At CES this week, Oculus VR is showing off a new prototype of its Rift headset, dubbed “Crystal Cove,” that incorporates a camera-and-LED system for head tracking and a quick-switching OLED display to reduce motion blur and increase image persistence.
The white dots on the surface of the Crystal Cove prototype in the image above are actually tiny infrared LEDs that send out signals visible to a camera specially designed by Oculus. This data is integrated with the gyroscope data that’s been in previous Rift prototypes to track your head’s absolute position and orientation as you crane your neck and lean forward, back, and side to side.
It’s hard to overstate just how much this changes the Rift virtual reality experience. Now, if you see something interesting, you can actually lean in to zoom closer to it. If you want to see the side of something sitting just in front of you, you can lean forward and around it and turn your head to the side to get an entirely new viewpoint. The environment no longer shifts with you, so to speak, when you shift your head around, as it did with previous Rift prototypes. Instead, the environment stays rock still and your virtual viewpoint is all that changes.
Oculus founder Palmer Lucky told Ars that positional tracking has always been part of the plan for the Rift, and the decision to use a camera-based model came after trying out many other potential solutions that simply weren’t accurate or feasible enough. The new system is still designed for seated use, though, and it won't track you as you walk around the room.
The other major improvement in the Crystal Cove prototype comes from a new HD OLED screen that allows for greatly improved persistence of vision. Instead of leaving a frame on for the entire 16 milliseconds or so that’s usual for a 60 frame-per-second game, the new display switches it on for only 1 or 2 milliseconds, then switches it back off quickly until the next frame is ready. The result is much less blurring when moving quickly through the VR space since the display is no longer showing frames that are a few milliseconds out of date. Such quick switching just wasn’t possible on the LCD screens in previous Rift prototypes.
It may sound like a small change, but the results are impressive. In a demo of Eve Valkyrie, the Oculus team turned the new image persistence feature on and off a few times, and the difference was easily noticeable. Words that turned into streaky messes while turning my head without the feature remained easily legible when it was turned on. The reduction in blurring, combined with the new head-tracking technology, completely eliminated the nausea I’ve felt interacting with previous Rift prototypes.
We’ll have more to say on our time with the Oculus headset, including an extensive interview with the creators and video of the new prototype in action, a bit later on. For now, though, it's clear that the prototype product Oculus is showing off at this year’s CES is a striking, generational leap over the Rift developer kits the company shipped just under a year ago.
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