HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Virtual reality is the future of media. That was the message here at the Oculus Connect conference. But while the company's eyes are clearly set on the future, it had a wealth of information to announce about upcoming projects, including a more consumer-focused Gear VR.
The new Samsung Gear VR will ship globally in November for $99. It's 22 percent lighter than the Gear VR Innovator Edition, and is intended to allow consumers to take their VR experiences on the go using their mobile devices. It works with more phones than its predecessor, including the Galaxy Note 5, S6 Edge+, S6, and S6 Edge. Samsung also promised an improved touchpad that provides greater control for movies, gaming, 360-degree video, and more.
That includes Oculus Arcade, which boasts classic games and franchises from Sega, Midway, Bandai/Namco and more, now available in 3D. In addition, there will be brand new games and IPs, featuring everything from puzzle-based exploration, space fights, and even an Adventure Time game. The Gear VR will also support Twitch and Netflix, with Vimeo, Tivo, Hulu, Lionsgate, and Twentieth Century Fox integration coming soon.
Oculus Rift
But while the Gear VR is exciting for casual and mobile gamers on the go, the device everyone is most excited about, of course, is the Oculus Rift. No pricing information was announced, but the device is set to ship in the first quarter of 2016, along with an Xbox controller—Oculus's gaming standard.
As one might expect, the Rift, in order to have its full potential unlocked, must work with an appropriately powerful machine, which is where the Oculus Ready PC Program comes in. A sticker from the program signals that a PC has been tested and works well with Oculus Rift. Manufacturers like Asus, Dell, and Alienware will offer Oculus Ready PCs for less than $1,000, the company said.
The Rift will offer numerous new ways to enjoy VR, everything from immersive film, peer-to-peer connections and games built by the more than 200,000 Development Center users. But perhaps unsurprisingly, Oculus is looking beyond the release of the Rift toward the future refinement and application of virtual reality.
A huge part of that, will, naturally, be haptics—or, in layman's terms, touch and hand-motion sensitivity. The appropriately named Oculus Touch went through more than 300 prototypes to find an acceptable model, but what the company ended up with sounds groundbreaking. To test the device, Oculus built a virtual toy box, in which the company's development team tested and refined their models to insure that they could interact with the environment in a myriad of ways, from throwing, poking, pulling, even shooting lasers at one another.
The plan is for the Touch to further amp up the social aspect of virtual reality, especially since the device will ship with an additional sensor, drastically increasing the live area of the Oculus. In terms of getting developers the tools they need to build games and applications using the new technology, Oculus will be making the hands from the toybox application available for developer use soon.
During the keynote, we were treated to an abundance of footage, highlighting numerous upcoming Oculus games. Keep your eyes peeled for our demo later, when we'll go in-depth with as many as possible. We'll also delve into: Oculus's take on the "paint" application; its sculpting program, dubbed Medium; as well as Bullet Train, a first-person shooter using the Unreal Engine, which makes incredible use of virtual reality and the new Touch, including bullet-time capabilities that allow gamers to slow the world down, pluck bullets from the air, and fling them back at their enemies.
The Future of VR
The keynote concluded with a talk from Michael Abrash, during which the Oculus Chief Scientist laid out a roadmap for the future of not just Oculus, but of virtual reality as a whole. As Abrash explained, the goal is to offer a completely immersive VR experience that touches on all of the senses and allows us to experience our non-virtual reality. While the way forward for some of these experiences—especially taste and smell—are extremely difficult, they are already beginning to make significant moves forward in regard to the other senses.
Of particular interest is the quest to improve the in-system visual aesthetic. There are various metrics that inform how "real" your vision looks, and in all of them, the Oculus currently lags behind real life, which should come as no real surprise. The difficulty in improving any individual metric, however, is that other metrics almost always take a hit. For example, increasing the field of view invariable cuts down on the quality of the image, and any hardware change or update affects ergonomic factors like the weight and bulkiness of the device.
While vision improvements are always appreciated, what's most exciting about Oculus's future is its plan for haptics. Though the technology is a ways off, its hope is to be able to reconstruct reality in real time, including everything from furniture in a room to actual faces, with the ability for individuals to then interact with their virtual world in the same way they would the physical. There are significant hurdles, however, as Abrash explained that Oculus not only needs to build the desired haptic technology, but also develop the software and hardware that allow it to put it to use.
The Oculus Connect keynote was a fascinating glimpse into the future of virtual reality and what Oculus has planned. The company has set some lofty goals for improving on existing technology and even pioneering new tech to make virtual reality more immersive than ever. But it isn't just planning for the future. With the Gear VR, it's also making its technology available to a much wider audience. Whether you're a hardcore techie, willing to drop some serious coin on the latest technology, or a more casual, mobile gamer, Oculus wants you to experience virtual reality like never before.
Source: pcmag.com
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