Published in Gaming

Oculus Crescent Bay Prototype is out

by on22 September 2014



Another VR try

Oculus VR had its own developer conference and managed to attract 1,000 developers from around the world that share the virtual reality dream.

We had a chance to try out the DK1, the company’s first prototype and the new DK2 and we think that the technology is interesting. However, the resolution, the image quality and overall experience is unimpressive. We will tell you more about it in a separate piece. Now Crescent Bay is the fancy codename for yet another prototype "on the path to the consumer version of the Rift." The new prototype features new display technology, 360 degree head tracking, expanded positional tracking volume dramatically improved weight and ergonomics, backed by high-quality integrated audio.

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Headphones are now attached to the Oculus Crescent Bay Prototype and of course there are some fresh and fancy demos. Michael Gorman, editor-in-chief of Engadget, had a chance to try them and he calls them: "the future of cinema and leap ahead.... but still quite a bit of work to do."

Since we tried the same Unreal Engine 4 & VR demo called Showdown we can say that the VR experience feels quite good, it can easily make you dizzy, but the picture quality on the DK2 is amazingly poor. It looks as good as a standard definition 576p display if not worse. It makes normal HD monitor gaming feel like a 4K. Let's hope that it looks better on Oculus Crescent Bay Prototype.

You can move your head around and watch the bullets passing by, but just as any cool technology including motion blur or 3D gaming, you can only experience it in slow monition. Guess what - Showdown demo is a super slowed down version of the 3D shooter and it includes a segment where a badass robot tries to take down the player. It looks like it was recorded in a 240fps slow motion mode. Once you speed it up, we can bet that most of the VR feeling will be gone and 3D movies suffer from the same problem. You don’t get to experience great 3D in fast moving scenes, it is as simple as that.

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Unity, one of the most important mobile gaming engines, also supports Oculus including the new 3D audio support, but devices like Samsung Gear VR where you have to rely on a power of a mobile SoC GPU makes even less sense than Oculus VR. That has to be even worse experience. Unity and Oculus made a few demos including Lucky’s Tale, Titans of Space, SUPERHOT, and DarkNet.

Oculus has licensed RealSpace3D’s audio technology for its version of 3D sound that definitely comes hand in hand with Virtual reality. The goal is to get a different audio experience based on head tracking information.
There is now word when the Oculus Crescent Bay Prototype will make its way to a lot of developers, but as far as consumers go, we reckon VR is still a long way off..

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