The future’s so bright I gotta wear these… shades?
I have waited 25 long years for this day to arrive. From the first clumsy attempt at Virtual Reality (VR) I experienced when playing the terrible Dactyl Nightmare back in 1991, I’ve known that VR had the potential to revolutionise the way we game, educate, interact and imagine. Sure, I may have needed to vomit immediately afterwards thanks to the chug-tastic framerates and huge delay between head movement and screen update, but it was a tiny, tentative taste of what was to come. Little did I realise that it would take so long for the world’s first consumer VR headset that didn’t suck to arrive. But arrive it has, in the form of the Oculus Rift Consumer Version 1 (CV1). We finally have VR that is affordable and that works… though it’s not without issues.
A SMALL PRICE TO PAY
Despite the founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, promising a cheap VR headset, the launch price of US$599 took many by surprise. His explanation was that he’d rather go for quality than rockbottom pricing; launch a dud VR product and consumers would be turned off for another decade. Throw in taxes, shipping and the anaemic Aussie dollar, and the final price for Australians is AU$1150. For most mainstream gamers this is outlandish, but PC gamers are accustomed to spending $1000 on a GPU alone. There’s also the fact that you need a decent gaming PC to use the Rift, another stumbling block for the masses. Yet many PC gamers already have a Rift-ready box, which requires an Nvidia GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 GPU or greater, 8GB of memory, an Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, along with three USB 3.0 ports. I did my testing on a heftier system packing an i5 6600K overclocked to 4.5GHz, along with twin GTX 980 Ti GPUs, but apparently this is overkill. From what I’ve seen on the Oculus forums, the minimum spec is fine for running nearly all of the Rift launch titles at the 90 frames per second required to keep motion sickness at bay. So, what do you get for your AU$1150?
WHAT’S IN THE BOX
The entire kit is enclosed in a slick box that Apple would be proud of, though Oculus has gone for a black look rather than white. Opening the magnetic flap reveals several key components. Obviously there’s the Rift Head Mounted Display (HMD), along with the motion tracker on a small stand approximately 20cm in length. The camera on the top of this rotates to ensure the user is sitting or standing in the sweet spot. There’s also the Oculus remote, a very small controller with just a few buttons, designed for less complex VR experiences. Finally, there’s an Xbox One controller with wireless dongle, required for the more intense games. Unfortunately there’s one major piece of the VR puzzle missing – the Oculus Touch controllers. Operating similarly to a Wiimote or Playstation Move controller but with much finer accuracy, these have been delayed until the second half of 2016 at an undisclosed price. After spending extensive time with the HTC Vive prototype, which does include two motion wands, the lack of the Touch controllers is a huge disappointment. Being inside a virtual world is one thing; being able to interact with it via hand and arm movements is something else entirely.
The setup procedure for the first two Rift Development Kits wasn’t exactly impressive, but it was aimed at developers, not consumers. Thankfully the new Oculus installation procedure is much simpler, leading users through each step of the process with videos and animations, all wrapped in a gorgeous interface. After downloading 800MB or so of software, I had the kit up and running perfectly, and it was already calibrated during the setup process. Trembling with anticipation, it was time to put the Rift through its paces.
TRANSPORTED TO ANOTHER WORLD
The HMD comes with three separate straps to adjust the fit, one on each side, as well as the top support. Unlike earlier kits, I had it perfectly mounted over my glasses within seconds – it simply fits so much better than the dev kits. This is crucial, as there’s quite a small sweet spot with the positioning of the HMD, and missing this leads to a very blurry image. However, once it’s in place, it stays in place thanks to the excellent fit. Weighing a mere 470 grams, the HMD is extremely light, and I didn’t notice any neck pain even after playing continuously for several hours. The CV1 has also cured the problem of the lenses fogging up, with a foam seal around the edge of the unit that keeps your moist, stinky breath away from the screen.
Unlike the HTC Vive, the Rift comes with stereo headphones, which fold up when putting on the Rift. The sound offered by these is surprisingly good, enough so that I didn’t feel the need to use my Audio Technica cans. It would be easy to do so though, as the integrated headphones are removable courtesy of a plastic tool included in the kit. The headphones are surprisingly clear at higher volumes, and include virtual surround sound to enhance the feeling that you’re actually in the game. While this virtual surround isn’t quite as good as a true, discrete 5.1 sound system, it’s up there with the likes of Dolby Headphone when faking it.
Each of the side-straps is attached to a mechanism that detects when the HMD is in place, which in turn automatically fires up the Oculus application, and the front-end of this is called Home. It’s an apt name, as the virtual environment is an ultra-modern mansion, complete with designer artwork and a crackling fireplace. Hovering before my eyes was my Rift library, stocked with over 30 titles, an impressive figure considering this is the launch of an entirely new platform. Many of these are only five minute demos and animations, but there’s also quite a healthy range of real games.
