The long wait is over, the next generation Oculus Rift is here and it's a giant leap over what has come before. The second iteration of Oculus VR's VR Headset, the Development Kit 2 represents the culmination of many months of cutting-edge research and progress since the company released its DK1 to Kickstarter backers back in March 2013. The DK2's enhancements include a higher resolution panel, up from 1280x800 to 1920x1080 (1080p) and moved to a pentile matrix, OLED panel for display duties. This means higher levels of resolvable detail and a much reduced screen door effect. The panel features low persistence of vision, a technology pioneered by Valve that aims to cut motion artefacts by only displaying the latest, most correct display information relative to the user's movements - as users of the DK1 will attest, its LCD panel was heavily prone to smearing, things are now much improved with the DK2. Other inherent advantages of OLED are a potentially infinite range of contrast - as every element of an OLED panel individually emits light, no backlight is required (as is the case with LCD panels) which means that when OLEDs are not lit, the panel is completely dark. This means that black should appear black (dependant on lighting conditions), and therfore perceived contrast levels are boosted hugely. Colours too should appear more vibrant. The other major advance is that, unlike DK1, the DK2 uses an optical, camera based tracking system which together with the onboard IMU provides the ability to track not just rotational movement but translational movement too, using onboard IR LEDs which sit behind an IR transparent shell on the front and sides of the DK2. In real terms, this means that (within the cameral's field of view) the system knows where your head is in 3D space . You can now move your head up and down, downwards and backwards relative to the camera and a DK2 compatible application can adjust your view appropriately, allowing you to lean in and out of a scene or lean left and right. Anyway, enough of the theory - what's it like in practice? Inside the Box and Unit Build and Comfort Impressions The DK2 takes a different approach to the DK1 in terms of connectivity. Whereas with the DK1, the Headset itself held only the display, lenses and IMU - the DK2 integrates the guts of the DL1 breakout box, into the headset itself. This means that you have a single, integrated cable running from the headset, splitting into USB (for tracking data) and HDMI (for video). It's a refreshingly uncluttered approach and means there's less chance of cable tangle. Despite the DK2 weighing in at 440g compared with the DK1's 380g it doesn't feel heavy at all in the hand. On the head too, the unit is light and comfortable to wear and as the cable now runs across the top of the head, you feel freer in movement than previously. The headset unit itself feels like a quality component with high quality plastics used throughout with a good level of fit and finish. The camera too, a custom designed and built device as a solid quality feel. Nice touches, such as the braided cable sheath (DK2 to USB / HDMI) and minimalist simplicity of the camera are appreciated. Physically, the DK2 feels very much like the DK1 to wear, light and comfortable although (despite what looks like extra ventilation) still a little warm over long periods on a summers day. The retraction assembly is almost identical to DK1, with two rotatable dials each side to bring the display and lens assembly close or further from your face. The lenses themselves are slightly larger (and flatter on the user facing side) and there are now only two sets (A, fitted as standard and B). The device feels slightly more comfortable in place and I found it easier to wear glasses whilst in VR than with the DK1 - although you still need to be careful as you put it on. Continued on next page .. Setting Up the DK2 After unboxing, you'll need to ensure you have at least 2 x free USB slots and one HDMI or DVI port on your GPU. After placing the camera atop my monitor, connecting the USB cable to PC and (don't forget this one) the 2.5mm jack ended cable (camera sync) between the camera and the cable splitter towards the end of the main DK2 cable. There is an additional AC adapter than plugs into the reverse side of the cable splitter, you don't need to worry about this until you start plugging in devices to the DK2's onboard USB hub port that requires a little more juice to power it. As it happens, Oculus' Quick Start Guide, which comes in the box is well worth following, it's clear and concise and will save you some head-scratching. [gallery type="rectangular" ids="14351,14350,14349"] When Oculus stated that they were delaying shipment of DK2 pre-orders in order to polish the SDK, some questioned the decision as over cautious (and perhaps even disingenuous) - but I can tell you that after spending a good few hours trying to get things working, it's probably better that they did. In fact, receiving the DK2 so early has turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand I have the kit, on the other, out