Brendan Iribe, the head of Oculus, recently discussed the future of the highly anticipated virtual reality hardware gaming system. The Oculus Rift is on the minds of gamers everywhere as it appears we are on the verge of a new age in gaming. But there are challenges in getting the system ready for consumers.
“There are a lot of challenges, like resolution, it’s a big one on the current dev kit,” Iribe admitted. He showed a couple of simple slides of how Oculus improved its Rift prototype’s resolution over the course of six months, bringing its current 640×800 per eye look to 720p, and eventually to a full HD 1080p. “You can’t imagine what it’s going to look like when it’s 4K, and it’s not far away. It’s not now, but it’s coming.”
One of the problems is the motion sickness that users with the developers kit have experienced.
“I’ve gotten sick every time I’ve tried [Rift],” Iribe said. He stated that, after just a couple of minutes, he feels ill and tends to stop using his company’s own device. “In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for 45 minutes.”
Soon, not in 2013, but soon, Iribe says, we’ll all be able to use Oculus devices without needing a good lie-down. He attributes this success to the team’s recent improvements to latency. Oculus aims to bring Rift’s VR delay down to just five milliseconds. “We are right at the edge where we can bring you no-motion-sickness content.”
Iribe also added in regards to developing for the commercial side of gaming.
“You also have challenges on the content side…user interface elements, you can’t have stuck in the corner anymore. That’s gone. User interface can’t be this 2D thing, it has to really be in the virtual world.”
