Oculus Rift: the next generation – why Crystal Cove moves VR one step closer to you

February 26th, 2014, 00:10 Posted By: wraggster

The new Oculus prototype has a better screen, reduced latency and improved movement tracking.

Eighteen months have elapsed since Oculus VR was founded, and in that time the company has been backed to ten times its $250,000 Kickstarter target, gathered $75 million in investment funds, and shipped the first development kits of its Oculus Rift headset to its backers. “If someone is going to do virtual reality, they should do it right or not do it at all,” Rift creator Palmer Luckey says, and his new Crystal Cove prototype is the closest VR has come to being faultlessly right.The public has been watching Rift the whole way through its gestation, from when it was an unnamed prototype built by Luckey in his house through to its appearance at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, where Oculus VR stole the limelight with the first glimpse of its newest prototype. It’s a device designed to answer the question that everyone has been asking during the journey: can virtual reality be done properly?“Virtual reality is the first platform where if you do it badly, you won’t just not have fun, you’ll actually make people feel bad,” Luckey says. “If one company puts out a bad VR experience, it reflects on the entire industry and it could potentially scare people off.” For Oculus VR and its investors, that means the stakes are high.Part of the concern is that the first Rift development kits left plenty to the imagination. Rift was clearly still an extraordinary piece of technology, one that made it seem like virtual reality might finally be practical, but a few final kinks needed to be resolved before it was ready for market. Those kinks included its latency, a low-resolution display and head tracking that was limited to three different movements. Those problems combined made a significant number of players feel nauseous while using Rift.Crystal Cove tackles these problems by swapping the devkit’s screen for a low-persistence OLED replacement, reducing latency, and tracking lateral movements using high-precision position-tracking technology. Together these tweaks represent a tremendous leap forward for the headset.

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