Yesterday, Oculus VR announced a lot of stuff at its first annual Oculus Connect conference in Hollywood, chief among them being a brand new Oculus Rift prototype, Crescent Bay. It was a great day to be a VR fan.
At Oculus Connect, attendees were treated to keynotes from CEO Brendan Iribe, chief scientist Michael Abrash, and CTO John Carmack followed by a round table discussion of VR masterminds, including founder Palmer Luckey. But not all of us were able to travel out to Hollywood or dedicate many hours of our Saturday to a livestream. Luckily YouTuber Ruthalas Menovich has posted all four of these keynotes to be watch at our leisure.
CEO Iribe kicks off the day by taking a quick pulse of the VR industry and eventually introduces the Crescent Bay prototype. As we reported yesterday, the headsets are lighter, more comfortable, and come complete with 360-degree positional tracking with LEDs added to the back of the prototype.
Here’s what Iribe says about his company’s latest creation:
It’s a massive leap from DK2. It’s a big of a leap from DK1 to DK2 as DK2 to Crescent Bay. It is awesome. It has updated display technology, including higher refresh rate, higher resolution, and improved optics…it’s still not perfect. None of this is perfect yet, but it is much, much better.
Once Carmack takes the stage, the information discussed moves from the accessible to the meticulously specific as he dives deep into some of the current limitations VR still faces. Unlike the rosier views prefaced by his colleagues, Carmack takes a more blunt route when talking about VR and especially Samsung’s upcoming Gear VR, which was Carmack’s project for the past year.
I believe pretty strongly about being frank and open about flaws and limitations so this is where I go off message from the standard PR plan and talk very frankly about things.
Carmack then dives into the importance of display performance when it comes to virtual reality headsets, saying 120 hz displays are the perfect solution to avoid visible flicker and also scale games at different frame rates.
The videos in total, including the hour-long round table, sum up to about 4 hours. If you’re interested in just the overview, stick with Iribe’s 45-minute opener, but all the speakers give detailed accounts on the future of VR from various technical and commercial perspectives — and from the looks of things, that future is pretty exciting.
Trust us, we’ve already been there. [YouTube]