Minimizing latency is the first step toward great virtual reality. In March, we announced the Oculus Latency Tester, a tool we developed to help content creators build better virtual reality games by enabling them to quickly and precisely measure motion-to-photons latency from any point in their game pipeline.

We’re pleased to announce that the Latency Tester is finally complete and we’re opening pre-orders starting today! If you have Oculus Store Credit from the Kickstarter campaign rewards, you can apply it to your pre-order.





Measuring latency of your game is crucial to developing the best possible virtual reality experiences. With the latency tester, we’ve been able to reduce the latency of all Oculus demos and integrations, identify potential rendering improvements more quickly, and uncover secretly buffered frames in different engines and GPUs. It can also be used to test your development setup for optimal latency testings to minimize latency (e.g. graphics card settings, Aero disabled on Windows, etc).

We’re really happy with the final product, and we’ve used it internally to benchmark and optimize latency across all platforms. If you want to learn more about how the guts of the Latency Tester work, you can read the original announcement post here: https://www1.oculus.com/blog/more-tools-for-great-vr/.

If you reserved your spot in line for a latency tester, please use the same email address at checkout to claim that reservation! Those reservations will place you at the front of the order queue. You must claim your reservation by Sept 30th at 11:59pm PT or your reservation will be forfeited and your spot will be handed to the next person in line.

We manufactured a limited quantity to start, and we’ll make more based on demand. If you have questions about the Latency Tester, head over to the Oculus Developer Forums and let us know. We hope you love it as much as we do!

GDCE, Gamescom, UNITE, & PAX

We spent the second half of August catching up with developers and gamers around the world at GDC Europe, Gamescom, UNITE, PAX Dev, and PAX Prime.

Palmer and Nate spoke at GDC Europe about why VR will drive content innovation and some of the key challenges facing VR game developers today. If you’re interested to learn more, Gamasutra provided a thorough recap of the challenges portion here.

On the show floors, people lined up for hours to try the latest demos from the community in the HD prototypes. Based on our back of the envelope estimates, we demoed Hawken, Unreal Engine 4, Blue Marble, Undercurrent, iRacing, Proton Pulse, Super Mega Mega, Lunar Flight, First Law, and AaAaa! to over 30,000 people.





The front of the line to try iRacing in the Rift at Gamescom.





The Gamescom booth team getting the word out about virtual reality and the Oculus Rift.





Flying a high-powered mech through the city streets of Hawken…

A special thank you to everyone that waited hours to see the latest demos — We appreciate it!

Expanding the Oculus Team





We’re looking for more super-talented engineers to help build the best VR platform in the world. In particular, we’re looking for the best and the brighest in the following areas:

Mechanical Engineering

Systems and Drivers

Embedded Systems

Android and C/C++

Web Engineering

If you think you’ve got what it takes to build the Metaverse, let us know! You can apply to any of the above positions, plus many, many more, at careers.oculus.com.

IndieCade and VR Jam 2013

We’ll be at IndieCade next weekend (Oct. 3rd – 6th) talking to developers, showcasing the VR Jam 2013 winners, and hanging out with the community in our back yard. Congratulations again to all the VR Jam finalists and winners!

We’re giving two talks at the IndieCade festival this year:

– Laird is giving a talk on team building and leadership in the video game industry Thursday at 9am PT.

– Palmer and Nate are presenting on virtual reality game design Saturday at 4:30pm PT.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, stop by the festival and say Hello!

As always, you can keep up on the latest Oculus news on www.oculus.com, www.facebook.com/oculusvr, or by following @oculus on Twitter.

Thanks,

— Palmer and the Oculus team