Feeding Edge’s Oculus Rift DK2 (Development Kit version 2) arrived last week. I had an original Oculus Rift (Pre-Facebook buyout) form the Kickstarter campaign. It is amazing looking back and seen that I wrote about that in August 2013! How time flies!
The new DK2 is a big leap in technology, though it comes in a much less impressive cardboard box, rather than the foam filled attache case of the original one.
The new unit is smaller and lighter but boasts a huge increase in picture quality. There have been quite a few ergonomic tweaks too.
The placing of the wires to the unit are now in the centre top and the cable is fed over the top head strap so it doesn’t get in the way as much as the side dangling cable of the DK1.
The old control box form the DK1 is gone, this used to take all the connections and a power switch etc. It was often the first thing to fall on the floor as the cables got tangled up.
The eye pieces are noticeably bigger too, presumably to get all that extra resolution and field of view in.
Aside from the resolution of the screens the biggest change is the external tracking of the Rift’s position. DK1 knew you were turning and tipping but if you stepped or moved side to side it had no idea. DK2 comes with a sensor that need to be mounted and pointing at the rift. It can, with software that bothers to use it, tell if you are near of far right or left, up or down relative the the sensor. It is not a kinect, but it does give 3d space positioning.
My neighbours may glance up and see this tripod and thing it is facing out of the window, when in fact it is pointing at me!
Getting the rift running on the Mac was a doddle as usual. With no control box the connections are simply and HDMI for the display and two USB connections one for the camera device and one for the headset. The power lead runs into a tiny splitter block and a synch lead runs from that to the camera sensor.
It was more tricky getting it to run on windows 8.1. though. My HP laptop has 2 gfx cards and trying to persuade it to extend the display and put primary rendered graphics on the rift is a bit of a pain. I ended up with the primary display 90 turning itself 90 degrees and the secondary rift flipped 180 degrees in landscape. The demo/tuning application runs in direct mode so you don’t need any of this but lots of the other things rely on extended desktop. You can of course make rift your primary display but it is not then delivered a one image but a bit in the left eye and a bit in the right so it makes launching things difficult.
However after a bit of “well thats just windows isn’t it!” I sparked up the Elite Dangerous Beta. This had upgraded since the last time. Elite has a display on secondary option though this was not DK2 direct mode it was possible to make it work.
I was instantly blown away by the improvements to the visual resolution of DK2. My laptop managed to cope too with the environment and it may not be the best gaming rig in the world but it certainly worked. I launched out into space and got chills running down my spine with the sense of being there as the shadow of the cockpit struts moved across my field of view as I turned away from the star I was docked near. It is really really good. I mapped a button on the stick to re centre the rift view though as there was a slight drift. However 2 beta things and on windows 8.1 it was not a huge problem.
I flew around for a while taking in the scenery then got into a slight dogfight in space. Being able to pull tight turns but look up and backwards to spot the bad guy was really effective. However I did suffer a little from not being able to see my controls. Using a joystick with loads of buttons is great, but I did not realise how much I had relied on seeing button 7 ! So it did not take my adversary very long to break my ship down. In the previous beta of Elite the canopy would crack than the ship would blow and you ejected. The new version before the cracking I got sparks and smoke filling the cockpit. This was an incredible effect in the Rift. The combination of the sense of being there in the vastness of space, with the confinement of sitting in a smoking capsule is something I will remember as a key moment in my gaming and VR experiences. The rift makes sense in games like this as you probably would have a helmet on anyway. That is something a lot of games designers could consider. Rather than trying to pretend its not something you have on, embracing it and making it part of the game narrative.
I experienced a crash, in a typical windows style, whilst trying to dock as a space station. I can’t tell if it was the rift, the game or the machine that did it but at a key moment of concentration and full immersion the shock of being unplugged from the environment, to loose the cockpit and the space around me to be replaced by half of the windows desktop in each eye was horrendous. It seems the Rift and Elite where generating a different type of gaming Flow. I was not experiencing flow because the task had become automatic. I was concentrating on landing the ship in the right place. It required a lot of though. However, mentally I was experiencing sensory flow. I had stopped considering the medium as a barrier, or as anything other than real. For reality to be turned off with no warning created a mental jolt. Its a very strange feeling and one that took a few moments to analyse and think about. It shows the power of these imagination enhancers and our blended reality. I should be used to this stuff but it still hits me 🙂
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