Oculus Rift DK2 - Initial Impressions
Posted: August 10, 2014, 6:03 am
I finally received my Oculus Rift DK2 after having pre-ordered it day one on March 19th.
With a few reservations I'll mention later, holy fucking shitsnacks is it amazing. In one area I'll go over, it's even better than even reality.
Setup:
It's a developers kit. It took awhile to setup and loading demos, etc is reminiscent of early PC games days where you had to tweak shit left and right to get things running. The SDK is less than a month old for the DK2. It's totally understandable but nonetheless, requires some work.
Hardware:
There's a motion tracking "camera" to setup in front of where you'll be using your Rift. I put it on top of my 46" TV and it works perfect. It has a little gizmo that allows for it to stay on top of most any monitor, or you can set it on something, or it has tri-pod mounting capability.
When you put on the rift, the lenses are millimeters from your eyes. If you have long lashes, you will clean the lenses with them.
I have something like 20/40 vision and I used the default "A" lenses and can see fine. There are also "B" lenses for those with more severe near-sighted vision. I tried them but they are too powerful for my eyes.
Oculus Configuration/Demo Screen Utility:
First thing you should do is go to Advanced Configuration and measue your IPD (Interpupillary distance). There is a pretty small visual sweet spot when looking through the lenses so it's important to get this right. Rift can handle IPD's from 55mm to 68mm. After going through the test, mine turned out to be 67.1. Whew. I always thought, if anything, my eyes were closer together than farther apart than normal. Maybe it's just that I'm tall/larger at 6'2".
It also asks you for your Eye to Neck distance both horizontal and vertical. I have no fucking clue so I left that at default settings.
You can set up profiles for each person using the Rift so it's easy to switch between people after initial setup.
An Xbox One controller or PS4 (or 360/ps3) plugged into usb works fine for most demos/games.
Show Desktop Scene:
The config utility provides your first virtual experience. It sits you at a desk and allows you to center the camera tracking but more importantly, it blows your mind with your first feeling of presence.
After you hit "center" and the tracking is working, a simple scene of you sitting at a desk, with a few plants, desklamp, pencil, and playing cards stacked into a pyramid shape is enough to convince you within seconds that this whole VR thing is for real.
It's fucking amazing. There's a plant sitting on the desk to your right. I leaned over to it and the leaves came within less than an inch of my face. This is the part that's better than reality. As you get older, everyone gets presbyopia (you can't see things close up and have to hold them at a distance)...with VR, you can throw that limitation right out the fucking door. Since everything in VR is set to infinity, shit that's an inch from your eyes is in crystal clear focus. In that sense, it's better than reality. I can't see shit an inch from my face IRL.
Moving on to the the stack of cards on the table in a pyramid shape. I stood up and moved over the stack and looked at it from behind. Freaking awesome. You are in the world, not looking at a projection. As long as the tracking camera has access to the sensors on the Rift, you can move about. Look behind you , you see the back of the chair you're sitting in. You know that chair isn't there but you sure as hell grab for it when sitting back down.
I ended up on my hands and knees crawling around my floor IRL. In VR I was looking underneath the desk. If space allows in the real world, I could walk around the Virtual desk, or crawl under it. Mind blown. VR FTW. There's no need to even go past the setup desk demo before you will be convinced you'll be getting one soon if you are ever able to demo one.
Last thing in the config demo that provides a sense of presence is the sit/stand option. If you select stand while still sitting, all the sudden your desk is 4 feet below you and you're looking down at it.
Pro tip: When standing up, lean your legs up against your desk. It's the only way you'll keep any sense of direction while in VR. It's easy to lose all sense of direction and have no clue which way you are facing. If you lean up against the desk, it provides a reality check with your direction IRL (for camera tracking)
Immersion/Presence, whatever you want to call it. It's there. "holy shit" "holy fuck" or whatever your favorite expression of amazement will be vocalized many times.
Reality check:
As mind blowing as the virtual experience is with the DK2, the resolution is nowhere even close to being adequate. The first consumer version will be higher resolution than the DK2, which is a lot higher than DK1 but there will be no missing the pixels. With the CV1, the experience will be good enough to forgive the lower res but a 4K screen will be what's needed for the kind of resolution we're used to on a 1080p screen today. You need four times the resolution due to the massive field of view.
FOV (field of view): You can see the edges of the visual area. It's like wearing large ski goggles I'd guess is the best way to put it. It doesn't take long for that to be out of your mind though. Also the focus sweet spot is in the middle of the screen and things blur closer to the sides, so you use your head motion to look around more than using your eyes to move all over a stationary screen.
