Oculus Rift, the new gaming technology that made a splash at this year's E3 2013, hopes to bring the immersion of video games into the third dimension by becoming one of the first high-quality virtual reality headset to make its way into people's homes and gaming repertoire.
At the Gaming Insiders Summit this week, head of Oculus VR Brendan Iribe discussed the future of the hardware and what the company has planned for the future.
"There are a lot of challenges, like resolution, it's a big one on the current dev kit," he said. According to IGN, he then showed a few simple slides showing how the brand has improved its prototype's resolution over the course of the past six months, bringing its current 640x800 per eye look to 720p. The goal is to eventually get the resolution as high as 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," Iribe said, before discussing how some key gaming staples will have to change and be re-imagined to accommodate the new technology. "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."
As many who suffer from motion sickness have already probably thought, this technology seems like a recipe for a case of the spins and an upset stomach. Iribe himself even confessed to experiencing issues.
"I've gotten sick every time I've tried [Rift]," Iribe said. He stated that, after just a couple 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."
Iribe attributes the lack of motion sickness to the company's efforts to reduce latency, saying that the goal is to get the VR delay down to just five milliseconds, although this isn't expected to be finished before the end of 2013.
