guarantee that the consumer model, once it comes out, we'll have it, but there's a lot of hope because it does add to the significantly improved the experience exactly. Now, other companies have also announced since the time we we did that podcast that they are going to launch their own competing headsets. The two big ones would be Sony,

which has the device called the Morpheus in development. Obviously that would be important because again the Oculus rift is meant for PCs. If you wanted to have something that had a console experience, you would have to go somewhere else, and so Sony Sony's approach is the Morpheus. Then you also have Samsung getting into this. They have produced a prototype headset, and they have not, at least as far as I can tell, there's been no release of an

actual name for the prototype. They do hope to bring it out to market before either Morpheus or Oculus Rift go to the consumer market, so they're they're really fast tracking this to try and beat them to the punch. So I'll be exciting to see what happens. Yeah, definitely. Meanwhile, there are some more serious applications of this technology. Yeah, we're talking military applications. And uh so here in the United States, darpas using the Oculus Rift to help train

soldiers in new techniques to fight cyber warfare. I read the story three times from Wired uh and uh called arepas using Oculus Rift to prep for cyber war and I don't get it. The idea is that they would actually be able to visualize things like a cyber attack

on a network. So if you remember, like any movie from the nineteen eighties where you have a hacker try to hack a system, half the time it would show a like a three D first person shooter kind of model where you're going through a maze and then you see a skull and crossbones, Like, oh, you don't want to go through their hacker take the door to the right, which for some reason isn't protected, and that's how you hack into the system. Because Hollywood wanted to have and

a visually entertaining way to represent this this process. Never mind the fact that hacking doesn't involve wandering through three person our first person shooter kind of environments, except now I totally could, which is weird. So it's making all of our nineteen eight streams come true. Yeah, well most of them. I've got a couple that you know, I still don't. They don't have my DeLorean. But anyway, pretty awesome, interesting implementation. Have no idea if it's ever going to

catch on, but it is an interesting approach. Then you also have another one. This is the Norwegian Army looking into using the Oculus riff to improve, uh, the the situational awareness of people who are inside tanks. Now, as you can imagine operating inside a tank which is designed to protect the crew as much as possible, it doesn't have a whole lot of windows. Yeah, I don't. You don't want a lot of views to the outside world in a heavily armored vehicle. It tends to be a

point of vulnerability. So what the way some of these UH tanks work is that they have cameras mounted on the outside and usually what you would have to do is you have a monitor and you would switch between camera feeds to see what was going on around the perimeter of the tank. Now, this is important for you to be able to assess the situation, see if there are any enemies or even friendlies near you, because obviously

you know you're an enormous vehicle. You have to be careful. Well, what they're looking at is using the cameras that these four cameras that would be mounted to the outside of tanks and digitally stitching together all the camera feeds because when you when you add all of them together, you get a full three D sixty degree field of view

around the tank. So if you digitally stitched them together and then feed that through the headset by by sitting down and facing forward in respect to the tank, so you're facing the front of the tank, you would be looking forward. If you turn your head to the right, it would start to pan your view over to the feed that's coming from the right side. And you could do that in three hundred sixty degrees create creating a hypothetically real time digital world that's actually the real world

surrounding you. Yeah, so it's really it's really more of a video feed than a than a virtual representation. So you're actually seeing that what's really out there, but you're doing it as if there isn't an enormous tank all the way around you, which is kind of interesting. It did.

I think that would also take some getting used to, because, uh, your perspective would be that you are the size of a tank, because when you look around, like the thing that's in front of you and the thing that's behind you, obviously that would be separated by the length of the tank. That's that's got to cause some cognitive dissonance. There's probably some some training you have to do in order to really get good at it. But that's super cool use

of this technology too. I mean, obviously I want to see uses that don't necessarily involve warfare that would also be cool. But anything that can can improve people's ability to have situational awareness in various types of scenarios, to me, is an interesting application of something that's meant to be for playing games. Um, this is something we see over and over with virtual environment technology. In general, we see

a lot of repurposing. Either we see it repurposed from some other field to be in virtual environments, or we see virtual environment technology repurposed for some other industry. Now sure, and hey, since military funding does frequently um jump start given technology, maybe it's good that these kind of projects are going on right now. That's true, all right, So

that wraps up this update to the Oculus Rift. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, let us know, send us a message our email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Tumbler or Twitter. Our handles tech Stuff hs W. When we come back, we will be running new episodes. Uh. This for interest of full disclosure. If you were wondering why are you doing updates, well two reasons. One, we

wanted to update these episodes. They really did seem like interesting news stories that we wanted to tell you guys about. And too, uh I was, I was, I was not in the office, so we had to we had to do something since I wouldn't be able to record. Yes, podcast hosts our humans too, um, I mean I mean

most Okay, I'm gonna quote most of the time. Right, Yeah, no, there there are times where I doubt my own humanity, not to mention the humanity of some of our coworkers, but we do in fact enjoy taking vacations, and then at least the taking part the preparing for could be somewhat of a toil, but no, we of course love all you guys, so let us know what you want to hear and we will talk to you again. Released for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how staff works. Dot com