World-builders who rely on VR as one of their main tools of the trade should rejoice, as Oculus VR announced that it will launch the second edition of the Oculus Rift Development Kit in July.
The price of the new Dev Kit may be higher than the initial one (for those who don’t know or don’t remember, the first iteration was priced at $300), but the improved performance fully justifies the price difference. Last year, when this company launched the first Oculus Rift, the world was shocked with how affordable this technology has become. Now, at the 2014 Game Developers Conference, Oculus VR proved that it can make the virtual reality headset even better, while still maintaining the price-to-quality ratio.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey explained that having taken the first step, the rest of the road is much easier now: “We’re much closer. The last year we’ve spent researching and developing what consumer VR needs to be… we didn’t know before, and we do now. We know what we need to ship, we know what parts we need to do it, we know where we can get those parts, and now it’s just a matter of playing the waiting game and putting it together.”
All in all, the DK2 is an improved version of the Crystal Cove prototype that Oculus VR exhibited at CES, earlier this year (see link to that story at the end of this post). The developers of this VR headset focused a lot on the comfort of the wearer and on his presence in the virtual world. To make everything look better, the company increased the resolution to 1080p, lowered the latency and improved the framerate. In other words, they proved to be quite responsive to the feedback they received from the developers who tested the first Dev Kit.
The company is already taking pre-orders for the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2 starting today, so anyone who is interested should head over to the company’s website. Hopefully, developers won’t be late with developing content that can be used in tandem with this VR headset, as wasting such an opportunity would be a real shame. That said, the Oculus Rift DK2 is far from being perfect, but that only means that the manufacturers still have room for improvements that maybe we’ll get to see next year, in a new version.
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