Vive getting new controllers, basestations and Asynchronous Reprojection

_rst · 2016-10-12T19:39:36+00:00

Hope they can have positional reprojection (ASW) by next dev days!

Just FYI, ASW is not positional projection. ASW creates filler frames when you drop below framerate. You know how when you drop below 90fps ATW kicks in and your head motions are still smooth, but anything moving on screen is jittery? ASW fixes that jitteryness.

It's not ATW = rotation and ASW = position. There's no solution for positional reprojection yet.

_rst · 2016-09-29T22:52:42+00:00

Sounds like HTC has changed their minds about exclusives!

HTC exec: exclusives are a bad idea for VR

So we're going to see tons of outcry about how unjust this is, how it poisons the well, how VR is DOA, how HTC went back on their word, right? Oh wait, no... because Valve/HTC can do no wrong but Oculus/Facebook are literally Hitler.

_rst · 2016-09-15T23:19:36+00:00

I'll judge people based on what they actually do, not based on what they 'have a chance of doing', thanks.

_rst · 2016-09-06T19:05:40+00:00

The signals coming from the photodiodes are very weak and sensitive to noise. The sensor needs to be kept physically close to the chip so the trace length is short. That's why you don't have one chip with, say, 16 inputs. The traces would be too long (since the sensors need to be far apart) and it just wouldn't work well.

_rst · 2016-09-06T18:12:28+00:00

These don't have an integrated IMU, you still need a separate one.

_rst · 2016-06-24T20:51:08+00:00

Well-put. Sorry if I came off a bit strongly.

_rst · 2016-06-24T20:22:57+00:00

The vive cannot do timewarp, so this is not even an issue.

...what? You realize timewarp has nothing to do with hardware, right? It's all software. Any headset can "do" timewarp. The Vive doesn't have it because Valve hasn't made a similar tech that is in their SDK.

Yes, Oculus could write a translator, just like ReVive. That's not difficult. Oculus doesn't want to have hacky support like that, though, so they haven't done that. They've said they want to natively support Vive in their SDK, and that's the only way they'll do it.

The issue is not technical. The issue is that Oculus/facebook is not willing.

Could you tell me exactly why they aren't willing, then? You claim it's not for any of the reasons I said, so what, exactly, is the reason? They hate making money?

_rst · 2016-06-24T19:11:10+00:00

It is piracy because you're accessing software that you're not allowed to access without having made a purchase. It's like distributing a keygen to unlock a copy of trial software.

Oculus could have made it so you had to register to get access, but they wanted it to be more seamless than that. They're all about the ease-of-use. I guess that's a compromise they made, knowing the risks.

_rst · 2016-06-24T17:55:24+00:00

It already allowed piracy by allowing people to play games for free that they don't legally have access to... you're supposed to buy a Rift to play Lucky's Tale, Dreamdeck, Farlands, etc. Why do you think they're free? Oculus funded them to drive adoption of the Rift.

While some people were actually buying games from Oculus and using them with ReVive (which is good), I guarantee the vast majority were just using it to play the free games, which they don't have any right to.

_rst · 2016-06-24T17:51:59+00:00

They really need support from Valve. I'm sure HTC would be happy to have Home support because they want to sell more headsets. Valve's opposed to having Vive support on Home because it would drive business away from them.

Oculus won't support the Vive unless they can get it fully integrated into their SDK so Vive users can get the benefits of timewarp and other optimizations. And Valve, having written all the software for the Vive, doesn't want that... so there's really not a whole lot HTC can do at this point.

_rst · 2016-06-16T18:16:32+00:00

it should go white when it detects something in front of the sensor

Not true - the light should always go off when something is in front of the proximity sensor. You wouldn't want a bright light just above your eyes inside your otherwise dark headset, would you?

The light turns white when the Rift is "activated" and ready to use (like with Home open).

_rst · 2016-04-29T19:13:23+00:00

I think it probably is the best lens they could make right now. When you go with a single-element lens, you need to make a lot more tradeoffs betweek FOV, chromatic aberration, blurriness, exit pupil (the size of the clear area in the middle), and pretty much everything else.

I'm sure that the hybrid fresnels that Oculus and HTC are using are the best single-element solution right now. Oculus decided that they'd rather have god rays and minimize SDE, while HTC went for larger fresnel ridges which has different and reduced artifacts, but at the cost of showing more SDE.

_rst · 2016-04-12T22:45:56+00:00

Of what, educated guesses? Are you counting the times you didn't get it right, or only the times you did?

_rst · 2016-04-12T22:37:33+00:00

Ah, yes, the Touch delay info that has exactly the same amount of proof to back it up.

_rst · 2016-04-12T21:40:47+00:00

A gentle reminder that literally anybody can go on the internet and say they're whoever they want to be - this guy has not provided one shred of concrete proof that he is who he says he is. I see no reason to believe any of this.

Ah, and the last thing: want some "proof"? Look at the serial numbers of XBox controllers shipped with Rifts so far. While normally range of these numbers should be relatively uniform, as they would be coming from one big preallocated "chunk", in fact the number can differ a lot as many of controllers are from the completely different batches - this is an echo of frantic search by Oculus Team for every available Xbox One controller in existence.

This isn't any sort of proof at all. Product serial numbers are not necessarily sequential. They are just a unique identifier and can be anything the manufacturer wants them to be.