of the box - almost nothing works. In fact, aside from the included Oculus World (Tuscany) and the Config Utility Scene, you'll be hard pushed to find anything that works with the current software. This however is changing rapidly and the developer community is already springing into action, compiling their old demos against the new 0.40 SDK. As of the latest SDK release (0.4.0 beta, released today as DK2s hit people's doorsteps), Oculus have chosen to separate the device's functional components (i.e. drivers and config software) into a separate piece of software, known as the 'Oculus Runtime'. This component provides: drivers for the positional tracking camera and what's known as the OVR Service. The latter component seems to be key in enabling the latest SDK's most interesting new feature - 'Direct Rendering Mode'. New Rendering Modes in SDK 0.4.0 If you've owned a DK1 you'll know the score in terms of device configuration and setup. In Windows at least, you either extended your desktop, using your Rift as an additional, independent display - this only worked if you were either willing to run with the DK1 as a primary monitor (tricky given the DK1s low resolution / clipped FOV) or hope that the application you wanted to run allowed you to specify the monitor you wanted to output to. Or, you ran your Rift in clone mode, either letting the DK1 downscale the original image or configuring your GPU to do the work instead. Now, with the latest SDK there is another option: ''Direct Mode'. It effectively hides the VR Headset from Windows as as display device, so no more fiddling with desktops and resolutions. When a game compiled against the SDK is launched, the OVR service intercepts calls to the headset and sends a Rift specific video signal direct to the HMD. So, you end up with a windowed application running on your standard desktop (with a duplicated view) and a native resolution feed on your HMD. This is an excellent step forward for Rift users. Not only does it ensure the DK2 runs at the optimal frequency and resolution (1920 x 1080 @ 75Hz) but it takes all the guesswork out of the experience, bringing the solution closer to what would be expected of a consumer experience. New Oculus Config Options and The New Oculus Config Test Scene Once you're happy with your IPD configuration / calibration, you can quickly check your setup by launching the brand new application which includes positional tracking support. The scene is simple but actually serves as a great way to demonstrate the power of positional tracking with the DK2. It places you in front of a desk with various objects on it, after selecting whether your stood or seated, you can go ahead and lean in to the scene and check the camera's field of view bounds are sufficient - you can even enable a visual representation of the camera's current field of view limitations which is updated in realtime as you move your head around - useful. Another new addition is the ability to align the utility with your units retraction assembly settings. That is, you can adjust a dial in the config utility to match the two dials on the side of the Rift which control the units retraction assembly (how far the lenses and display sit from your face). It's not clear how this information is used, but I assume further tweaks to the rendered view (IPD, chromatic aberration correction etc.) are made based on the info. Continued on next page .. The DK2 In Action: Pros, Cons and Comparisons with the DK1 So it's here and you've configured it, so what's in like in practice? To help answer that question, I've broken this section into subsections, hopefully giving you the best idea possible of what to expect. Resolution, Screen Door OLED and the Pentile Problems Of course, the biggest and most immediately obvious upgrade for the DK2 versus DK1 is that 1080p OLED panel. In action, the panel delivers on its promise as a significant upgrade to its predecessor. As soon as you fire up a demo, the differences between DK2 and DK1 are immediate and stark. There's no more washed out attempt at contrast, DK2 delivers deep, inky blacks. After firing up Elite: Dangerous for the first time (checkout my full video playtest here), I just sat, looked up and stared into space, literally. The bright, sparkling stars against that perfect black emptiness was for a brief moment mesmerising to me. And it's hard to overestimate just how much difference this makes to the experience. Having such awesome contrast adds huge definition to any scene and this has the added benefit of enhancing your ability to differentiate parallax for a boost in 3D effectiveness. [gallery type="rectangular" ids="14346,14344"] Colours too really pop with the new panel and added contrast. Stepping into the Oculus World demo again and comparing the experience with DK1 was an interesting experience. The terracotta masonry of the villa, the verdant green of the lawn and the foliage are vibrant and believable. There seemed to be a tendency for a little red push in the image, but this seems to be more to do with chromatic aberration in the new DK2 lenses being