crescent-bay

At Oculus’ inaugural ‘Connect’ event in Hollywood CA today, CEO Brendan Iribe announced a new feature prototype that  Oculus believes delivers VR presence for the first time. The Prototype is called Crescent Bay and although exact specs are not yet available, this is a rough breakdown of the features set:

  • Higher Refresh Rate (confirmed as 90Hz)
  • Higher resolution (likely 1440p)
  • (Possibly) Higher FOV
  • Integrated Audio
  • 360 Degree Tracking (LEDs now on back of headset too)
  • Oculus licensed Real Space 3D Audio Specialisation (10 years in development)

And the attendees at Oculus Connect get to try it today! Ben Lang and the Road to VR team are on the ground ready to get their hands on this new hardware and we’ll bring you impressions as soon as we can.

This story is breaking – we’ll add more details as they become available

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • brandon9271

    Wow! :) DK3 anyone? lol Well.. I think this is seriously going to hurt VRvana’s kickstarter attempt!

    • proyb

      None at all, any DK haven’t got AR integrated as Vrvana has which is a nice additional and the spec may change to match Crescent Bay. Couldn’t believe they uses budget headphone? Will still be using Pentile OLED which isn’t optimized for VR and can’t adjust lens focus?

      • brandon9271

        i would think that the specs for the Totem are ‘locked’ at this point because any upgrades would increase the cost. Also, AR could be easily added to the Rift when the RGB version of Leap Motion gets release. code named Dragonfly I think. I dunno, I’m just not sold on the Totem. Oculus has Abrash, Carmack and many brilliant minds and nearly unlimited resources that I don’t see Vrvana being able to compete with. I hope they can though, competion is great. I’m just very sceptical at this point.

        • proyb

          Vrvana are planning stretch goals for better hardware, we haven’t know what are they yet except they have mentioned to increase FOV. While it takes Oculus team a lot of effort to reduce the latency as low as possible, every products have their milestone towards final products. I hope the DK3 spec will be made known soon.

  • David Mulder

    Do they really want me to regret it even more that I can’t attend the conference? Ach.+

  • SuperDre

    Well, one they they really need to invest some money into is design and comfort, as even though it’s another prototype, it sure looks ugly, the headphones sure look like cheap crap you get on a plane. And from the looks of it, it’s still using an external camera for tracking..
    But one thing that’s also give me an ahum, is that this prototype is shown so soon after the release of the DK2..
    Not that the new protoype will be released anytime soon (I think the next release will be the Consumer version)..

    • Darshan Gayake

      fully agree their headphones indeed looking just same as disposables offered in flight and shabby too. May sound good but they must at-least cover them in elegant way as present appearance is raw crud.

  • seektruth2

    Nice, hopefully this leads to the consumer version before too long as I am still waiting on it to get my first rift. I’m guessing like the Note 4 the resolution will be 2,560 x 1,440 resolution as it is a common resolution for high end gaming. I doubt the consumer version will be 4k as not only would it require a expensive powerful gpus but also the cable technology like hdmi 2.0 will struggle to get 4k above 60 fps.

    I am disappointed that no input device was mentioned. I was hoping for a advanced leap motion like device built in(as mentioned here http://blog.leapmotion.com/leap-motion-sets-a-course-for-vr/ ) or something like the stem controller. So there is no clear VR controller for interaction in 3d.

    Looks like the most used device for VR will remain the 360 controller. I don’t think that will be a deal breaker for VR as most gamers already have one and are used to how to use it to navigate in 3d space. But this may create a barrier for non-gamers wanting to interact more naturally in VR.

    I was hoping they were going to announce a early 2015 release date and start preorders for the consumer version. So it looks like we may be seeing a fall release. But that said I’d rather they get it right rather than release a DK3.

    • Mageoftheyear

      My heart was literally thumping at the beginning of Bredan’s speech as it sounded to me like they were going to announce CV1 and I was thinking “Oh no! This is too soon! How can it be!?”
      I was actually very relieved with the announcement of Crescent Bay instead, but still slightly surprised there was no mention of controllers in the works.

      • seektruth2

        Yeah I had the same response and had my wallet open ready to drop up to $400 on the CV1 and another $330 on the GTX 970 graphics card. But I am partly glad its not as more vr ready gpus should be available to chose from by then.

      • brandon9271

        there HAS to be some kind of controller in the works! considering all the options like Leap Motion, PrioVR, ControlVR, STEM.. Oculus HAS to be work with one or several of them behind the scenes or working on their own control scheme. Input is such an important factor for compeling VR that I just know that Oculus wont overlook it. If nothing else they should work towards standardizing VR input with the SDK so that developers wont have to add support for all the various controllers individually. That’s my hope anyway.

        • Mageoftheyear

          A part of me still thinks Oculus will piggyback off of Valve’s controller for now (assuming the timing is right) and leave the enthusiast end of the market in Sixense & Tactical Haptics’ hands for now as they continue work on their own controller.

  • Rokrull

    Norman Chan from Tested has a really interesting Interview about Crescent Bay with Nate Mitchell and Palmer Lucky and both actively dodged giving any answers regarding resolution except to say it wasn’t very important and to emphasize that they were using all new higher quality optics (lenses). Also, those headphones are apparently very high quality.