Oculus VR held a developer conference called Oculus Connect 2 in Los Angeles, USA from September 23rd to 25th local time. 1500 participants from all over the world gathered to listen to VR-related lectures and experience a number of the latest demos for the company's products that enable virtual reality (VR).
On the 24th, the company's CEO Brendan Iribe gave a keynote speech explaining future strategies, and made many important announcements. The highlight of this time is new information about the controller device "Oculus Touch". I would like to introduce the latest demo together with how I experienced it.
The venue was the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, USA
There are two types of Oculus products, low-end and high-end
Oculus VR is rolling out VR devices in two product categories. The low-end product of "Samsung Gear VR" that realizes VR with attachments using smartphones, and the high-end product "Rift" that realizes a rich VR environment on the assumption that it will be used on PCs.
The Rift comes with an Xbox One game controller as a controller, but a dedicated controller called Oculus Touch that realizes more natural operation is also planned to be released.
In the keynote, it was announced that Gear VR was previously sold as an "Innovator Edition" for $ 199, but the official version will be $ 99 and will be released in November. Compatible models are Samsung's 2015 model Galaxy Note 5 / S6 / S6 edge / S6 edge +. Features have been improved, such as 22% lighter than previous models, and attention will be focused on whether mobile VR will become popular.
"Gear VR" announced at $ 99
Rift for PC is scheduled to be released in the January-March period of 2016, and expectations are rising as the release approaches. Sales prices and reservations will begin at the end of the year.
Rift is the hardware following the "DK1" (meaning the first developer kit) released in 2012 and the "DK2" released in 2014, and is the first hardware to be released for general users. It has two organic EL monitors inside, a resolution of 1080 x 1200 pixels for one eye, a refresh rate of 90Hz, and a viewing angle of 110 degrees that completely covers the field of view.
The DK2 is 960 x 1080 for one eye and the refresh rate is 75Hz, so the performance is greatly improved.
However, the machine specs required to comfortably watch the video are high. In particular, the video card requires NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290 or higher, and the performance equivalent to a gaming PC. With Oculus VR, we plan to authenticate each PC maker as "Oculus Ready" that Oculus works, and put stickers etc. on the hardware so that users can easily recognize it. The price range of PCs will start from around $ 1000.
Game development of each company is progressing toward the release date. It was announced that the "Oculus Platform" for Rift, which has a mechanism similar to the App Store of Apple's content distribution system, will also be launched by the time it is released.
(On the next page, "Demo that you can't help but feel the potential of VR")