Play til you puke. Back when Duke Nukem 3D was the rage (early 90's?) I would play until I got so sick I had to lay down or throw up. Same goes for the Rift. It's overwhelming sometimes, along with some demos not being optimized very well. I'm slightly more susceptible to motion sickness than average. As with FPS games, VR will also improve. I don't get motion sickness with FPS games anymore. A lot of this has to do with the rudimentary motion controls in VR right now.
Demos/Games:
Anime Dancing Girls: Beach Party, Concerts, etc
Due to the less than optimal resolution currently in DK2, the most surprising and impressive thing I've encountered is close up objects. Easiest way to demonstrate that is human figures. The Japanese are the farthest along with developing cool demos. As such, there are a few vocaloid demos with singing/dancing vocaloid anime girls.
MikulusDK2:
First demo I tried simply has Miku (most famous vocaloid) standing in the middle of a gridded room. She does't do more than stand there but her eyes follow you and her head turns in your direction. The sense of being there is instant but with head tracking, while walking around, you can also move your head in close. This is where the resolution doesn't suffer. When you are an inch from something, it's crystal clear and amazing. It simply feels lik you are right there. Stand up (IRL) and look down at Miku, lean around and look behind her. The detail is insane.
Beach Concert:
Another Vocaloid demo places you on a beach where three vocaloids are dancing in front of you. Behind them is the ocean of which they are standing in ankle deep water. Behind you are beach chairs, a hut, volleyball court, bar, etc. There's a lighthouse out on a pier. This is the first demo where I said "fuck yeah" this is what I was imagining VR to be like. I felt like I was at a resort. I walked around and out on the pier up to the lighthouse. Standing in front of it, it was massive and I had to look straight up (IRL) to see the top of it. I walked around the area, looking at all the detail, moving super close to mundane things like glasses on tables, etc. This was a place I could sit in a lounge chair and chill to wind down. Keep in mind that everywhere you look, you are in the virtual world. Besides the ski goggle effect and knocking shit over IRL when you reach for something in the virtual world that's not really there, you are completely immersed.
Vocaloid Concert:
Final anime demo I tried had 1, 2 or 3 vocaloid singers dancing to a large selection of vocaloid songs. While the experience was cool in itself, this demo presented a cool way of selecting options. You are in a thunderdome type structure. The menus for choosing vocaloids, volume, songs, atmosphere (night/day/spotlight/sunset/disco lights, etc) appear high up on the structure. There are boxes below each choice and you simply look directly at the box to choose it. This is done with head tracking and works well. Eventuall eye tracking will be part of VR setups.
As usual, I could move around freely and observer the dancers, or look at the moon, sun, structure, but also there was a z-axis allowing me up move up or down with my viewpoint. I eventually started moving higher and higher until I was way above the dancers. Vertigo didn't set in until I moved through the bars above the dome cage and looked back down through them. Pretty high! This demo also is notable for the lighting effects. The shadows and lights on the 3D model dancers was pretty amazing.
Kon Tiki:
This demo has you out in the middle of the ocean on a large raft that contains a hut in the middle of it. There's also a crowsnest at the top of a mast. Walking around, the detail is great. Little shit like a lantern hanging on a post was interesting because of how freaking close to it you could get, and also being able to move around it using head tracking to see it from different angles. Lean in, lean back, etc. This is a much different feeling than using keyboard or controller to zoom in, move, etc.
Climbing up a rope ladder to the top of the mast was ass puckering experience #2. Imagine the recent Tomb Raider scenes where she climbs up the radio tower. That was intense on a flat screen. Try to imagine that in VR where you are completely surrounded in all directions you look by the environment.
Chilling Space:
This demo/game has you floating way above the Earth. It's peaceful and Carl Sagan is talking about protecting our little blue planet. There are a bunch of asteroids and satellites floating around in all directions...some heading right at you. You have a virtual arm you control with the mouse that's holding a laser blaster. As the asteroids approach, you shoot them to redirect them from hitting you. They are everywhere, look behind you, below you, above you. When they get close, they are massive in size. Sense of scale is awesome. While you feel the need to shoot anything heading at you, it's not stressful and even if you don't get them all, they bounce off you harmlessly. It's very relaxing and shooting the asteroids is a great example of something like the original Asteroids game re-invisioned for VR.
Museum of Games:
Someone made a virtual museum containing about 100 3D models from PC/Console games along with wall posters of many more. This is a great example of virtually visiting a place form your home (even though this one doesn't actually exist in the real world).
