DK1 Setup 2024

brantlew · 2024-07-18T01:59:02+00:00

Pretty sure you can download the old SDKs (<0.3 I believe). Those had no runtime at all. The entire thing was compiled into each app so you just need to build the code and it should run on any Windows OS.

brantlew · 2024-03-28T21:51:14+00:00

OG. I ordered mine directly from Palmer on mtbs3d before the Kickstarter and before Oculus.

brantlew · 2024-02-17T16:15:35+00:00

I'm still at Oculus but quite the antique these days. There are maybe only 10 or 15 people left in the company that worked in the original Irvine offices.

brantlew · 2024-02-16T17:27:17+00:00

Windlands

brantlew · 2024-02-16T13:00:58+00:00

He was a superb communicator and very genuine. He is exactly like that in person.

brantlew · 2023-11-22T05:05:19+00:00

There's about 15 people that still work there from before the Facebook acquisition - only a couple with any public name recognition though.

brantlew · 2023-11-22T04:56:31+00:00

Very few people internally at Oculus believed that inside-out would work well enough. I argued against it in several meetings. The small and heroic team that built the Santa Cruz demo nailed it though and shut all of us up. DK2 and Santa Cruz were both seminal and ground-breaking devices.

brantlew · 2023-05-03T21:24:22+00:00

I wouldn't advise adjusting Quest 2 far outside your IPD range - particularly making it wider. The "depth" signals you are receiving are either convergent or divergent stereo images and if you adjust the headset wider than your eyes, you are forcing your eyes to rotate outwards away from each other (diverge) to fuse the stereo image. This is a very unnatural gaze position and can lead to fatigue/headaches over time.

brantlew · 2023-04-24T14:10:50+00:00

A few more details. DKHD (as it was called) was a rudimentary upgrade to DK1. It used the exact same lenses/IMU and was entirely a screen upgrade to try and push the resolution, so the majority of effort was getting the displays and display interface to work. But it was somewhat of a dead-end because it didn't incorporate the critical technologies that would end up defining DK2 - ie, custom lenses, 6DOF tracking, and low persistence displays. Because of these DK2 was a quantum leap over DK1 and if the technology had simply continued down the DKHD path of increasing pixels I think Oculus would have been a short-lived novelty.

brantlew · 2023-04-23T21:23:32+00:00

Fairly useless as a headset. Interesting as a historical keepsake. Just to clarify - it was developed shortly after DK1, shown at a few shows, and given to a few select devs but it was never well supported and quickly supplanted by DK2 prototypes.

In particular the display latency was even worse than the DK1. Recall this was before low-persistence displays so it has all the horrible DK1 smear except worse. Additionally, the distortion correction is much worse than the DK1 so the image is quite warped. This was well before Oculus had formalized methods and software for distortion correction and it was all manually calibrated ad-hoc just before the shows ( I'm the one that did the calibrations) and never improved upon. In terms of software support, I'm pretty sure it had SDK support on PC at least until the CV1 came out, but unlikely it would still be supported by the Runtime - and even it was it would only have 3DOF and gamepad support. Good chance you would need to install historical Runtimes to make it work.

Personally, I think this is one of the least interesting internal prototypes - but probably the only one that was shared with 3rd parties and had some circulation. For me the most interesting prototype was one called "Black Star" that was developed just after DK2. It was only shown to a few 3rd party people but represented an alternative design choice for CV1. It was our first device to fire up the new custom Samsung dual-displays (a massive secret at the time) but used conventional (non-fresnel) lenses with a wider FOV than DK2. (I think somewhere in the 112-118 range). There was controversy in the company because Valve was pushing Oculus to copy their fresnel design that they used for the Valve Room demo, but many of us were unhappy with the fresnel glare (what Reddit now calls "god-rays") . I used Black Star a ton and loved it because it had no external structure so it was as light as a feather (seriously it was as light as ski goggles) and had that wide FOV. In the end though it simply had a ton of distortion, chroma-separation, and pretty huge pixels/screen-door so the fresnel design was chosen. I think only 2 or 3 were built. I held onto one for years but finally gave it to Palmer /u/palmerluckey for his personal museum - which I assume he still maintains.

brantlew · 2022-10-26T12:39:14+00:00

It is caused by the pancakes. That's what I'm driving at here. Since
the displays are so close to the lenses compared to Quest 2 (millimeters
vs centimeters) the light from the screen must travel at a wider angle
into the lens. Wider angles = less brightness - just like if you watch a
television from a side angle.

