A render of Oculus' new Crescent Bay prototype Oculus
A render of Oculus' new Crescent Bay prototype
A new head harness outfitted with IR LEDs allows for 360-degree positional tracking. Oculus
A new head harness outfitted with IR LEDs allows for 360-degree positional tracking.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe announcing the arrival of the company's new Crescent Bay prototype. Oculus
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe announcing the arrival of the company's new Crescent Bay prototype.
The new prototype also includes integrated audio, a first for the Oculus Rift. Oculus
The new prototype also includes integrated audio, a first for the Oculus Rift.
Improved ergonomics and stability help you stay in the "sweet spot" of presence more easily. Oculus
Improved ergonomics and stability help you stay in the "sweet spot" of presence more easily.
The writer tries out Crescent Bay at the developer summit Oculus Connect. Oculus
The writer tries out Crescent Bay at the developer summit Oculus Connect.
Externally, the eyebox isn't significantly different from the one on DK2, Oculus' current developer kit. Oculus
Externally, the eyebox isn't significantly different from the one on DK2, Oculus' current developer kit.
The weeks leading up to Oculus’ first developer summit were full of rumors. Would the virtual-reality company finally unveil the consumer version of its Oculus Rift VR headset? If the design wasn’t finalized, would we at least learn the unit’s specs? Its resolution? Would there be a controller?
The answer to all of these was “no.” But Oculus still managed to blow everyone’s mind.
When Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe took the stage Saturday morning at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, his keynote was equal parts VR pep rally and love letter to the developer community, but it wasn’t detail-rich—until he revealed a brand new feature prototype called Crescent Bay. “This prototype shows off the features, the quality, the presence that we need to deliver for consumer VR,” he said, referring to the feeling that one is truly existing in a virtual space.
(Fun fact: Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach, CA is very close to Oculus’ Newport Beach headquarters—and Crystal Cove State Park, which inspired the name of the company’s previous feature prototype. If there’s another one to come in the future, our money’s on Pelican Point or Arch Rock.)
Crescent Bay is as big of a leap forward from the current developer kit DK2, Iribe continued, as DK2 was from the original devkit that Oculus funded via Kickstarter in August 2012. It features 360-degree tracking, improved ergonomics and weight, and integrated audio. And it was available to try that day: an in-house team in Oculus’ Seattle office had created a suite of experiences for it, and Epic Games&mdash:which had designed demos for each Rift prototype thus far—had contributed the piece de resistance, a new demo called “Showdown.”
Entering the Bay
Later that day, an Oculus staffer took me into a massive meeting room that had been partitioned into a series of 10 individual rectangular chambers, each the size of a decent-sized office. I walked into Room 9; the walls were bare, save for a small tracking camera mounted on the longer wall in front of me. In the corner, another staffer stood with a Crescent Bay unit, which was connected to a computer rig and a monitor. This wouldn’t be a seated demo, though. A slightly raised platform, about four feet square, sat in the middle of the floor for me to stand on; the edges were beveled, the staffer explained, so that when my feet hit the slanted edges I’d know that I was near the edge.
Up to this point, the only freestanding Oculus experience I’d had was in “The Room,” a small office in the Oculus offices that replicated the Valve Room, an experience that an R&D team at Valve Software had cooked up in 2013. (It was the Valve Room that first convinced Iribe, notoriously sensitive to simulator sickness, that presence was possible and virtual reality was a viable consumer technology.) The Room, though, had been papered in fiducial markers, symbols that allowed a prototype headest to orient itself in free space; this room had no such markers. If Oculus had indeed managed to replicate the performance of The Room, and Crescent Bay could induce presence, then it was a breakthrough that they’d been chasing for months: “We have to be better than that,” Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had told me in April, talking about The Room.
The Oculus staffer handed me the prototype, and I slipped it over my head. Once I had it settled so that I was in the “sweet spot,” seeing the VR display with the best focus and resolution possible, he helped tighten both the headband and a new adjustment band that ran from the crown of my head down the back. Immediately, I could feel the weight and ergonomic improvements. Even using the DK2, I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping a hand on the eyebox just to stay in the sweet spot; with Crescent Bay, once I was in it I was in it for good—that sucker was staying put. I gave the word, and the demos began. “Feel free to move around,” the staffer said. “Crouch, stand, lie on the ground if you want to.” Again, this was a huge departure from any other official Oculus demo I’d ever experienced.
Re-Establishing Presence
The demos, to a one, were breathtaking, each in different ways. All told, there were 13, ranging from the lifelike interior of a submarine to a cartoonish meadow to standing on the edge of a skyscraper in a Bioshock Infinite-like cityscape. There was a T. Rex walking up to me and roaring; there was some sort of insect rendered in an electron microscope. A couple of them, particularly one that let me crouch over a small town and examine its paper inhabitants, were clear homages to the experiences from the Valve Room. And finally, Epic’s “Showdown” put me in the middle of a slow-motion firefight between near-future sci-fi soldiers and some sort of oversized droid, complete with bullet-time effects and a car flipping directly over my head, its driver still inside it.
Through them all, the experience was vastly improved over anything I’d seen for the DK2, and even The Room itself. The so-called “screen door” effect, in which the spaces between individual pixels are visible, was completely gone. The 360-degree tracking was nearly flawless; try as I might, spinning this way and that, I could only break presence in two of the 13 demos. The 90Hz refresh rate made everything appear incredibly smooth and lifelike, from a hugely magnified microbe to a friendly alien. The display was, frankly, astounding, though whether that was due to improved resolution or a diffusion layer that blurs out the screen door effect I’m still not sure. (At this time, Oculus is refusing to discuss display specifications, leading to conjecture that Crescent Bay might utilize a new 21:9 panel that Samsung patented earlier this year.) Despite their underwhelming appearance, the integrated earphones delivered impressive sound; Oculus’ licensing Visisonic‘s Realspace 3D audio technology so far seems like a smart move.
Individual dimensions, though, are just that. The one thing that matters is whether or not all those dimensions can come together to deliver presence. I’ve experienced that presence before; I can tell the difference. And as much as I’ve enjoyed the DK2, it was never quite able to recapture that magic. Crescent Bay did.
Of course, knowing Oculus, this isn’t the end of the line. The company still won’t give a date for the Rift’s consumer release, and Iribe was quick to point out in his keynote that they’re “not there yet.” But if Crescent Bay is any indication, Oculus is well on its way.
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