I’ve had some fun playing with my Oculus Rift dev kit. It’s got some great features, it’s got the latency problem whipped, and just needs to work a bit on tools and upping the resolution – if’s a great proof-of-concept, and if they can survive for another iteration or two, I think they will have something, perhaps something revolutionary.
Two folks I know have gone on to work at Oculus V.R. (OVR), so I know it’s building momentum. I was surprised to find that John Carmack not only was named the CTO, but has actually left id to work at OVR. They now have a Dallas office 🙂 . So John is a force in the industry, and he’s just the kind of guy VR/AR needs to try to put this stuff into the hands of the consumer. I played around with the older VR/AR HMDs a long time ago, and while the actual experience wasn’t that great (I don’t get motion sickness), the lag and the low resolution were the real killers of the tech back then.
O.R. has the latency pretty much whipped, and when they come out with their Gen2/3 HMD which will need better resolution (already here – just pick up any good smartphone), wireless connectivity (also any smartphone), it will be on the road to becoming a must-have product, at least for the tech savvy.
We’ve got Google Glass, Technical Illusions castAR, the Oculus Rift, Sony’s HMZ-T3W, and whatever Valve is going to show at their Dev. Conf. in Jan. 2014, so I think there’s enough folks piling on the notion that AR/VR is almost here so that it may finally get some traction in the consumer space. Like most cutting edge tech., the game players will adopt it first, then everyone else will come around. If you offload processing to any of the next-gen mobile platforms, you can wirelessly connect to the HMD via something like BLE while getting orientation information back,then you’ve really got something, since the offload platform will replace the user’s smart phone, it’s not going to be something extra they have to buy, it’s just going to be more capable version of something they already own.
It’s going to be awesome!