Looking around Home, the first thing to impress me was how responsive and accurate the tracking is – it’s come a long, long way from the DK1. No matter how quickly I moved my head, the screen followed my movements perfectly, and the addition of IR emitters on the rear HMD straps means it’s possible to turn 360 degrees without losing tracking. It’s super smooth and responsive, with no detectable latency whatsoever. While many of the demos and games suggest standing up while using them, I found the seated position to work best, as there’s far less chance of getting tangled in the HMD’s cable. I think this will be a real issue for the HTC Vive, as you’ll tie yourself up in no time when walking around your living room.
The first dev kits suffered from a huge problem called chromatic aberration. It was almost as if I could see the Red, Green and Blue sub-pixels that make up each individual pixel, especially when looking towards the edge of the screen, but I’m happy to report that the CV1 fixes this issue entirely. The weird rainbow coloured pixels of the dev kits are now gone, thank god.
Instead of the single screen used in the dev kits, the CV1 now has individual screens for each eye. Each OLED panel packs a resolution of 1080 x 1200 running at 90Hz (hence why games have to run at 90 frames per second). By using two screens, it appears to allow for wider adjustments of the Interpupillary distance, which is the distance between each pupil. However, the biggest benefit is the sharper image they provide; individual pixels are significantly harder to spot than the grainy screens of the dev kits. During most of the VR experiences that I played, I didn’t notice the pixel structure at all, yet in a handful of situations they’re quite obvious. While 1080 x 1200 sounds like a decent resolution, the fact that each screen is just an inch or two from the user’s eye, and is being magnified by a Fresnel lens, means the pixel structure is visible if you look for it. This isn’t a problem when enjoying experiences that don’t have much fine detail, and also when you’re focused on objects in the near distance. Surprisingly, this made games with a third-person camera some of the most enjoyable. Firing up a first person game such as Adrift is fine when you’re in a small room, but at certain points you leave the space station. When gazing at the ruined station in the distance, the low resolution makes it difficult to resolve detail, and it’s also prone to aliasing. Exposing this issue even more were the 360 Photo and Video apps. The photo app places the user inside world-famous locations, but because it’s the real world they’re packed with detail, and the Rift’s screens just don’t have enough pixels to handle it. The Video app is even worse, as the content running at an even lower resolution than the screens, resulting in a pixilated, blurry mess.
Thankfully most launch titles are aware of the low relative resolution, and have used clever art and design to get around them. Whether it’s focusing the player’s attention on smaller spaces, or using simplified art styles that don’t pack lots of fine detail, most of the time the resolution issue isn’t a concern. Cranking up my GPU’s forced anti-aliasing setting also helped matters. However, I think we’ll need at least a 4K panel in each eye to remove this issue entirely, which is several years away. And you can imagine the horsepower required to drive twin 4K panels, each rendering a separate view of the 3D world?
One final issue that I noticed was a kind of ghosting or halo that appeared around bright objects on a dark background, almost like a reverse shadow. They’re very hard to describe until you see them, but it appears to be caused by the lenses, which means it’ll probably be an issue with the HTC Vive and PSVR as well.
ULTIMATE IMMERSION
The initial wow-factor of the CV1 is just as revolutionary as the first time I played a game with 3D graphics, if not more so. Instead of peering at the virtual world before me through a 2D window, I was actually inside it, able to look around and travel through it. The leap in immersion is exponential, making even the most basic experiences so much more enjoyable. As such, even the simplest games are incredibly enjoyable, for the first few hours at least. Once the novelty wears off, some of the simpler games do become repetitive and bland, but there’s also a healthy range of excellent games on offer.
I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve already spent quite a lot of time in VR HMDs, but I didn’t find any of the experiences to cause nausea. Oculus gives each game a comfort rating, from Comfortable to Moderate to Intense, and even on the latter games I had no need to reach for a bucket. I did get a slight headache after playing for the first few hours, but this seems to have disappeared the more that I play. I had the exact same issue when I started playing First Person Shooters, but like VR, it only lasted a day or two.
So then, is the Rift CV1 worth $1150? If there wasn’t a competing product on the near horizon, I’d recommend it without hesitation… but HTC’s Vive is launching in just a couple of months, albeit at a higher price of $799. While the HMDs of the two competing products seem to be very similar, with basically identical specs, the inclusion of two motion controllers as well as room-sized tracking makes the Vive a more encompassing VR experience. As such, I’d recommend holding off until the HTC Vive lands, by which point the Rift CV1’s price point may have dropped, and the Touch controllers could be available.
While overall the Rift CV1 is an incredible product, delivering a quality of VR experience that is unprecedented, there are still a few niggling issues, which I think all of 2016’s HMDs will likely suffer from – resolution and haloing in particular. Yet regardless of which kit you buy it’s worth remembering that this is day one of the consumer VR revolution, and I have no doubt that these problems will be solved within five years, if not earlier. I also have no doubt that VR will rapidly take over from 2D screens, especially in the fields of video over IP, educational applications, virtual prototyping (i.e. engineering and architecture) and whatever else some brilliant mind comes up with. But it’s us gamers who will benefit first and foremost, as once you’ve actually lived and played inside a game, it’s hard to go back to that boring old 2D window.
VERDICT
The lack of Touch controllers is a disappointment, but the Rift CV1 proves that VR is here at last, and is here to stay.