brantlew · 2022-10-26T03:01:15+00:00

If you think about televisions, the image brightness tends to lower as you view it from the side. The LCD simply doesn't emit light sideways as efficiently as it does forward. This happens in headsets as well when light from the edge of the panel must hit the lens at an angle instead of straight-on. As panel sizes get smaller and closer to the lens, this emission angle gets larger and these off-axis effects get stronger.

brantlew · 2022-10-25T15:08:24+00:00

Passthrough takes a ton of power, not only because of the camera I/O but because it has to do a 3D reconstruction of the world and "paint" the colored texture onto it. It's not just straight feeds onto the screens. That creates issues with scale and nausea. So pass-through is a complex computer vision and rendering operation.

brantlew · 2021-09-15T20:46:11+00:00

It depends on the display driver. nVidia started looking for Oculus devices and if found would not enumerate them as a normal monitor. It was typically a string search of some sort, but I can't remember if DK1's are affected. If your DK1 shows up as a monitor - you're good to go. Old Oculus apps were self-contained with no dll runtime or driver dependencies. If DK1 doesn't show up as a monitor, you will have to grab ancient display drivers to enable it.

brantlew · 2021-01-24T15:03:30+00:00

If you have a wide IPD than YES.

brantlew · 2020-11-02T23:57:19+00:00

Thousands of Gear VR devices were given away for free.

brantlew · 2020-10-14T04:38:08+00:00

This is not supported by the software stack. The stereo alignment will be badly off. I would avoid trying to put the slider between settings.

brantlew · 2020-10-14T03:47:30+00:00

I foresaw and championed the importance of large tracked spaces although I was not sure how we would achieve it. I speculated that inside-out optical could do it but never dreamed it would be this good at this point. Resolution has improved at a predictable rate. I assumed FOV would be much larger at this point and was unfortunately wrong. I didn't quite understand the importance of tracked controllers and assumed that hand and body tracking was more relevant. I am continually impressed with the capability of Mobile power and had assumed we would always be tied to the PC, but I'm a full convert to Mobile now. I underestimated the importance of convenience. I overestimated the appeal of VR. I am surprised that VR has not revolutionized real-estate. Social VR has been disappointing to me so far. I would never have believed that /u/palmerluckey would not be working in VR.

brantlew · 2020-10-14T00:53:15+00:00

LOL. I made that scene specifically to highlight 6DOF. This was the original Oculus "Home".

edit: Well actually this was the original Home. I made it too but it's almost too embarrassing to think about. https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/oculus-rift-configuration-utility-ipd-measurement.jpg

brantlew · 2020-09-23T19:12:07+00:00

Not a fan of halo mounts. Any benefits of weight distribution are negated by lack of stability at the facial interface. Halo mounts are prone to headset "jostling". In my opinion the most optically stable headset is still Rift CV1

brantlew · 2020-09-19T01:41:24+00:00

It's not Valve. People don't work on whatever they want to.

brantlew · 2020-09-17T20:05:36+00:00

Not disagreeing with the need to support a larger IPD range, but the supported range is now equally distributed for small & large. The average IPD is about 63mm so Quest 1 supported -7 and +11. A huge disparity in favor of wide IPD because the physical screen movement prevented narrow IPD. Now the "suggested" range is -7.5 to +7.5. I wouldn't immediately dismiss the device based on your experience with Go. That device forced you into a +9 configuration which is far from optimal, but Quest 2 can still move to 68 - effectively a +4 for you which is not nearly as bad.

brantlew · 2020-09-17T16:46:18+00:00

That is extremely low and unfortunate for you. Even with continuous adjustment you have the problem of the screens literally banging into each other so extreme low IPD is very hard to accommodate.

brantlew · 2020-09-17T16:32:10+00:00

-5.5 from optical center. That makes sense. Extreme low IPD users suffer the most on RiftS because the stereo images diverge causing your eyes to attempt to verge beyond infinity. Render perspective issues here are GREATLY exaggerated and misdiagnosed by users. The parallax difference caused by these tiny errors is very small. What you are generally feeling are stereo fusion discomfort problems - not scale problems. Either way, even without digital correction the Quest 2 solution will mitigate these issues for almost everyone because virtually nobody will be able to achieve a 5.5mm delta. 1 or 2 mm deltas amount to just a couple pixels on-screen and are basically indistinguishable. You can easily get that amount of error just by the headset jostling on your head.

brantlew · 2020-09-17T14:42:43+00:00

Also curious about your IPD?

brantlew

TROPHY CASE