So for our case study proposal, I’ve decided to propose the Oculus Rift as my presentation. So where to start….
The man behind the “vision” would be Palmer Luckey who originally was a Head mounted dsiplay designer at a military research lab. He came up with the idea and formed the company Oculus VR Inc.. The Oculus Rift was announced at E3 2012 with its first demo showcasing a game of Doom 3 with head-tracking and real time 3D. After the demo, it was immediately backed by companies of note such as Valve, Epic Games and Unity. After it’s successful demo, a kickstarter was launched to help raise money to mass produce this headset.
The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset that tracks the users head position in real time and displays any program(video games) of your choice in 3D. The most interesting part is that as the headset tracks your head position, a camera in the program(video game) matches the exact angle of your head; immersing you into the game. As it does this, everything you see is displayed in 3D to further deepen the immersion.
As to where this whole journey began, it started in a forum. Palmer had been discussing his ideas while unknowingly to him, John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, had seen his work and gave him the extra push he needed to get his ideas into the world.
Why was this made? If I could ask Palmer, I guess he would say he did it for fun. You could say he was kind of an enthusiast for this kind of thing. It was made for video games.
The Oculus Rift is made of a 7 inch screen spread over both eyes split in half. Each lens for each eye will render at 640 x 800 pixels making the entire thing render at 1200 x 800 altogether and this is just the developer version! The consumer version is boasted to have 1920 x 1080 resolution. The hardware running the 3D is so sophisticated that it can effectively prevent motion blur by presenting each frame of movement at a crazy speed. The head-tracker also is crazy fast which runs at 100 Hz latency which allows the frames to come in super smooth for that real life experience whenever you move your head. It also good for preventing motion sickness.
That’s my proposal(hope I did that right)
