Palmer Luckey explains why eye tracking for foveated rendering isn't there yet

Really interesting chat at OC4, he also offhandedly mentions Pimax and why he’s not willing to comment on them at the moment. Thought it was informative for those interested in the eye tracking module.

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Not quite easy for him to comment while he’s at the Oculus Facebook summit

It does piss me off though when they talk about screens not being good enough yet. They just announced a stand alone device with better lenses and panels than their high end headset. What a bunch of fuckin clowns. Their plan is basically to roll this tech out as slow as possible to make maximum profit! If HTC announced their CV2 tomorrow Oculus would do the same

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I don’t think that it’s fair to say Oculus is milking the tech, there’s too much competition in the market for that. Oculus is simply aiming for a broader audience. Most people don’t have high end gaming rigs and can’t run PC VR. Oculus Go and Santa Cruz might not be what you’re after but the market will be much larger for these devices than it is for the 8k.

As for the tech not being there yet that remains to be seen. It might be that it’s there but with caveats that Oculus isn’t ready to take on (like requiring a 1080ti for instance) because they want to bring as many people into VR as possible.

Understood but my point is they announce a $199 headset that they claim has newer improved screens and lenses and runs of a mobile phone chip? What about the thousands of people who invested top dollar for their “High End” device? Were all stuck with muddy low resolution SDE and massive light glare

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I think they’re in a tough situation, on one hand they’ve just lowered the price of the rift and a lot of people have just bought into PC VR because of it, and on the other hand it’s been almost two years for some of us using the same headsets. If they announced a new rift then sure some of us would be very interested, but then it’s a big screw you to everyone who just bought a rift, especially since they’ve already stated that they aren’t doing gen 2 till at least 2019.

As much as I want more high end VR, if they want to wait a bit and in the meanwhile drop the price of the rift and introduce cheaper options into the market to grow a user base then more power to them.

I also find it frustrsting that the tech is there for them to massively move VR forward yet they choose not to.

It was after all gamers that initially sponsored OR.

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I suppose if you like the idea of large companies trying to take hostage of new technology. Look at Star VR for example. Those pricks tried to tell us large FOV VR was only possible for commercial interests. Now there’s a $400 headset available that out performs the units they probably sell to IMAX for 10,000USD

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You think they’re trying to take VR hostage? I think they’re just trying to get as many people into VR as possible and I’m sorry but you’re not going to do that with very high end VR headsets (running on high end PCs) alone. They needed to appeal to a broader market and that’s what they’re doing.

On top of all this it’s not like they’re abandoning their high end gear, they just have a longer product cycle than we would prefer. We shouldn’t be so entitled as to expect companies to make everything we want when we want it because frankly what we want is niche. And at the end of the day there are companies like Pimax to step in and fill that niche anyway. We should be happy that HTC and Valve and Oculus even dared to create this market in the first place, not get mad that they haven’t made gen 2 yet.

Yes. Mark Zukerberg is trying to keep investors happy. Agree with you 100%

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I’m sorry but when was this?

I’m not feeling inspired by him saying ‘‘Pimax is not scary yet’’ … kind of sounds like he’s saying Pimax is no where near as good as Oculus’s products? or did I miss his meaning all together?

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He’s at the Facebook convention. He cant say anything

While I do agree he can’t just say “Pimax is awesome!!” I think he could have just not commented at all… it is what he seemed to be going for at first.

It really is rediculous. Consumer milking. Thank god, like really, for real third party competition. Otherwise it ends up being some nonesense like the cable company monopoly in America.

The problem these past two years is them not offering a high end solution for those who wanted it.

They are working to lock as many users into their walled garden as possible, making high end headsets doesn’t really accomplish that as much as cheap simple headsets that might not be very fun but people buy anyway.

I’d take it as til PiMax goes into full production; there not scary yet. Or its marketing often sn opponent will down play concern of a competitor.

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True no need to milk consumers. However Oculus is not really trying to get the masses into VR; its more they want a piece of Google’s vr market.

I don’t think he was talking about the Pimax HMD at all. The conversation was first on eye-tracking and then led to Neurable… which both are controllers when defined. I was thinking he was mentioning Pimax’s eye-tracking module myself due to the context of the conversation at that point.