Oculus Rift Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,269 words · ~6 min read
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Welcome to our Oculus Rift video. If you are just here for Crystal Cove, be sure
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to check the timestamp in the description of this video. If you are also here for Crystal Cove and the
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developers kit, just continue to keep watching and we'll jump into that right away. When you first open the box,
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you're presented with the actual Oculus headset, the control box, which you end
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up plugging most of the things into, HDMI cable for the control box, and a
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DVI HDMI converter just in case you need it, a power cable for the control box as
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well, a USB cable for the control box as well. A set of three lenses, both A, B,
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and C, which are very important. I'll get into that later, and some travel
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adapters just in case because they are shipping this all over the world. For you glasses users out there, there are
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adjustments on each side of the headset, so you can change the distance of the
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lenses and the screen. That can be done with a coin or a flaad screwdriver or
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something like that. But if you can use contacts, it is recommended as wearing
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glasses will reduce your field of vision. And there is potential that the lenses could come in contact with the
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glasses and in turn scratch them. The control box is relatively simple. It's
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fixed to the Oculus via cable. And for buttons, it has power, brightness up and
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down, and contrast up and down. In terms of IO, there's HDMI, DVI, USB, and
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power. And that's about it. One really nice thing about the control box and
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headset combo is that you can actually cable manage the cable to go around the
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side of your head and then down the back. That way, if you put the control
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box in a good position, you could replace their 6T HDMI cable with a very
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long one and have a power bar or something like that and make it so you're a little bit more mobile so you
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can spin in your chair very easily without the cable getting caught on anything. If you have an Oculus Rift or
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if you're planning on getting one in the future, I would highly suggest going to riftenable.com. They have a very good
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database of all the games that are compatible with Oculus Rift. And their
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search function is awesome. Say you have a Connect and a Hydra and a Rift. You
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can tell it that and then it'll tell you all the games that can work with those
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different devices so you know exactly what you're getting yourself into.
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Another annoying thing is having the video feed for the Oculus go somewhere
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that isn't the Oculus. So to fix this, what you can do is go to the executable
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file for the game that you're trying to run, right click on it, and create a new
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shortcut. Right click on a shortcut, go to properties, and under the target text
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field after the very last quotation, add space dash adapter space, and then
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whatever number you have your Oculus plugged into for uh video output slot on
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your graphics card. For me, it's number one. So, I just have space- adapter
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space 1. But that'll be whatever you have yours plugged into. And this will
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tell the game exactly what adapter or screen it's supposed to run to, and that
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will push it directly to your Oculus. Now, I have spent a gratuitous amount of
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time with my Oculus Rift. I love this thing. And thanks to Rift enabled, I've
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been able to find a ton of different games to try, and it has been extremely
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fun, but it's not ready. It's the developer kit. It's not the final
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version. It's not the consumer version. We know this. Um, but the the
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observations with the developer kit is don't be way too excited about the
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developer kit. Be super ridiculously excited about Oculus and VR in general,
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but not necessarily the developer kit, because you still can definitely see the
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pixel grid. does totally look like you're looking through a screen door. You can see space in between the pixels.
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I can't stress that enough. It's not perfect. There's also some features that
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will be in the consumer version that are not in the dev kit. Enter Crystal Cove.
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Where the 1080p prototype brought us very obviously to 1080p from 720p on the
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dev kit, the Crystal Cove upgrades are not quite as obvious. It's still a 1080p
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panel, but it is a OLED panel with low persistence, which is actually extremely
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important, and I'll talk about that later. The more obvious part is the IR
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positional tracking on the camera, which leaves you with those IR LEDs all over
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the front and is obviously the reason for the name Crystal Cove. The
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positional tracking works by having a camera watch your Oculus where there's
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the IR LEDs so it can tell how it moves,
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which is amazing because now you can lean forward, you can lean around.
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Before you were essentially a camera on a tripod that had wheels. You were
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moving around but it was very fixed. You could turn how you were looking and you
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could look up and down, but that's about it. You couldn't really lean. Now you
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feel a lot more human and that massively increases the immersion. If you want to
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lean over and pick something up, it works. If you reel backwards, your
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character will reel backwards as if you are scared. It feels much more natural
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and breaks the whole boundary thing where it doesn't really feel like you're
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playing virtual reality because your character isn't actually moving with
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you. Now, for micro movements, your character will move with you, which is
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amazing. In an interview with Oculus, it was said that the display is turning off
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in between frames to help with motion blur. Taking that and the fact that it's
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an OLED display, if you go on Blurbusters and check out their OLED
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display motion blur article, which is actually quite good, it'll talk about
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how this works. So, what they're probably using is point samples instead
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of sample and hold. And the idea of this is it will put an image on screen and
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then turn the display off so that it doesn't sit there for too long creating
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motion blur and they're not guessing what should be there which is really
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problematic for VR experiences as well which would also cause motion blur. And
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the strobing is so fast strobing as in turning off and on not yeah other terms
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of strobing. um is it's so fast that you won't notice it yourself, which is
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actually quite a good experience and will help you a lot with reading text
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and will help a lot with that that motion blur problem that the previous
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versions of Oculus have had. So essentially, be excited, be super
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excited, post on the forums, post in the comments below, like and dislike this
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video, talk to your friends about it, tell your mom, and as always, subscribe
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to Lionus Tech Tips.