OC4 News

[kojack]

So far we have two headsets announced:
Oculus Go is a stand alone (not mobile phone or pc based) headset. It will be $199us and will release early next year.

Oculus Santa Cruz (which we've seen before) will be a product too, with 6dof tracked hand controllers.

No specs yet.

Hmm, Santa Cruz doesn't have headphones. Is that just due to early prototype?

(Just like OC3, the live streaming in VR is broken, so I'm watching on a monitor)

Update 1:
Oculus GO has 2560x1440 and new lenses which reduce glare.
Audio drivers build into headset, you can get sound without headphones.
Oculus GO is GearVR compatible for software.
Unity and Unreal support.
Developers are getting GO in November.

Update 2:
So apparently the rift has games. I'm glad they pointed that out. 🙂

Oculus For Business program.
New rift bundle (3 sensors, face interfaces, touch and headset)
Commercial vr license. Bulk orders.

Update 3:
Rift bundle now at $399 permanently as of today.

Update 4:
Santa Cruz controllers have a touch pad.
Constellation IR based.
Santa Cruz has 4 ultra wide cameras for inside out tracking. The tracking volume goes behind you partially (looked like maybe 230-260 degrees? Just guessing from the little diagram)

Update 5:
Oculus for Business bundle is $900. It comes with: Headset, Touch Controllers, 3 x Sensors, Remote, 3 x Rift Fit, Commercial Warranty, Preferential Customer Service, Commercial Licence.
https://www.oculusforbusiness.com/

Oculus Dash is the new interface.
It can open as an overlay while in a game.
It's designed for Touch. I don't know how this will affect people without Touch.
Dash lets you use PC apps in VR. You can pin overlays of things like videos inside of games.
Debugging Dash using Visual Studio inside of Dash. 🙂

Oculus Home now has customisable environments and interactive stuff.
Looks like Home has become The Sims.
Games can be launched like in Arizona Sunshine: plug in cartridges.
You can visit other people's environments.
Shared spaces in the future.

Dash and new Home are part of Rift Core 2.0, coming in december.

Update 6:
New oculus avatar system.
Developers can make custom avatar accessories (they come with games by the sound of it).
Avatars will be usable on SteamVR and Daydream.
Coming in 2018.
Lipsyncing.
Eyes auto track interesting objects around you.

New Oculus store coming 2018.

[kzintzi]

little surprised Atmos hasn't turned up to discuss the new features and options..

[kzintzi]

thought you might :wink:

[Nekto2]

zboson said:

No news about the Carmel browser yet at OC4.

Was it GearVR browser?
FireFox and Crome supports WebVR.
And... it seems Dash will do.

[Siilk]

Santa Cruz controllers have a touch pad.

Please tell me it's not in place of thumb sticks. 😕

[kojack]

Siilk said:

Santa Cruz controllers have a touch pad.

Please tell me it's not in place of thumb sticks. 😕

Sadly:

Also less buttons than the rift.
There doesn't seem to be anywhere to rest your thumb either, hold it in the air or it's activating the touch pad.

The Go has a touch pad too.


I'm really not a fan of that. I don't like the Vive wands, I bought a Steam Controller and I hate the touch pads on it, I even disabled the touch pad on my laptop (I use a real mouse with it).

[Siilk]

kojack said:

Sadly:
Also less buttons than the rift.
There doesn't seem to be anywhere to rest your thumb either, hold it in the air or it's activating the touch pad.

The Go has a touch pad too.

I'm really not a fan of that. I don't like the Vive wands, I bought a Steam Controller and I hate the touch pads on it, I even disabled the touch pad on my laptop (I use a real mouse with it).

Yeah, sad news indeed. 😞 Oculus touch design was one of the biggest CV1 selling points for me, it's combination of physical buttons, thumbsticks and touch sensors is perfect. My only hope is that CV2 will still use same touch controllers as CV1. Well, either that or a support for 3rd party controllers.

[Anonymous]

Well the Touchpad makes sense to emulate the Gear VR library of games that were all built around the Touchpad on the side of the headset. 

For PC VR I'd much rather have buttons and a stick though!

Doesn't Dash look sooooo aweeesome?!

[zboson]

kojack said:

I just got into the Carmack speech (half an hour late, I was playing Roborecall).
Apparently if I heard correctly, Oculus GO has an LCD screen with proper RGB sub pixels. He says that while it has more latency and not as good blacks as oled, it's an overall win due to having higher effective resolution (1440p RGB LCD is higher res than 1440p Pentile OLED).

I got a OLED display on my laptop and I would not want to go back. The visual quality is stunning. Blacks are black and not gray.

As far as Santa Cruz goes, even if touch pad turns out being a step back, I think overall it's going to be really great. Those that got to try it out at OC4 had very positive things to say about it.

https://uploadvr.com/hands-on-santa-cruz-full-freedom-controllers/

Put simply, Santa Cruz feels like it represents the way VR should be.
The controllers ditched the analog stick from the Rift controller in
favor of a touchpad — though I didn’t use the touchpad for anything in
the game — and they overall felt much lighter than Touch. The headset
itself slipped on easily and it was at least as comfortable as a Rift.
The freedom I experienced losing that wire while enjoying hand presence
is a high bar for immersion and it will be hard not to hold all future
VR hardware to that standard.

Somehow I missed that Santa Cruz is stand alone i.e. it does not require a PC. I thought it was only going to be wireless.

https://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-oculus-santa-cruz-ii-prototype-controllers-2017-oculus-connect-4/

Quickly, to clear up any confusion, let’s be clear that Santa Cruz is a standalone
headset. That means it doesn’t rely on a PC for anything—it has
everything on board that it needs for VR, including power and compute.
That’s different than a wireless headset, which would be
untethered, but still rely on a host PC to do the rendering and
computing. Because Santa Cruz is a standalone headset, the idea is that
you can use it anywhere, and the inside-out tracking ought to give you
essentially unlimited tracking volumes.

I'm quite surprised by that. Will it have enough processing/graphics power? I'm skeptical. Maybe it will have two modes: stand-alone and wireless?

[kojack]

Atmos73 said:

Come on Oculus stole Abrash from Vive

Atmos73 said:

So what next - Oculus stole my Abrash?

Atmos73 said:

Hell, I bought from Oculus Home after Oculus stole Abrash from Valve

Atmos73 said:

But didn't Oculus leech Carmack from Zenimax and Abrash from Valve

Atmos73 said:

Haha Valve never sued Oculus for steeling Abrash - not yet anyway.

[Anonymous]

Valve stole Abrash from RAD Game Tools. 

...or you know like every other human being made a continuous decisions to change jobs.