While the wall textures etc were pretty basic, the 3D models and posters were cool. The first room I walked into had 3D models of Galactus, one of the Titans from Titanfall, some large monster from Half Life 2 and maybe a transformer...HUGE. All of the 3D models spun on pedestals. Galactus was massive as he should be. In fact, for this room, you walked on a high walkway with the 3D models in pits so you were about about eye level with their wastes. Sense of scale, depth, etc is stupendous.
I need to revisit this demo to see the rest of it. I peeked in the next room which has Harley Quinn and the Witcher among others and though what a great way to show the history of gaming and their characters.
Archivision Architecture:
This demo places you in the entry way kitchen and dining room of a house. There are some things like breakfast sitting out on the counter, a fan blowing in the corner, a book on the table. What this demonstrated to me was how fucking cool it would be to use this for real estate, hotel rooms, ship cruises, etc to give potential buyers/renters, the ability to walk through locations and see exactly what to expect. The detail can be unreal. I walked up to the floor standing fan, walked around it, moved up close. So real.
This isn't just for houses, etc though. Looking down at a keyboard on a desk in one demo (not the config demo) has me thinking how cool it would be to see a virtual keyboard, or anything else you are thinking of buying right in front of you to see the layout and move around the entire product. I see now why Mark Zuckerberg wanted in on this. The possibilities are endless for commercial uses, social uses, after the initial gaming wave deals with the first generation. Seeing a picture of something or even a 3D rendering on a flat screen is not the same as seeing it to scale up close.
----
Overall, I'm happy to report that VR is for real and amazing. The DK2 is just that, a developer's kit. There are kinks to be worked out. It's not a fad. It also won't replace standard displays for all things but I'm betting within 5 years, they'll be as common as a tablets are now and eventually as common as TVs or phones. The biggest hurdle is resolution which should be solved within a year with 4K screens already developed in the 5" screen size. CPU/GPU power is the other part that needs to catch up to drive a 4K screen. With 4K VR screens, you might start losing sense of reality vs VR.
I still haven't been able to try the main reason I bought the Rift for, 3D movies. Tomorrow, one of the main VR cinema players should be updated to work on the DK2 so I can report on 3D movies using a VR headset. I also need to try 360 degree movies. I've barely touched the demos out there as well.
With a few reservations I'll mention later, holy fucking shitsnacks is it amazing. In one area I'll go over, it's even better than even reality.
Setup:
It's a developers kit. It took awhile to setup and loading demos, etc is reminiscent of early PC games days where you had to tweak shit left and right to get things running. The SDK is less than a month old for the DK2. It's totally understandable but nonetheless, requires some work.
Hardware:
There's a motion tracking "camera" to setup in front of where you'll be using your Rift. I put it on top of my 46" TV and it works perfect. It has a little gizmo that allows for it to stay on top of most any monitor, or you can set it on something, or it has tri-pod mounting capability.
When you put on the rift, the lenses are millimeters from your eyes. If you have long lashes, you will clean the lenses with them.
I have something like 20/40 vision and I used the default "A" lenses and can see fine. There are also "B" lenses for those with more severe near-sighted vision. I tried them but they are too powerful for my eyes.
Oculus Configuration/Demo Screen Utility:
First thing you should do is go to Advanced Configuration and measue your IPD (Interpupillary distance). There is a pretty small visual sweet spot when looking through the lenses so it's important to get this right. Rift can handle IPD's from 55mm to 68mm. After going through the test, mine turned out to be 67.1. Whew. I always thought, if anything, my eyes were closer together than farther apart than normal. Maybe it's just that I'm tall/larger at 6'2".
It also asks you for your Eye to Neck distance both horizontal and vertical. I have no fucking clue so I left that at default settings.
You can set up profiles for each person using the Rift so it's easy to switch between people after initial setup.
An Xbox One controller or PS4 (or 360/ps3) plugged into usb works fine for most demos/games.
Show Desktop Scene:
The config utility provides your first virtual experience. It sits you at a desk and allows you to center the camera tracking but more importantly, it blows your mind with your first feeling of presence.
After you hit "center" and the tracking is working, a simple scene of you sitting at a desk, with a few plants, desklamp, pencil, and playing cards stacked into a pyramid shape is enough to convince you within seconds that this whole VR thing is for real.