somewhat more stark than DK1. Shadow detail is a little more difficult to gauge at this stage, but there seemed to be a tendency towards a little black crush (where shadow detail is squashed and hard to resolve) but other artefacts with the panel (which I'll discuss later) may have made this appear worse than it is. So, about that extra resolution then. I'm pleased to report that the extra pixels the new 1080p panel offers means the DK2 is an altogether more pleasant and practical proposition for gaming. Pleasant, as fine detail in scenes such as text are now resolvable at sizes and distances generally used in games and in particular menus. No longer do you have to squint to read that in-game sign or strain to distinguish that menu item. There are however aspects of the DK2's OLED Pentile screen which are both desirable and undesirable. I'll reserve a full blown exploration of the implications of using a Pentile matrix in VR for later article, but briefly the sub-pixel arrangement on offer here have the effect of replacing the DK1's 'screen-door' effect (where the pixel structure and the gaps between was clearly evident) with a honeycomb matrix effect. That is to say, 'pixels' on the DK2 are still easily distinguishable (we're going to have to push 4k+ resolutions to come close to eliminating this). The new effect is actually arguably preferable overall too, it's much easier to ignore the panel's makeup when in game on almost all scenarios. However, when text is involved (or any situation where small straight lines are used to describe a scene) the image suffers. The honeycomb effect means straight-edges are poorly defined and look 'fuzzy' making reading text marginally more difficult and immersion breaking. It's one of the reasons I've never been a fan of lower resolution pentile matrix panels in mobile devices - I found this effect irritating and distracting in the extreme. However, unlike with a mobile device, you won't spend most of your time gazing at acres of text every day. And, this is why this particular display artefact is relegated to the status of 'minor gripe' and overall the sub-pixel arrangement on the DK2's panel actually offers a slightly more organic and natural view of the virtual world. The extra resolution though means textures are vivid and geometry appreciable, you can now gaze at the gameworld horizon and enjoy the view instead of counting the blocks. This however shows blemishes and limitations of any game of application you may be using. The Oculus World demo, once masked by DK1s panel deficiencies is now unmasked as basic, blocky and generally unconvincing with muddy textures and poor geometry. The DK2 and eventually the consumer version of the Oculus Rift means developers and artists are going to work a lot harder to ensure their work hold up under the close scrutiny of virtual reality. Conversely, titles where attention to detail have been lavished on the environments, really come to life. The DK2 enabled cyber-thriller Technolust is a cornucopia of intriguing objects moving around peering at and around them with the DK2s extra resolution and positional tracking was an absolute joy - I was utterly lost in an apartment from the future and loved every minute. Low Persistence of Vision, Goodbye Motion Blur! Cited by Oculus during the reveal of their Crystal Cove prototype as one of the major breakthroughs in providing users with a comfortable and believable VR experience. The technology leverages OLED's near instantaneous pixel switching time and a new rendering technique which aims to present the users only with the most up to date information image information and then only for a fraction of the time a standard display would present the image with the remainder of the frame 'black'. The practical upshot of this technique is that motion blur when moving your head around is massively reduced, making the presented scene far more solid and believable. But, does this work in practice? In short "Hell yes!". My first experience of low persistence was at CES 2014 with a short demo of their Crystal Cove prototype, a close relative to the DK2. With the DK2, I jumped into the Oculus Config Utility test scene and was immediately blown away how crisp, clean and downright solid everything felt. Swinging my head wildly about resulted in nothing more than a beautifully presented scene and a very sore neck. In fact, when the technology is working well, you instantly forget about it - which is probably the best possible positive I could state here, motion blur is gone (caveat: see below artefact details), never to return - and it's a revelation! Continued on next page .. Inherent Display Artefacts and What Can Be Done About Them I mentioned in my Day One summary that I'd come across two issues with the DK2's display. The noticeability of these issues will vary from user to user and application to application, but they represent issues that will need be either fixed or diminished in order for the VR experience promised. True Black Smear: I noticed this effect almost immediately after dropping myself into the Oculus World demo