Oculus Half Dome - a deeper dive

[dburne]

Some very exciting things in this Oculus blog- Varifocal Lens and Eye Tracking.

A little deeper dive than was revealed at F8.

 

https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-the-team-behind-half-dome-facebook-reality-labs-varifocal-prototype/

 

Sounding very exciting to me.

[chiliwili69]

It great that they have the resources to create a large R&D team to research every aspect of VR. They invest in the long run.

Nevertheless, having a mechanical thing there moving back and forward every milisecond it a real challenge to be put in a domestic product. I wonder how many cycles this will require to require some maintenance or change worn parts.... the reliability of a machine is inversely proportional to the number of moving parts.

For the nearest future (1-3 years) I think they should focus more on the FOV, resolution, computing requirement and price. They are the most demanded items for the VR and non-VR users:

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/33300-why-you-are-still-not-in-vr/

 

The interesting thing is that despite of all new tech introduced in this prototype they keep the same form factor of the original Rift. This is a real challenge on top of the previous.

 

The first time Palmer showed the Rift (I don´t remember where) I thought, well, it is small, it is just OK.

Only after the years of usage and comparing to other headsets (VivePro) is when I fully realized all the great ergonomics work being done in the Rift.

Honestly I think it is difficult to improve the compactness and well adaptation to the head. I think the Rift form factor will be there for many years.

 

[HunDread]

Agree with all points. In addition the moving mechanics will most probably boost the price too. It's good that they have ideas like this but not sure it's not a bit early. A ton of Rifts already had to be replaced including mine without this kind of complex tech. Improving the essential parts of the VR experience seems more important to me. 

 

With that said, I hope they prove me wrong.

 

 

[dburne]

I believe they have stated that some of this new technology they are working on is for further down the road, not everything will be in a CV2.

It will be interesting to see how all this develops.