It's fucking amazing. There's a plant sitting on the desk to your right. I leaned over to it and the leaves came within less than an inch of my face. This is the part that's better than reality. As you get older, everyone gets presbyopia (you can't see things close up and have to hold them at a distance)...with VR, you can throw that limitation right out the fucking door. Since everything in VR is set to infinity, shit that's an inch from your eyes is in crystal clear focus. In that sense, it's better than reality. I can't see shit an inch from my face IRL.
Moving on to the the stack of cards on the table in a pyramid shape. I stood up and moved over the stack and looked at it from behind. Freaking awesome. You are in the world, not looking at a projection. As long as the tracking camera has access to the sensors on the Rift, you can move about. Look behind you , you see the back of the chair you're sitting in. You know that chair isn't there but you sure as hell grab for it when sitting back down.
I ended up on my hands and knees crawling around my floor IRL. In VR I was looking underneath the desk. If space allows in the real world, I could walk around the Virtual desk, or crawl under it. Mind blown. VR FTW. There's no need to even go past the setup desk demo before you will be convinced you'll be getting one soon if you are ever able to demo one.
Last thing in the config demo that provides a sense of presence is the sit/stand option. If you select stand while still sitting, all the sudden your desk is 4 feet below you and you're looking down at it.
Pro tip: When standing up, lean your legs up against your desk. It's the only way you'll keep any sense of direction while in VR. It's easy to lose all sense of direction and have no clue which way you are facing. If you lean up against the desk, it provides a reality check with your direction IRL (for camera tracking)
Immersion/Presence, whatever you want to call it. It's there. "holy shit" "holy fuck" or whatever your favorite expression of amazement will be vocalized many times.
Reality check:
As mind blowing as the virtual experience is with the DK2, the resolution is nowhere even close to being adequate. The first consumer version will be higher resolution than the DK2, which is a lot higher than DK1 but there will be no missing the pixels. With the CV1, the experience will be good enough to forgive the lower res but a 4K screen will be what's needed for the kind of resolution we're used to on a 1080p screen today. You need four times the resolution due to the massive field of view.
FOV (field of view): You can see the edges of the visual area. It's like wearing large ski goggles I'd guess is the best way to put it. It doesn't take long for that to be out of your mind though. Also the focus sweet spot is in the middle of the screen and things blur closer to the sides, so you use your head motion to look around more than using your eyes to move all over a stationary screen.
Play til you puke. Back when Duke Nukem 3D was the rage (early 90's?) I would play until I got so sick I had to lay down or throw up. Same goes for the Rift. It's overwhelming sometimes, along with some demos not being optimized very well. I'm slightly more susceptible to motion sickness than average. As with FPS games, VR will also improve. I don't get motion sickness with FPS games anymore. A lot of this has to do with the rudimentary motion controls in VR right now.
Demos/Games:
Anime Dancing Girls: Beach Party, Concerts, etc
Due to the less than optimal resolution currently in DK2, the most surprising and impressive thing I've encountered is close up objects. Easiest way to demonstrate that is human figures. The Japanese are the farthest along with developing cool demos. As such, there are a few vocaloid demos with singing/dancing vocaloid anime girls.
MikulusDK2:
First demo I tried simply has Miku (most famous vocaloid) standing in the middle of a gridded room. She does't do more than stand there but her eyes follow you and her head turns in your direction. The sense of being there is instant but with head tracking, while walking around, you can also move your head in close. This is where the resolution doesn't suffer. When you are an inch from something, it's crystal clear and amazing. It simply feels lik you are right there. Stand up (IRL) and look down at Miku, lean around and look behind her. The detail is insane.
Beach Concert:
Another Vocaloid demo places you on a beach where three vocaloids are dancing in front of you. Behind them is the ocean of which they are standing in ankle deep water. Behind you are beach chairs, a hut, volleyball court, bar, etc. There's a lighthouse out on a pier. This is the first demo where I said "fuck yeah" this is what I was imagining VR to be like. I felt like I was at a resort. I walked around and out on the pier up to the lighthouse. Standing in front of it, it was massive and I had to look straight up (IRL) to see the top of it. I walked around the area, looking at all the detail, moving super close to mundane things like glasses on tables, etc. This was a place I could sit in a lounge chair and chill to wind down. Keep in mind that everywhere you look, you are in the virtual world. Besides the ski goggle effect and knocking shit over IRL when you reach for something in the virtual world that's not really there, you are completely immersed.
