oculus rift prototype side

Not the best news for backers of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter this morning — Oculus Inc. has announced that shipment of the Oculus Rift developer kit has been delayed until March. The company also says that they’re moving up to a larger 7″ screen with better performance. They’ve released new photos of the latest Oculus Rift prototype and it’s definitely looking good!

The Oculus Rift is an upcoming head mounted display for virtual reality gaming with a wide 90 degree field of view. In August 2012, a Kickstarter campaign pulled in an impressive $2.4 million in support for the Oculus Rift developer kit. Oculus Inc. had initially expected to ship the developer kits in December. Learn more about the Oculus Rift.

Manufacturing Schedule and Delayed Shipping

The latest update from Oculus Inc., posted today, announces that the Kickstarter developer kits have been delayed until March. The design has been handed off to manufacturing and unfortunately it seems that they underestimated how long the next steps would take.

We wanted to have the developer kits to all our backers before the holidays; but more than that, we want to ship the best Oculus Rift developer kit possible. In order to accommodate the required changes, new features, and manufacturing duration, we had to shift our ship date.

The company has posted the manufacturing schedule to show how long each part of the process is now expected to take:

The chart reveals that the final design choices and component decisions for the Oculus Rift have been locked in as of November 11th. Now the manufacturing tooling stage begins where the molds need to be assembled and tested. A month of the delay is due to the factory being closed for Chinese New Year. Apparently Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus Inc. and creator of the Rift, recently traveled to China to see if they could get more done before the Chinese New Year, but that doesn’t seem to have gone so well.

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The first 5,000 orders should ship out in early March, assuming everything goes according to the schedule,. There were 7,408 units pledged through the Kickstarter and the company says that they will be shipped in the order of pledges received  If you ordered toward the beginning of the campaign you are probably within the first batch. The remaining 2,408 units will have to wait until the next batch which may not be until mid-April.

After the Kickstarter, Oculus Inc. opened their site to Rift pre-orders. These post-Kickstarter units will go out after the Kickstarter orders. The company expects them to ship in late April.

It is unclear how the limited set of 100 unassembled from the Kickstarter are affected by the delay.

New Oculus Rift Photos… a Hidden Camera?

Along with the update comes photos of the latest Oculus Rift prototype (and one of the connector box). This seems much closer to finalized than the previous prototype that we saw. Looking good!

Some have noted that there appears to be a camera at the center of the eye on the front of the unit. A camera could be used for see-through functionality (to let you see outside of the HMD while in use) or for optical tracking which would allow for more accurate head tracking and possibly even positional tracking of the head in 3D space — a feature that would accurately allow players to jump, duck, and even go prone within games. The last two photos above are zoomed in on the possible camera to get a better look… it’s tough to say.

It’s possible that what appears to be a camera is just an optical illusion or maybe even a power-indicator LED. Oculus Inc. said nothing about this in their latest update so keep your hopes metered for now.

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Update: As we thought, Oculus Inc. has confirmed that the suspicious circle is indeed an LED power indicator. At least it might make a good place for modders to add a camera once they crack open the developer kit!

New Oculus Rift Screen, Sensor Details, and Unreal / Unity Integration

The original Rift design utilized a 5.6″ display. Production of that display was discontinued recently and the company had to find a new display that fit their needs.

The new display is the same 1280×800 resolution but is 7″ in size. In addition to being larger, Oculus Inc. says that the new display is better than the original in every way except for weight:

…the new display beats the old display in almost every key area including response time, switching time, contrast, and color quality. The improved switching time of the panel actually alleviates most of the motion blur people saw in earlier prototype demos. The downside to our new 7’’ is the weight differential: approximately 30g more than the 5.6’’.

That brings to Oculus Rift weight up to around 250g. Fortunately that’s still light compared to several other HMDs. The company didn’t mention whether or not the increase in screen size would result in an increased field of view. We have word out to them for confirmation.

See Our HMD Comparison Chart

We uncovered info regarding the custom Oculus Rift head tracker a few weeks ago. Oculus Inc. has now confirmed that the sensor supports refresh rates up to 1000hz which is pretty amazing and an improvement over the commercial Hillcrest tracker they were using previously.

