In these days I’ve completely formatted my VR PC. The reason? A damn blue screen of death loop.
My friend Max was playing with Robo Recall and having a lot of fun. Then suddenly he started having some audio issues, so after a while I decided to restart my PC. Well, blue screen of death. F*ck.
Continue reading “Oculus, USB 3.1 and blue screen of death loop (thread exception not handled)”
Some times ago, I made an interview with a great team working on a relaxation app for virtual reality: Just Relax. Today, I’ve been able to actively try another relaxation tool for VR: Guided Meditation VR. Guided Meditation VR is one of the demos that I loved the most at DK2 times (the good old times of Oculus Share, when VR was so pure, do you remember that?) and so when Cubicle Ninja guys gave me a free key I was so happy!
After having installed it, I launched it… ready to feel relaxed.
Initial menus were a bit too fast (not so coherent with the relaxation theme) and were strangely controllable only using left hand (don’t know if this happened only to me or if it is a design choice… but I didn’t manage to change this in any way). Continue reading “Guided Meditation VR review: relax in virtual reality”
When I arrived in the office today, my buddy Gianni told me as first thing: “Have you read about Palmer Luckey? He’s just quitted from facebook!“. Yesterday I had no time to check VR news sites, so no, I didn’t know that and so yes, I was enormously shocked. I hoped that today was April the 1st, but this was not an April’s fool. It’s real. He’s gone.
Everyone is reporting this memorable Facebook statement about this departure, so I’m doing the same here
Palmer will be dearly missed. Palmer’s legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We’re thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR, and we wish him all the best.
The translation is
Palmer doesn’t work for facebook anymore. We don’t care, but we pretend to do.
I admit I’m very sad. I’m very sad even more because a bit I recognize myself in him. Well, less rich, less famous, less successful, less lucky… but as a VR startupper I feel his pain. Continue reading “Palmer Luckey departs from Facebook, goodbye man”
After GDC 2017, lots of things have changed in the VR world. Nothing unexpected, but lots of little big news that show how virtual reality ecosystem is evolving very fast.
One of the most interesting news has been the one of Oculus cutting 200$ for the price of Oculus Rift + Touch bundles. Since Touch cost is 199$, this practically means that if you buy a Rift, you get Touch controllers for free! Furthermore, if you want to buy an additional tracking sensor, you’ll get a discount of $20 on the previous price!
Continue reading “Virtual Reality price is lowering, adoption is coming?”
After having criticized Oculus about its tracking issues and how its updates were making things even worse (unless you used Duct Tape, of course… duct tape fixes everything!), today I have to say “Bravo!” to its guys.
The new Update they’ve released for the Rift, the 1.12, seems to have fixed lots of stuff: as you can see from the release notes, a lot of work has been done to make tracking good again. The feedbacks from the users have been really positive and now reddit shows people writing “With 1.12 my room scale works” and so the virtual world is a happier place. Surely there will be people that will still experience errors and problems, but their number has been drastically lowered. Continue reading “Oculus Tracker Update 1.12 makes Oculus a good guy again”
2 days ago with a post on its blog, Oculus announced the launch of the new Samsung Gear VR. As always, with respect to the older version it is more powerful, more comfortable, more epic, it has more compatible content and blah blah blah. Honestly despite all the marketing words, I’ve not seen that much innovation in the different versions of Gear VR: the only thing that truly changes is the phone that you put inside it and that gives more horsepower to the graphics you see inside virtual reality.
This year, finally, Samsung and Oculus have introduced a true innovation: the remote. Oh, well, actually this is not a true innovation, since something similar was already present inside Oculus CV1 and Daydream, but it’s surely an innovation for this headset. And you know, I love remotes: if you’ve read my Daydream review, you know that I found it super-comfortable. Gear VR had to introduce it to not fall behind its competitor. Remote of Gear VR has 3-DOF so you can point objects and has 4 buttons and a touchpad to have super-easy interaction with the VR environment. If you’re thinking “it’s almost exactly like Daydream one”… yes, you’re right.
We all know the problems that Oculus is having with its room-scale tracking and the fact that its just released update (the 1.11) is not helping that much. Nate Mitchell has tried saying that everything is ok and that bad tracking is all fault of bad camera positioning by the users but I don’t believe this that much.
Today I opened a post that was lying around on reddit (ah, the lovely reddit) since some days ago, to discover an absolutely strange but effective solution to these problems. Continue reading “Oculus tracker problems can be fixed using duct tape?”
Just a little thought about today news that I found most interesting: Oculus is seriously starting an augmented reality division.
The news is quite strange because Oculus is a virtual reality company and while lots of people still confuse the two, AR and VR are two pretty different technologies. Furthermore, no one of the other big players of virtual reality is experimenting on AR, too (or, at least, we don’t know it). Vice versa, big players in AR at the moment are names like Microsoft, Meta, Epson and the super vaporous Magic Leap and no one of these names is involved in VR (except from Microsoft, to be honest). Even Apple seems more interested in AR and to have excluded VR from its business. It is like the companies are investing in one technology or the other at the moment, due to the fact that these technologies are so innovative that they require huge investments in R&D, devices, marketing, contents and other stuff and so there are no enough resources for both. But Oculus now seems interested in AR, too. Continue reading “Oculus is interested in Augmented Reality?”
After reading about all room-scale problems, Oculus had announced an update of its tracking system for the end of January. It arrived a bit later, but it arrived, with a long list of improvements, starting from the Oculus Home carpet being straightened (wtf, seriously).
If you’re thinking about this has solved all problems… well, you’re wrong. Subreddit /r/oculus is again a long list of “my room-scale setup doesn’t work”. Someone has posted images of his glitches seen in Quill…
Continue reading “Oculus Releases Tracker Update 1.11 but with no luck”
The ghost howls 