Gadgetory

this is adi with the verge one year ago I saw the oculus rift virtual reality headset for the first time it was impressive but there were some obvious problems you couldn't turn your head without the world blurring and the low resolution meant everything looked like it was behind a screen door at CES 2014 oculus unveiled a new version that's supposed to bring virtual reality in line with real reality the new Crystal Cove prototype isn't perfect but thanks to a better screen and some new software techniques looking around actually feels natural not blurry on a normal display but pretend is a hypothetical normal display with but it's perfect it has no switching time no lag whatsoever you render an image on the PC you send it to the screen and then that image stays on the screen until it gets sent a new image now the problem with that is that means that during motion the image is only correct for a vanishingly small amount of time then the rest of the frame it's wrong until it gets a new new image and so you end up with an image that's actually wrong most of the time it's like a broken clock it's right for very brief moments every once in a while but the majority of the data that you're getting from it is garbage and so what we're doing with our low persistence prototypes is rendering an image sending it to the display showing the image on the display very briefly and then turning it off and then leaving it black all the way until the next frame and then the next frame new image then it goes off and if you do that at a high enough frame rate it means that you get a smooth continuous image that doesn't have any garbage data in it that's not the only new thing in Crystal Cove if you lean forward or sideways your in-game viewpoint will too thanks to a camera and sensors that sense where your head is the wild card of course is games I was able to get a second look at Eve Valkyrie a space dog fighting game I also saw d3 with the rift you can really see ships moving in your peripheral vision and you can target missiles with your eyes but that great is only one of the few games you can play on the rift and it's hard to tell what will actually work oculus says it's rift prototype still isn't what it wants to ship to consumers but it's getting a lot closer it's still just early days of us getting all of the features worked out we've shown the HD prototype in the past now we're showing the Crystal Cove prototype which has the positional tracking and a low persistence so each of those big ticket items that we wanted to solve for the consumer market for the consumer product we are solving one by one we're running out of things to solve so we're getting very close we do know that game pads I mean that's what we're using right now they're not the end game for VR input their kind of a hokie left over from what people know how to use and you can make it work well in VR like you can make a game that works well with a gamepad but what we really want to do is be able to track the body be able to you know track your movements and especially your hand movements in a natural way that is like real life and I think we'll update get there of course you won't ever mistake Crystal coves virtual reality for the real world but it's at least a lot more fun to Jack into Oh