Oculus Rift vs GearVR

After having talked you about the headset you should buy and having made a detailed comparison of GearVR vs Cardboard, today I want to highlight the difference between Oculus Rift and Samsung GearVR.

Both headsets are high-end ones and both are produced with Oculus technologies. The key difference is that the first one is a high-end tethered headset, while the second one is a high-end mobile headset. That is, the first one has to be connected to a VR-ready PC (through HDMI and USB port), while the second one is a piece of plastic that works when you put your Samsung phone inside it.

Samsung GearVR and its companion phones… if you use Note7, game explosions have never been so real!(Image by Oculus)

I preordered the Oculus Touch!!!

Yesterday evening has been a great moment for me… I preordered my Oculus Touch, reserving my front seat having been one of the people that pre-ordered the Rift CV1 in January!

As we already know, I paid them 199€… and I hope they will be great! My controllers will arrive in December, so I’ll have something to do during my Christmas vacations… 😉

And you, have you preordered your Touch Controllers? Have you ever tried them? Let me know in the comments section!

 

Highlights of Oculus Connect 3

Some days ago I wrote a blog post about what to expect from the Oculus Connect 3, the greatest Oculus event of the year. I made some predictions… and I got right with three and a half out of five! Am I a magician? Well, it would be cool, but actually it’s only matter of being informed on the VR world and just being a bit visionary… even if the magician story is the one I actually tell girls to impress them:)

Ok, so… what have been the most important announcements of Oculus Connect 3? Oculus has made a short recap on its blog and I want to enhance it with some thoughts.

Oculus Connect 3: what to expect from it?

From 5th to 7th of October, Oculus will hold its annual event in San José, California: the Oculus Connect. It will be a day where super-smart people (like god-like programmer John Carmack or super smart-man Michael Abrash) will hold super-interesting talks and where Oculus will make lots of important announcements.

It will be an event totally worth to be seen. The talks of Oculus Connect are always interesting… look at this one made by Michael Abrash some times ago when he talked about illusions perceived by our brains:

But the thing we are waiting the most are the announcements. What will Oculus announce? We don’t know… but we can make some speculations. And I hope you will speculate with me in the comments, saying your predictions about the next Oculus Connect!

How to stream virtual reality to Youtube

As you already know, we of Immotionar re organizing a small event here in Turin about VR & AR, called Disruptive Technologies Conference. Since we’re sold out, we’re planning to create a live stream of the event, to show our fantastic talks to people that can’t attend it. This means that we’ve also to stream our virtual reality demo game, with its audio and video on the same PC where we stream the seminar slides and the speaker talking… but, how to stream all this correctly?

Our new futuristic demo game for ImmotionRoom system… look at that explosive Tron candies!

How to select Oculus Rift audio output device

Oculus Rift CV1 comes with very handy integrated headphones. That’s great, but they may cause some problems about where to output stuff, especially games designed to be played with Oculus.

Yes, because, from a Windows standpoint, the Rift headphones are just like any other audio output device, while when it comes to playing games involving the Oculus Runtimes, things can become a lot more strange. These days we were organizing for the DTC event and we had hard times trying to output our Unity demo audio to the surround speakers of the conference room. All other audio (like from VLC, Windows volume, etc…) was correctly reproduced, while the Unity audio was always sent to the Rift. Then I navigated to the Oculus support and found the solution to the problem (ah, the old and dirty RTFM!).

Oculus Touch price has been leaked?

Today I found this thread on reddit where a redditor has discovered that a german appliances reseller, MediaMarkt (which is called MediaWorld here in Italy), may have leaked the final price of the Oculus Touch on their e-store.

At time of writing, the link doesn’t show price anymore, but I’m a smart guy so I made a screenshot 😀

Virtual reality games: The Affected (+how to make it work with Oculus CV1)

The Affected is one of my favourite virtual reality games of all times. At the moment it’s just a small demo that was made for Oculus DK2 (so lots of time ago), but it’s really awesome. The developers say that they’re developing a version for Oculus CV1 and other episodes, but I’ve never found them anywhere. But I hope that’s true, because I’m really eager to try a new version of this game!

The Affected is a horror virtual reality game, divided in 3 small episodes: The Manor, The Hospital and the Carnival. Every episode is scary as hell, so this is not a game for the faint of heart!

The Oculus Unity Pro Trial: should you take it?

Some days ago I opened my email and received a mail by Oculus saying that:

Since you’re one of our Rift pre-order pioneers, you get a free trial of Unity Pro! Your unique access code is available now, but expires December 31, 2016.

I was one of the one pre-ordering the Oculus Rift CV1 in January and living all the shipping mess (Pepperidge Farm Remembers!). So, now, Oculus rewards me with a free trial of Unity Pro! Cool! I’m a Unity Developer… this trial interests me a lot. But I’m not going to activate it.