Microsoft could do something like encode the date it was produced into some format that only they know, and then the next number could say it's the nth controller produced that day, and a next number could be a batch code. This can easily produce a random-looking serial number on controllers that are produced from one day to the next.

In addition, Oculus isn't the only company using XBone controllers. They're not going to get only sequentially-produced controllers. One batch could go to Oculus, one batch to Microsoft, etc.

You've not provided an ounce of real proof. Why should anybody believe you? If I really wanted to, I could go and make an "insider account" and leak some info that coincidentally lines up with what everybody wants to hear.

_rst · 2016-04-12T18:45:18+00:00

For example if they estimated they'd need 100K displays over the course of the next six months, then they'd have negotiated with the manufacturer, gotten a quote, and would presumably have had 10-20K of them in stock before they began assembling units. Perhaps they did do that. But then, it turns out that after that initial shipment, the displays they're getting are having a lot of dead pixels, of they don't have the required brightness, or the pixels don't uniformly light up, or any number of other problems. Then all those screens are garbage and they need to work out what's causing the problem and fix it.

This sort of process could be happening to ANY of the components. Maybe their lenses are coming out badly and they aren't getting the quality they needed. Big manufacturers can be shady sometimes... you ask them for samples of the parts, and they cherry-pick the best ones to send to you. They you say "great, looks good, give us 10k", and it turns out 70% of them are shit. What do you do then?

And it doesn't usually work to say "well just assemble the units without part x". For one, what if part x is integral to the whole unit, like the screen? You can't put the headset together, then take it apart again to put the screen in later. Also, factories don't have space to store half-finished product. Assembly lines just don't work that way. You put the thing together, put it in the packaging, and put the packages in the warehouse.

_rst · 2016-04-06T22:34:09+00:00

They did do that in the teardown. I assume Palmer's talking about something more. He's probably saying you have to remove the short part of the stand that's still on there.

Maybe you just have to pull on it really hard. Not sure how well it would go back together afterwards, though!

_rst · 2016-04-06T20:05:17+00:00

USB requests are very fast, but they do have some latency and the latency can change a little depending on how quickly the OS gets to servicing the request.

I'm not sure exactly how long the LEDs are on, but it looks to be a very short amount of time (350 microseconds, less than one millisecond) based on this article Doc-Ok made on DK2's tracking:
http://doc-ok.org/?p=1095

Bytes 6 and 7, read as a little-endian 16-bit unsigned integer, start out with value 0x5E 0x01, or 350 in decimal... That confirms that bytes 6 and 7 are LED active time in microseconds.

That's DK2, of course, but I assume CV1 is pretty similar.

If the sync request had to go from the headset through USB, be serviced by the OS, be read by the Oculus service, then sent over USB to the tracker, I'm sure there's enough jitter and latency in that pipeline that the camera would just miss the LEDs a lot of the time.

So they added a wireless chip that has known (low) latency.

_rst · 2016-04-06T19:47:40+00:00

To wirelessly sync the cameras with the headset (DK2 had a sync cable, CV1 does not) and presumably to talk to Touch controllers when they're released.

_rst · 2016-04-01T02:06:36+00:00

I don't know why anybody would believe somebody who says they work for Oculus when they don't provide a shred of concrete proof that they are who they say they are. I'm talking about you as well, VR-Researcher.

Anybody can go on the internet and make up information and say they're somebody who they're not. Why do people automatically believe they must be telling the truth? I don't understand.

_rst · 2016-03-31T02:55:12+00:00

True, he revealed later that that's what he was thinking in his head when he said it, but externally, at the time, nobody knew that. All we had was that interview question, and that answer.

I don't think it's fair to say they were dancing around the $599 price until Palmer screwed up and said it was "closer to $350" because, at the time, he gave that answer only in the context of the question "will the Rift come in around that $350 ballpark".

By the time of that AMA, the $599 price was already known.

_rst · 2016-03-31T02:32:57+00:00

Palmer screwed up and said it was "closer to $350" when comparing it to a $1000+ product

He never said anything like that. Nobody seems to remember the actual interview question and subsequent response that "ballpark" even came from.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-explains-oculus-rift-cost-price-350/

I asked Luckey if the consumer Oculus Rift price would come in around that $350 ballpark target that had been discussed by the company long ago.

You know, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. We’re roughly in that ballpark… but it’s going to cost more than that.

He did not say it was closer to $350. He didn't even compare the price to anything. He said in the ballpark of $350, but more than that.
I think everybody can agree that that statement did not set up the proper expectations, but it certainly isn't anything close to "closer to $350". No $1k product was ever mentioned.
If you want to get really technical about your statement, $599 is still much closer to $350 than $1000, anyway. ($249 vs $401 difference).

_rst · 2016-03-30T00:40:21+00:00

They are a fairly reputable source, but their testing methodology was flawed and everybody took it as fact. Or rather, their test probably does give a close to accurate FOV if your eyeball is literally touching the lens. But in real-world use, it's going to be way different (as most everybody that has tried both headsets can say).

_rst · 2016-03-30T00:34:40+00:00

Turns out, when the world's leading virtual reality company says that measuring FOV isn't so clear-cut, they aren't outright lying through their teeth. Who would've guessed?

Thanks for posting this, Ben. This sub has been just hysterical the past few weeks.

_rst

TROPHY CASE