4 great ways to embrace alternate realities and reject your own
Yes! Got you with a clickbait title! Okay, moving on.. oh.. no.. there's no "4 great ways to embrace alternate realities" unless you count the four features of the DK2 that I list below...
Today the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2) arrived in the office to much excitement, and for good reason. We've had the first development kit in the office for quite some time now, the DK2 represents a leap forward on the core Oculus Rift concept.
So what's changed from the old clunky DK1 to the sleek and sexy new DK2? Let me tell you..
Positional Head Tracking
"What the hell does that mean?" everyone always asks.. well quite simply it means that you can move your head side to side, forward and back, up and down as well as just looking left/right/up/down.
In practice, that means that if the VR app/game you are using puts you in a desk, you can actually lean forward in your chair in real life and get a closer look at things in the virtual world without touching a keyboard or mouse.
This really steps up the immersion because you can actually look around that A-pillar in your favourite racing game or duck your head out of the way to avoid a ball in a virtual game of dodgeball.
Higher resolution
The DK2 runs at 1980x1080, which gives 960x1080 per eye. This bump in resolution really makes a difference to how the virtual world feels around you when you can see much more detail. Subtle reflections on metallic surfaces, small particles of dust floating past your head, you get the idea.
This is a big improvement when going from the DK1 to the DK2 since the DK1 was much lower resolution
Low Persistence OLED Display
This is not something that people notice the effect of straight away but you can pick up it after a little bit of time with the DK2. Basically the low persistence OLED display reduces the time it takes to get a pixel in front of your face based on the changes in your head movement. Basically, it significantly reduces motion blur
Still don't know what I'm talking about? Check this image out
No more 'Box of burden'!
The DK1 had a very unsightly and annoying connector box which was permanently attached to the rift headset. The box was big (relatively speaking), ugly, and always got in the way when trying to move things around a desk where the DK1 was set up on.
No more! It's gone! Yay!
There's a much smaller box connected to the DK2 cable now, but it's about half the size of a match box so it no longer gets in the way. Good times.
Why are you writing about this?
Because we got a cool piece of technology which is only going to become more prevalent in our society once the actual consumer version is released and other manufacturers start making and releasing their own competing technology.
The future of VR is bright!
