We received our Oculus Rift DK2s on Tuesday and so I thought I would do a post with some first impressions and also make a short video of what our game currently looks like through the lens and taking advantage of positional tracking for all movement. Note a lot of this is just placeholder art until we have our actual art complete and that it also looks a lot better in the rift, most of the artifacts are due to the camera going out of focus rather than a problem with the DK2 itself.



I’ve had the original dev kit since last April and have tried practically every demo I could get my hands on and I’ve also been working for the last several months with it on Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes so I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the DK1.

When people discuss the specs and the pros and cons of the DK2 versus the DK1 it tends to sound like it is a small incremental update, but for me it’s been a night and day difference. The resolution increase, low persistence and positional tracking push the experience far beyond what was possible with the old device.

Resolution & Screen Door

The bump from 1280×800 to 1920×1080 may not sound all like all that much, and a lot of discussion of the change to a pentile OLED makes it sound even less significant, but I’ve definitely found in practice it makes a big difference in being able to make out things like text and smaller details. This is very important to Keep Talking as we no longer need to position the bomb at uncomfortably close distances to enable people to see it well.

The screen door is still noticeable, but feels much less intrusive. It also has a different shape due to the pentile display that I’ve found a bit less distracting.

Low Persistence

I think my expectation was that some motion blur would still exist, but I really haven’t been able to notice any and this change might have made more of a difference for me than the resolution change. Eliminating that blur not only makes looking around the environment more comfortable, it also makes it much easier to make out finer details.

Positional Tracking

Lack of positional tracking has always been one of the caveats I have to tell people when demoing the DK1, otherwise people would move laterally and feel strange though they usually wouldn’t quite figure out why.

I tried a few demos of positional tracking using the razer hydra and I guess I figured the IR camera based solution would feel like that but improved slightly. The difference in precision and latency makes it a completely different experience. The positional tracking feels pretty much perfect and instantaneous, though you do have to place the camera pretty far from you to have much of a capture area to move around in.

In the desk demo scene that they created for testing positional tracking it really adds to the depth of close smaller objects, while in larger scenes like Tuscany the tracking tends to feel far more subtle, but definitely gives access to new depth cues like parallax that make scale feel more apparent and the world feel much more real.

This new better sense of scale made the problems with the models in our game far more apparent, we already knew that the table, chair and door weren’t sized properly, but in the DK1 this wasn’t really all that obvious. In the DK2 it is actually fairly distracting.

SDK

The only real problem I’ve had with the DK2 so far is that the SDK is still in a very early stage. Not that this isn’t the kind of thing to be expected with development kits and I’m definitely happier having it early than waiting longer for it to be perfected. It has been more problematic for Allen and Ben who have had some software compatibility problems which have limited their ability to use their kits.

Direct to rift mode in Unity doesn’t seem to work well currently, introducing noticeable judder, extended mode does work, but still feels a bit off.

Final Thoughts

The DK2 is a very big step up from the DK1. It still needs a bit more polish but it definitely feels far closer to being ready for consumers than its predecessor. I still wouldn’t advise people who aren’t developers to pick one up yet but if this pace of improvement continues I think the consumer version is going to be amazing.



- Brian