The data coming from the new sensor will be accessible using the Oculus SDK in easy to manipulate formats (quaternion, matrix, Euler angles). The raw sensor data is also available for those that want to do the math themselves.

As a testament to how fast the 1000hz, watch how incredibly responsive the tilting head movement is in this brief new video that the company just released:

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This also shows that the Unreal integration is coming along swimmingly. Oculus Inc. says that they’ll post a new video soon showing Unity integration progress.

Oculus Rift SDK and Consumer Version

The company says they are working on bringing a developer hub online.

The Developer Center will have the latest Oculus SDK, engine integrations, official forums, support system, and ways to send hardware/software feedback directly to the Oculus engineering team.

All developers will be invited to join the Developer Center and start discussing Rift development before the kits begin shipping.

They also say that due to time constrains they had to push some features back to the Oculus Rift consumer version (Oculus Rift 2) which is expected some time in late 2013. Oculus Inc. had been teasing some surprise features previously but it sounds as if those have been moved to the consumer version. Perhaps the camera was one of those features?

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • The new design looks wack. Nothing like what was promised.

    • Adam

      Yeah, “wack” like cool, right? To be honest, I didn’t notice the change until you mentioned it. I ordered a dev kit, not a consumer product. I’d accept duct-tape assembly as long the guts of it worked as promised.

    • jestersdream

      It wasn’t promised it always said : “Early concept of Oculus Rift developer kit. Actual product will look different.”.

    • Harley Mills

      Nothing was promised. You are referring to the concept design. This isn’t even the final product. It is a developer kit. The final design may very well look like the original concept. Who gives a shit anyway? It’s not like you can see the Rift while you are playing.

      • Who gives a shit? Lots of people… The design has to embody the dream. Besides, if it’s going to be sitting around my house it has to look good.

        • Yossi Preminger

          sonicoliver :
          Who gives a shit?

          This place is for people who give a shit about VR.
          It seems you’re more devoted to trolling.
          I suggest you go to reddit.
          Tell them I said hi.

  • Yossi Preminger

    The delay isn’t too surprising, but I wish they had kept us in the loop earlier.

    I don’t think the 7″ screen should have an effect on FoV except that for the same FoV the lenses would be farther out from the screen.
    However, the fact that a 7″ screen is ergonomically practical means that in a future version we could easily have two 4″ AMOLED screens of the type that is common in phones. A consumer version seems closer than ever!

  • Yossi Preminger

    Just occurred to me the “camera” is off center… it wouldn’t make sense. You want a camera either centered or in front of one eye.

  • I’m 99% sure your right that in the Oculus logo there is a blue power-indicator LED.

    I think adding an AR camera would be a major hardware addition to the unit at this stage, and would require a significant amount of software support in order to implement augmented reality with a major game engine.

    It wouldn’t be a optical positional tracker, because generally you would need several points of light in order to triangulate the position (Vicon / Phasespace do this), or one bulbous source of light in order to use size differentiation to determine position (PS Move does this). Also, if a marker was placed on the front of the Rift, it is more likely to be occluded by the head than if it is placed somewhere else where it can be visible from all angles.

  • Seriously, one or two months would be reasonable, but this is a total failure on the planning part. Yes, march would have been more reasonable in the first place, but the fact they said that december would be it suggested they were in a far further fase… not that they had made a mess of the planning. And I am surprised that the T1 fase would need to take so long, but that’s probably because the number of units is so small so the factory is giving them a low priority or something I suppose.

    Oh well, the really important thing they failed is in the communication department. They should have given weekly updates on *all* progress towards their investors… not once every two months or so…

    Guess I am just a tad bit disappointed, because I had expected them to have announced it already if they were planning on being late… not 3 days before their first dead deadline…

    • I’d have to agree… Especially something as time sensitive as this emerging technology.

      Even in 2 months time, the field will change tremendously… Sony will probably release something new, there are a lot of dark projects that keep popping up all the time. This is a race… I love the Oculus’ take on it, I love their angle, but they’ve got to be on it, especially when it goes commercial.