for the first time. The issue manifests itself during motion when focussing on a high contrast area of the scene (in this case the dark handrail on the stairs) then moving your head. This results in a nasty smearing effect reminiscent of the old DK1 panel blur, albeit limited to the area of the scene in question. This is an issue recognised by Oculus - Boone Calhoun of Oculus VR commented on the issue recently: We will have a fix for reducing this artifact. The artifact appears when a dark pixel becomes much brighter in the following frame. There is a workaround of sorts for this issue which is actually implemented in the DK2 version of the Technolust demo but unfortunately has its own side effects. By converting any true black to RGB (1,1,1) it removes the black smear issue but any dark scene then is overlaid with a subtle green mist. As Boone has stated, this is a hardware issue for which Oculus have a fix to affect at the software level. We'll report back once we have further new on this. Micro Stutter: Anyone who's ever run any dual GPU solution will probably recognise the term 'microstutter'. It was an artefact borne from framepacing issues caused by nVidia SLI and AMD Crossfire drivers when running more then one graphic scard in your gaming rig. Well, that effect seems also to be present with the DK2 and possibly for similar reasons. When moving your head around a scene, the scene updates appear to pause for fractions of a second, producing a jumpy, stuttery image. This seems application dependant (and perhaps strapped to frame rate consistency). It was most evident in Elite: Dangerous although I noticed similar issues when playing Technolust too. Again though, Oculus are on the case. Chris Taylor tweeted in response to mr article: @muterobert glad you got all that working. Our driver guys are working on judder issues and already have the problem fixed. Have fun! :) Sounds like Oculus are on top of these issues big time and that fixes are already known and likely inbound imminently. Great news! Lenses, FOV and Chromatic Aberration This section needs to me marked as a WIP. As of writing this, i've only spent 2 days with the DK2 and some aspects of this section will rely on calibration experimentation that may take some time. The following views and comment are therefore liable to change. I'll try to update and add detail as I go. Lenses: The DK2 ships with just 2 sets of lenses (A-B) versus the DK1 (A-C). The DK2 lenses are noticeably larger than that which shipped with the DK1 meaning, in theory, the sweet spot for the optimal experience may be larger. The housing design remains the same, with the same rotate-and-lift mechanism to remove the lenses. The DK2 has a slightly more reassuring 'click' when engaging. [gallery type="rectangular" ids="14378,14379"] FOV: This is a tough one and I need more time to be sure what I'm seeing is correct. For me, using the 'A' lenses with the retraction assembly entirely 'in' (i.e. all the way to my face) I could detect what I think was the edges of the panel beneath. The effect reminded me of my short time with the HD prototype last year, but the effect is nowhere near as pronouned. Moving the assembly further from my face removed the effect but replaced it with a more traditional binocular effect instead. From this experience, I'd say that the DK2 (which uses a 5.6" panel versus the DK1's 7") provided a fractionally lower FOV than the DK1. That said, the differences are small here - frankly it would be churlish to even suggest it was a problem. Update: After some more viewing and fiddling, my opinion is that the DK2 does provide a noticeably lower horizontal FOV than the DK1. It's the one aspect of the DK2 I'm slightly disappointed in as the rest of the package is so stellar. Chromatic Aberration: As the DK2 clearly sport 'upgraded' lenses versus the DK1, it's pretty obvious its optical parameters will be different also. What I noticed after some playtime is that either the software correction for chromatic aberation (the separation of light caused by the Rift's lenses) isn't quite 'there' yet in terms of effectiveness, or I need to do more work at the calibration stage. Others have noted after I uploaded the Elite: Dangerous video that the aberration correction seems much more stark when viewed without the Rift. Positional Tracking - Freedom to Move! Nausea associated with so-called simulator sickness, virtual reality's nemesis, is a tough problem to crack. The causes a many and varied and every individual stepping into VR reacts a little differently. However, when you reach an acceptable frame rate, remove motion blur and judder and cut latency to indistinguishable levels, there's only one major hurdle left. Your brain is remarkably sensitive to tiny movements your head moves in every day life and when what the eyes see don't match up to what signals from your inner ear, the brain struggles. DK1 had rotational tracking, which meant that the onboard IMU calculated head position on 6 axis (see image: right), this is great - especially if you can hit a low enough latency between detection of movement and transforming the view to match. So in the DK1, you can move your head forwards/backwards, left/right and tilt left/right - but if you moved your body and head in space, the sensors had no clue that you'd moved which means the view displayed isn't updated accordingly. This leads to an extremely disconcerting sensation whilst your brain tried to make sense of what's going on. This can then lead to simulator sickness, and nausea. Some extreme cases I've seen only need one incident like this and the affected person can feel unwell for many hours. So what's the solution? You need positional tracking, so that the headset / application knows its position in 3D space so that any application can update accordingly. Of numerous possible options, Oculus chose single camera based optical tracking solution. The DK2's housing has numerous infra-red LEDs embedded which all flash at different frequencies. The camera, packed in with the DK2, not much larger than a typical webcam, faces the user which picks up these LEDs and can use the unique signature to build a positional model of the DK2's position and orientation. In addition to this the DK2 contains a more traditional IMU providing rotational tracking information. Hey presto, positional tracking! So, What's it Like in Practice? When the camera is setup correctly and the application you're using hooks into the positional data, something magical happens. Instead of merely looking around, rooted to the spot, you can freely (within reason) move in and out of the virtual scene. Move your head closer to the camera and your virtual head will move into the virtual space. Duck, and you can look under objects. Dodge and lean around doors and lean out of windows to look up at the sky. Within limits, this is all now possible with the DK2 and it transforms the experience - making it immeasurably more human. Wandering through the Oculus World demo, inspecting branches and peering under light fittings - you feel like you're really exploring the virtual space. Mooching around your retro-futuristic apartment in Technolust and inspect your Atari 2600, lean over to inspect a suspicious barrel and discover a corpse peering back at you from within. Lean over the edge of the boat in Senza Peso and peer down into the depths of the water underneath. These are naturalistic actions that elicit natural consequences in the gameworld. Latency is imperceptible to me at present, the Oculus team have done a fantastic job at tweaking their tracking and rendering chain. The camera's positioning is somewhat critical - as you might expect. Oculus recommend that you place the camera at roughly eye-level and so that it sits roughly 5 feet from your face. This is fine, except that for most PC users, you'll probably be sat with your hands on a keyboard no more than 2-3 feet from the monitor the camera is sitting on. In practice, this still works in most cases - but you're likely to suffer more issues with your head stepping outside of the camera's field of view. Oculus recommend a joypad based experience, and I can see why. I still need to experiment further with this and look forward to others receiving their kits to share their custom placement solutions. The other slight niggle I had was that the rate of movement in game relative to my physical movements seem de-emphasised. That is, I felt I should be moving further in he gameworld than I was and this caused some disconnect. Not sure if this is a conscious tweak at the software side or simply that I'm dead wrong here, again more work is needed to be sure. I do wonder what solutions developers are going to engineer to deal with the obvious issues of players leaning through virtual objects though. Either the gameworld will have to have natural limitations to prevent this from happening (not particularly realistic) or the player's view is stopped at the point of clipping - which would cause disorientation and perhaps nausea again. Frankly though, those concerns are far outweighed by the thought of what developers are going to come up with when they set to work with the DK2 - I cannot wait to find out awesome experiences await us. In general though, the positional tracking solution Oculus have come up with is elegant and supremely effective. It adds the missing piece to naturalistic viewing of virtual worlds and is going to be crucial in tricking us we're inside those virtual spaces. -- So there you have it, almost 4,000 words on the next generation Oculus Rift. So many words and yet so much more to say and talk about. It's an enormous leap in experience over the now usurped DK1 and offers the best possible VR experience the you can obtain commercially right now. What's more it proves that Oculus have a handle on the challenges that they only began to start solving 18 months ago. The DK2 offers a great target for developers to craft experiences needed for the forthcoming CV1 consumer release and means they can focus on creativity without worrying too much about shifting goalposts of hardware. Hats off to the team at Oculus, you've delivered on your promises and then some.