Despite announcing that the Oculus Rift would support Android all the way back during the company’s 2012 Kickstarter, Oculus VR has been quite secretive about their forthcoming Android SDK. In an interview at Gamescom 2014 last week, the company alluded that work is still underway on bringing virtual reality to mobile.
In an interview by Enter The Rift (French link) with Oculus VR’s founder, Palmer Luckey, and VP of Product, Nate Mitchell, a question was asked about the powerful graphics cards needed to power virtual reality experiences.
“The best experiences require the best graphics cards, how do you ensure that general public can play VR in good conditions?” asked Nicolas Germouty from Enter the Rift.
“That’s largely up to the content developers,” Luckey responded. “…the Rift can run on extremely low-end hardware even with integrated graphics if the experience is stripped down enough.” Going on to note that the company’s Oculus World demo could even run on a last-generation MacBook Air.
“I think it is a very real problem… even with lower-end experiences, and I agree with Palmer—we have experiences running even on cellphone devices right now—but as we move the framerate higher and higher and the resolution higher and higher, it’s only going to get more and more challenging and so I think Palmer is right, content creators are going to have to be smart about how they create experiences,” said Mitchell. “…initially it may be that the highest-end experiences… you do have to have some serious computer hardware and latest GPU technology, and we’re working with Nvidia and AMD and all the graphics card manufacturers as best we can to really help drive that…”
It wasn’t stated explicitly, but my intuition leads me to believe that when Mitchell says the company has experiences running on mobile devices, he means running at the 75 FPS that’s recommended of all DK2 titles, which would be quite impressive on mobile hardware.
Oculus CTO John Carmack appears to be one of the people working hard on the Oculus SDK for Android, occasionally tweeting out some bits referencing the platform.
If anyone is curious, I did wind up using the CImg library for resampling. Touch of pain on Android due to C++ issues, but nice interface.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) July 18, 2014
I really wish Android native dev tools set up as easily as iOS tools. The absence of device provisioning is some compensation, but still… — John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) August 5, 2014
Beyond the company confirming that there is work in progress on the mobile SDK, there’s little info about when it will be released or how deeply it will dig into the Android OS. With Samsung and Oculus apparently working together, it’s possible that we’ll hear first about the mobile SDK when Samsung’s ‘Project Moonlight’ is announced, reportedly happening in early September.
