Answers from Luckey

[Tbone]

I'm doing a bit of stalking on Reddit and finding some interesting information from Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus. We'll have a lot more answers next week coming out of CES, but here are some things to mull over:

Q: Is the consumer version planned on being released before the summertime?
A: No.

Q: Will there be different versions of the Rift (for instance, a better screen) at different costs?

A: There will be one consumer product with one set of specifications, and it will use the best tech available to us. The idea of a premium model makes no sense; if a better panel is available at all, we would use it for the main product and get the best possible volume price. If a panel is not available to us in large quantities, then there is certainly no way it would be available in small quantities. There are plenty of other reasons to not split our hardware, but that is the main one.

Mobile displays can only get so expensive, there is a higher chance of a panel not being available at any price than a panel being available at too high a price. The Rift will have the best display we can get our hands on. The $300 figure is by no means set in stone.

Q: Oculus recently announced they will be developing their own VR content. Will Oculus be developing content that is compatible with other HMDs? What type of content will Oculus be creating?

A: Gaming is our top priority right now, but the definition of what a "game" is gets blurrier and blurrier. We are doing work around passive experiences, movies, telepresence, CAD, and lots of other applications.

VR needs more than just a headset, and there are currently a lot of different solutions to a lot of different problems in VR. Take VR input as one example: You have PrioVR, STEM, Leap, Project Holodeck, castAR, and a bevy of other devices all trying to solve 3D input in completely different ways. It would be impossible to create a game that takes full advantage of some of those devices without compromising the experience for others. Input is an extreme example, but even differences between headsets can be huge (A game that relies on a wide FOV like Infiniteye has may be difficult to adapt to a lower FOV headset, for example). If Oculus invests in a VR game, we want to optimize it as an amazing experience on our hardware, not a decent experience on all hardware. I am biased, but I don't think anyone is going to be able to make a better VR platform than us. We will continue to be the best.

Fast headtracking and large FOV are basic requirements for a decent headset, not added features. Keep in mind that there is much we have yet to disclose.
We are too early along to limit ourselves to a standard of basic thresholds. Imagine if the Rift (eventually) had eye tracking, full body tracking, galvanic vestibular stimulation, or some other feature that no other headset has. We will be building and investing in games that fully utilize our hardware for the best experience possible, not wasting development time making a crippled version for lesser hardware. You are right that there will be games that work on any hardware meeting some basic threshold, but they will not be our focus. A day will come when all VR headsets are capable of everything needed for a good experiences, but that day is not today, not next year, and probably not the year after that. From a purely financial side, it is hard to justify using our own money (which really comes from our users, through the price of a Rift) to make games that are compatible with cheaper headsets from companies that do not have to share any of that cost. I don't want to encourage clones from companies that are not innovating or investing in VR, why would Oculus subsidize inferior hardware?

Q: Recently Oculus has stated that you've reached the sweet spot of less than 15ms of latency. Does this include your motion prediction algorithms?

A: Including motion prediction in our latency figures would make us bullshitters. We could predict to negative latency if we want, but any hard numbers we give are real.

Q: Will the consumer version have a manual adjustable IPD?
A: We are experimenting with IPD adjustment, but our new lenses are a dramatic improvement over the developer kit, and they will be even better in the consumer version. The image remains clear across a much wider range of IPDs.