Linden Lab Looking at the Oculus Rift for Second Life Now: One Insider Weighs Its Pros & Cons

Linden Lab is planning to integrate the Oculus Rift VR headset with Second Life, as I reported last week, and staffers just received a dev kit. Some developers like it, an insider told me, "others do not." As for Linden CEO Rod Humble? "I hear that Rod falls in the 'like' category." So now, my source adds, "I expect we'll try to get it working in SL just to see how it looks."

So far, this insider went on, some Linden developers are seeing some pros and cons with the Oculus Rift, especially related to Second Life. It does cause dizziness in some, for one thing, but rendering quality is good, for another. Here's the full breakdown:

"1 - The lenses that provide the wide field of view on a single LCD screen also magnify the pixels. If you have good eyesight then the RGB sub-pixels are very visible.

"2 - Slow pixel response (time to go from light to dark) causes visual detail to blur when when changing view direction quickly. The blur detracts from the sense of 3D.

"3 - No acceleration detection, only orientation, so you can't strafe your view by moving your head to the side.

"These three problems, combined with apparent motion that does not match what your own proprioceptors are telling you, can cause some people to get nauseous in certain demos. Some people who were dizzy from one demo were not affected by others.

"Another drawback which probably doesn't contribute to disorientation is that the LCD has low contrast range between bright and dark. Not surprising given that you've got a low-cost LCD right in front of your eyes, but nevertheless one aspect that could be improved upon in the future."

That said, this insightful insider had some positives about the Rift to share too:

"A - The latency of the orientation detection is pretty good.

"B - The wide field of view helps immersion.

"C - Lightweight headset.

"D - Correct rendering/distortion for each eye so the sense of 3D was very good."

Final takeaway? "The Oculus indicates what is possible. Future headsets, with high resolution LCD's, accelerometers, and integrated 3D sound, will increase the sense of immersion."

Much thanks to my anonymous insider for the early thoughts. Seems like the question whether Oculus Rift will truly work consistently well enough with Second Life (or for that matter, any virtual reality experience) still remains an open question. More soon, hopefully.

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Comments

[OkinSama]

Just a note, the Oculus Rift's motion sensor DOES have accelerometers, and gyroscopes, and magnetometers.

Those 3 sensor types are combined via driver sensor fusion, to get as accurate 1-to-1 head tracking as possible.

Technically, with a little customization of the drivers, you probably could get positional tracking working.. But it might not be very accurate, and could drift.

Oculus instead choose to use those motion sensors only for handling your view angle, not your position.

For the consumer version, it seems they are planning both a 1080p screen, AND putting 2 small cameras in the front of the headset, which will be able to track movement far more accurately based on visual movement. Which should keep positional tracking from having any drift.

It seems all of the problems those SL devs had with it, are simply issues with the low res screen on the dev kit. The consumer model, and future dev kits, WILL have 1080p screens and probably positional tracking, which should greatly improve the experience visually and maybe even motion-sickness-wise.

[Anthony]

This is a development kit. The consumer version will be much better so why don't they mention that? All of there concerns will be addressed with the release of the consumer version...

[Oculus user]

I have a rift. The biggest trick is going to be able to get things to go at a minumum of 60 FPS, any lower than that and the experience becomes quickly unusable. Getting things to 60 FPS on SL is tough to do.

[Todd]

Im curious as to how they're going to get a clunky 10 year old 3d engine to go 120 frames a second (required to give each eye the required 60 for emmersion). The big pixels they're complaining about (that wont exist on the commercial versions) are the only thing allowing it even come close to the speed it will require to give the end user a convincing immersive experience. Once they crank up the retail versions to the 1080p SL will simply not run at anything better then a head mounted slide show. But I can already hear the Linden solution for this "Turn graphic settings to lowest and draw distance to 2 feet".

[Adeon Writer]

The consumer version will have a higher resolution (1920x1080, I believe) so the pixel issue should be addressed, since they'll be smaller.

[Adeon Writer]

Todd: This 3D puts half the image to each eye, so only 60 fps is needed.

[Dirk Talamasca]

It is still early days on the rift but it is good to see LL considering the technology.

I experienced the rift at a trade show and within the 15 to 20 minutes that I had access, I obviously considered how the device might translate into Second Life. While I could easily accept the nice advantages that would occur within a casual spectator's experience, I felt that building and object manipulation were going to be a tremendous challenge.

[AR Technologist]

I had posted previously about this here but your blog does not allow links I assume.

You should have a look at the Epson "Moverio™ BT-100 Wearable Display". This device is market ready, functional and mature. It surpasses Oculus Rift in many capabilities & portability. It has numerous apps and the controller is Android Based.

With Google Glass on the public horizon and other similar Augmented Reality devices I feel Oculus is a niche product where something like the Moverio has far more versatility... Yes it can be used in gaming, virtual simulations and training. Look through the Epson website and look at the videos under "Product Information / Product Specs".

While the Moverio and others are still a bit more expensive at "this time" these will certainly gain more traction as other products like Google Glass come to general market and as we know the prices drop to the consumers favor.

Also have a look at "scopear" which uses this technology in training applications.

[AR Technologist]

Another thought. I use OpenSimulator & SecondLife as well. While I hadn't paid much attention previously to non-dedicated viewers, I was just looking through the 3rd Party Viewer directory and took note of Lumiya Viewer for Android.

Given that there is already an Android based Viewer for SL & OS, this would further enable Epson's Moverio as it is Android based. I'd have to wonder how complicated or easy it would be to port Lumiya to use this headset.

[psuedonymous]

I'd not heard of the E-100 before, but from it's specsheet I can see why: it doesn't look like anything different from the various other bog-standard HMDs that have been available for the past decade. Small FoV, microdisplay based, not a particularly high resolution (960x540 for the E-100, 600x800 per eye for the Rift, only a 40 kilopixel difference), but the kickers?
- No external input, so you're saddled by whatever an awful SoC running a vastly out of date Android build can produce. Not much.
- Tiny FoV. They try and cheat with the old 'x size TV at y distance' nonsense, but that works out to a measly 22°. This is compared to the Rift's 110°.
- No IMU.
- More expensive than the Rift

The E-100 is generic in every sense, offering inferior specs to displays such as Sony's HMZ-1 or SMD's ST1080. It's only advantage over the Oculus devkit is a marginal increase in resolution, and a sub-par integrated SoC (only really good for low resolution portable video).

[Krinkles Q Klown]

Wow. Another useless feature while bugs languish in the JIRA, which looks more like virtual landfill every day. This is called, "putting lipstick on a pig."

I can say with certainty I will not be buying this new piece of hardware as I'm finally absolutely fed up with LL and its corporate stupidity.