Interview with Palmer up on Kotaku

[Stryker]

Hey Guys, didn't see a thread about this but pretty cool interview with Palmer up on Kotaku. Though he is saying that OVR wants to sell these through their website and not retail, I found that really odd. Hopefully they can meet the CV1 demand and handle it themselves.

http://kotaku.com/the-future-of-oculus-rift-according-to-the-man-who-inv-1622182782

[ZmillA]

He says CV1 is going to be smaller. How can it be smaller and still have a larger FOV, while still allowing for the screen distance to be adjusted and allowing for people with larger heads to use it?

[cerebral]

"ZmillA" wrote:
He says CV1 is going to be smaller. How can it be smaller and still have a larger FOV, while still allowing for the screen distance to be adjusted and allowing for people with larger heads to use it?

Metamaterial lenses.Never heard of them :lol:
So Morpheus will be in retail shops and Rift not? There are basically as much hardcore gamers with powerful PCs as there
are PS4. 😮
10-15 time more resolution means 8k. Why so pessimistic? Next year there will be already 4k smartphones.
in 3 years we'll see a prototype my guess.
Why is Palmer Luckey always talking about ' we have a loooong way to go'.
Sounds like Samsung is going to make a roadmap with 1MP increase from year to year prolonging only their own business.

[Dreamwriter]

"cerebral" wrote:
So Morpheus will be in retail shops and Rift not? There are basically as much hardcore gamers with powerful PCs as there are PS4. 😮

And those hardcore gamers don't go to Best Buy or Target or whatever to buy hardware, they go online to places like Amazon, NewEgg, TigerDirect, or the manufacturer directly in some cases. Also, who knows when Morpheus is coming out, Sony has said it isn't going to be anytime soon.

10-15 time more resolution means 8k. Why so pessimistic?

He was talking about future technology vs currently available technology, and the max resolution of currently available consumer technology is 4k. So 10-15 times more resolution than 4k is indeed years away.

[cerebral]

"Dreamwriter" wrote:

"cerebral" wrote:
So Morpheus will be in retail shops and Rift not? There are basically as much hardcore gamers with powerful PCs as there are PS4. 😮

And those hardcore gamers don't go to Best Buy or Target or whatever to buy hardware, they go online to places like Amazon, NewEgg, TigerDirect, or the manufacturer directly in some cases. Also, who knows when Morpheus is coming out, Sony has said it isn't going to be anytime soon.

10-15 time more resolution means 8k. Why so pessimistic?

He was talking about future technology vs currently available technology, and the max resolution of currently available consumer technology is 4k. So 10-15 times more resolution than 4k is indeed years away.

from where do u know he is referring to 4k? But if he is, i think even that wouldnt take that much time, ideally speaking.
From manufacturing POV it is already possible.
8 years ago noone could imagine all people are going to have 45 inch
LED TV in their livingrooms.
If industry decides to sell a new tech then they'll do it. Technology and tools to produce such insane density are already there.
It will be an iindustrial paradigma change nothing more, like with battery cars, that'll need hundreds of billions of investments for the f.... amount of batteries.(one GigaFAb of Tesla costs 5 billion for only 500,000 cars. :mrgreen: )
The only thing that is technically holding evolution of VR back is PROCESSING POWER and MONEY(huge investments,sadly).
THerefore we would have to wait two decades more, but with foveated eye tracking that could quickly change.

[ThreeEyes]

It is amazing so many take anything OVR says and turn it negative.

So what if they sell it exclusively through their website. That means lower prices as there is no dealer markup. It also wouldn't surprise me if they don't do preorders and only make it available once the distribution centers are stocked thanks to everyone who didn't understand the preorder and ship as soon as available gets the DKs to everyone way faster than building stock in warehouses before allowing orders. Hopefully they do it the same way as DK2 but we'll just have to see.

And all Palmer said about the future is that there is a lot of technology to develop and a number of years to do it over. That means just like any other technology, it will grow over time. We didn't just go from an 8088 CPU to multicore multigigahertz CPUs that have their power measured in GFlops to TFlops. Or from CGA graphics to true color 4k displays with refresh rates in the hundreds. Nothing in the computer industry happened in a single jump and it has all taken decades to accomplish.

I can literally see great things ahead. The glass is more than half full and things are ripe for big innovation and advances. It's good.

[occhiowalker]

This is the most important part of the whole interview:
((but Palmer does confirm a previous interview quote where he said he would be disappointed if it wasn't out before the end of 2015. "I did say that," he agrees.))

[Cgpnz]

If he wants it in every household, he needs to go retail. Plus the one off
nasty courier cost is gone.

[Paul33993]

"Cgpnz" wrote:
If he wants it in every household, he needs to go retail. Plus the one off
nasty courier cost is gone.

And replaced with distribution/shipping costs (that are paid by someone) and retailer mark-ups. Web only really is the cheaper method. And since CV1 isn't being targeted at the mainstream audience, pretty irrelevant where it's sold.

[rtweed]

CV1 is still going to be aimed at hardcore gamers and early adopters. Those people shouldn't be buying the devkits (if they aren't developers) and the fact that they are shouldn't factor too heavily into OVR's business plans.

It makes sense to sell online only in the beginning, although given what's happened with DK1 & 2, I'd be thinking about partnering with Amazon for sales and distribution rather than trying to do it all in-house, because it's clearly not what OVR is good at.

I'm sure they will go retail sooner or later, but if I were planning that rollout I'd go retail with CV1.1 or CV2, after I knew for certain that the supply chain and QA processes were up to the requirements of selling large volumes through distributors and retailers. Starting online also gives them more control over their initial user base, which in social marketing terms is going to be their most influential, high lifetime value customers (OVR are owned by FB, so what's the chances they've already considered this?)

It would also be a good idea to wait until there was some significant content available before trying to sell to the average consumer that's never thought about VR, but might pick one up on impulse. Otherwise those people will only be disappointed with what they get (unless Carmack & Co are secretly working on some earth-shattering first party content).

It's also unlikely that problems like sim-sickness, standard input devices and positional audio will have been fully ironed out by the time CV1 comes out. Those things might not bother early adopters but they might give the more casual consumer a bad impression of VR and turn them off buying CV2+. I think everyone involved is conscious of how VR was oversold 20-ish years ago, didn't live up to the hype and was subsequently written off until now. They need to be able to walk before they can run.

[cerebral]

"Cgpnz" wrote:
If he wants it in every household, he needs to go retail. Plus the one off
nasty courier cost is gone.

not really. One example. 2013 there have been 3 billion parcel shippings in Germany. 😄 g
If Oculus manages it to have two dozens distribution centers on the whole planet then they are good to go.
But hold on, maybe there are going to be retail trader protests like there have been a few with Tesla. :lol: