Before developers can get to work with the Oculus Rift DK2, the Oculus SDK needs to be in ship shape. The company apparently wasn’t ready to deliver the SDK in time for the first batch of DK2 shipments. They opted to hold the first shipment until the middle of next week to afford more time to ready the SDK. Andres ‘Cybereality’ Hernandez, Oculus’ Community Manager, shared the update in the Oculus Developer Forum:
We’ve decided to hold the initial shipment of DK2s until the middle of next week so that we have an additional week to polish and QA the new Oculus SDK.
We’ve been working on this update for over a year, with a focus on making the Rift easier to use and develop for. There are multiple major improvements including overhauled device and display handling, and we want to make sure the new SDK ready for integration by thousands of developers when DK2s start arriving at doorsteps.
Sorry to make everyone wait another week. We wouldn’t delay if it wasn’t important.
The good news is that this only affects the very first group that would have received their units, and this doesn’t change the total number of units that will ship in July.
Again, we’ll keep everyone posted. Thanks for bearing with us!
Back in April, the company released the Oculus SDK 0.3.1 Preview which added John Carmack’s Timewarp technique, improved distortion, and more. At the end of May the company put out an Oculus SDK 0.3.2 Preview 2 with support for Mac and Linux along with further bug fixes and enhancements.
See Also: Early Oculus Rift DK2 Unboxing, “The color, contrast, and motion is leaps and bounds over the DK1″
On the 1st of July, Oculus provided its first shipping update regarding the DK2. The company at that point said that they had received some 45,000 pre-orders for the Rift DK2 and that they expected to ship roughly 10,000 units from factories in July.
The Oculus Rift DK2 is the company’s second VR headset development kit which offers a number of major improvements over the original kit, called the DK1, which was the result of a successful Kickstarter back in August, 2012. Although the DK2 is intended for developers, the company openly offers the VR headset up for sale to anyone interested for $350; new orders are expected to begin shipping in September.
The Oculus Rift DK2′s most notable enhancements are a higher resolution display with low-persistence capability and the addition of positional tracking. The new screen is 1920×1080, resulting in a resolution of 960×1080 per eye, compared to the 1200×800 (600×800 per eye) resolution of the DK1. The DK2 features an IR camera which faces the user to detect translational (up/down/left/right/forward/back) movements in addition to rotational movements. The Oculus Rift DK1 only tracks rotational movements.