Vocaloid Concert:
Final anime demo I tried had 1, 2 or 3 vocaloid singers dancing to a large selection of vocaloid songs. While the experience was cool in itself, this demo presented a cool way of selecting options. You are in a thunderdome type structure. The menus for choosing vocaloids, volume, songs, atmosphere (night/day/spotlight/sunset/disco lights, etc) appear high up on the structure. There are boxes below each choice and you simply look directly at the box to choose it. This is done with head tracking and works well. Eventuall eye tracking will be part of VR setups.
As usual, I could move around freely and observer the dancers, or look at the moon, sun, structure, but also there was a z-axis allowing me up move up or down with my viewpoint. I eventually started moving higher and higher until I was way above the dancers. Vertigo didn't set in until I moved through the bars above the dome cage and looked back down through them. Pretty high! This demo also is notable for the lighting effects. The shadows and lights on the 3D model dancers was pretty amazing.
Kon Tiki:
This demo has you out in the middle of the ocean on a large raft that contains a hut in the middle of it. There's also a crowsnest at the top of a mast. Walking around, the detail is great. Little shit like a lantern hanging on a post was interesting because of how freaking close to it you could get, and also being able to move around it using head tracking to see it from different angles. Lean in, lean back, etc. This is a much different feeling than using keyboard or controller to zoom in, move, etc.
Climbing up a rope ladder to the top of the mast was ass puckering experience #2. Imagine the recent Tomb Raider scenes where she climbs up the radio tower. That was intense on a flat screen. Try to imagine that in VR where you are completely surrounded in all directions you look by the environment.
Chilling Space:
This demo/game has you floating way above the Earth. It's peaceful and Carl Sagan is talking about protecting our little blue planet. There are a bunch of asteroids and satellites floating around in all directions...some heading right at you. You have a virtual arm you control with the mouse that's holding a laser blaster. As the asteroids approach, you shoot them to redirect them from hitting you. They are everywhere, look behind you, below you, above you. When they get close, they are massive in size. Sense of scale is awesome. While you feel the need to shoot anything heading at you, it's not stressful and even if you don't get them all, they bounce off you harmlessly. It's very relaxing and shooting the asteroids is a great example of something like the original Asteroids game re-invisioned for VR.
Museum of Games:
Someone made a virtual museum containing about 100 3D models from PC/Console games along with wall posters of many more. This is a great example of virtually visiting a place form your home (even though this one doesn't actually exist in the real world).
While the wall textures etc were pretty basic, the 3D models and posters were cool. The first room I walked into had 3D models of Galactus, one of the Titans from Titanfall, some large monster from Half Life 2 and maybe a transformer...HUGE. All of the 3D models spun on pedestals. Galactus was massive as he should be. In fact, for this room, you walked on a high walkway with the 3D models in pits so you were about about eye level with their wastes. Sense of scale, depth, etc is stupendous.
I need to revisit this demo to see the rest of it. I peeked in the next room which has Harley Quinn and the Witcher among others and though what a great way to show the history of gaming and their characters.
Archivision Architecture:
This demo places you in the entry way kitchen and dining room of a house. There are some things like breakfast sitting out on the counter, a fan blowing in the corner, a book on the table. What this demonstrated to me was how fucking cool it would be to use this for real estate, hotel rooms, ship cruises, etc to give potential buyers/renters, the ability to walk through locations and see exactly what to expect. The detail can be unreal. I walked up to the floor standing fan, walked around it, moved up close. So real.
This isn't just for houses, etc though. Looking down at a keyboard on a desk in one demo (not the config demo) has me thinking how cool it would be to see a virtual keyboard, or anything else you are thinking of buying right in front of you to see the layout and move around the entire product. I see now why Mark Zuckerberg wanted in on this. The possibilities are endless for commercial uses, social uses, after the initial gaming wave deals with the first generation. Seeing a picture of something or even a 3D rendering on a flat screen is not the same as seeing it to scale up close.
----
Overall, I'm happy to report that VR is for real and amazing. The DK2 is just that, a developer's kit. There are kinks to be worked out. It's not a fad. It also won't replace standard displays for all things but I'm betting within 5 years, they'll be as common as a tablets are now and eventually as common as TVs or phones. The biggest hurdle is resolution which should be solved within a year with 4K screens already developed in the 5" screen size. CPU/GPU power is the other part that needs to catch up to drive a 4K screen. With 4K VR screens, you might start losing sense of reality vs VR.
I still haven't been able to try the main reason I bought the Rift for, 3D movies. Tomorrow, one of the main VR cinema players should be updated to work on the DK2 so I can report on 3D movies using a VR headset. I also need to try 360 degree movies. I've barely touched the demos out there as well.