Anyone familiar with the physics of electrets? I was thinking a while back that you could freeze a charge in cooling PLA or other plastic being used for printing. I looked around and some guys talked about it briefly a few years ago but never really explored it.

It seems like it might come in handy to bake electrets into your design. If nothing else, you could make half of a position sensor without having to glue on a magnet or something. I seem to remember hearing that the electret effect is influenced by mechanical strain, but it might make the charge bleed off and ruin the electret.

I doubt you could put enough charge in to allow you to make a motor or speaker, but who knows....

What have they done? Show me their inventions which have advanced the state of VR. What do they have? The cheap plastic lens to increase FOV? (Despite being obvious to anyone looking to cost-reduce during consumerization.)

Certainly they have done something? No?

Samsung may not have announced it, but they'd be working on it.

I don't have a dev kit. So what? I bet it's awesome. That isn't the point. Or maybe it is... the point being that OR created zealots by showing you prototypes built out of commonly available components. It isn't that OR created that magic, it's that the magic is enabled by cheap, high-res displays and low-latency sensors that *everyone* has access to.

LIke I said in a previous post, it is because of OR that we're talking about VR in 2014, but even without OR we'd be wearing it in 2016.

Palmer sounds like a narcissist. He's crazy if he thinks he or his company is solely responsible for driving VR.

He jumped the gun and showed off his companies demo products - a fancy marketing trick if you will. Big deal. VR was coming regardless. Now that the displays and sensors finally allow a product that a consumer can afford there will be many VR devices. The technology is old and proven.

If OR had never existed, we might not be *talking* about VR in 2014, but we'd still be wearing it in 2016.

Or (C) patent it all and license it for free, which would ensure that patent trolls don't move in and cripple the industry.

The amount of 'religion' surrounding OR is starting to reach the level of Apple products. You're all trying so hard to make the company the next big thing but they're just a hardware integrator. They're not your best friend. They aren't on your side. VR was and is coming when the tech allows it. When we all strap VR goggles on it won't be thanks to OR or any one individual behind it.

If you want to raise someone on a pedestal, start with the nameless engineers who dedicated their careers to making displays and sensors smaller, faster and cheaper.

No, VR has been around in many forms for many years, but OR has made huge improvements. Acting like this isn't true shows your malfunction.

Sure, OR made improvements, just like Sony, Samsung, and other companies not fawned upon by the tech media and ignorant techno-fanbois.

Close, but very misleading. OR did serious work in solving major issues with VR.

Oh sweet, just point me to all those patents they're sitting on then...

The article invalidates what you're saying. OR isn't special. They just showed their hand early in an attempt to get free marketing. What they're doing isn't technologically difficult given the advances in things like 3d rendering, compact displays, low-cost motion sensors, and lower-latency inputs.

No! Oculus is the Christ-child! They are the saviour of humanity! They invented VR tech and are the only force for good in the universe.... or at least that's what all the major tech publications keep trying to ram down my throat.

VR is old hat. The interesting stuff was patented decades ago. Oculus is just one of dozens of companies that will be leveraging lower cost displays and sensors to deliver an acceptible VR experience.

The magic is marketing and timing.

Oculus used the technological leaps which are going to enable many companies to produce affordable, low-latency VR displays. Then they allowed people, including marketing and media folks, to play with their alpha-quality hardware, generating tremendous excitement.

Oculus is just another hardware company. Given that they have so much expertise under one roof, they may solve some of the integration issues better than others, but they really aren't doing anything new on a grand scale.

Commercial software and 'cutting edge' tech companies work fast and loose. We just need to make shit work, not necessarily adhere to page after page of specifications. That is the polar opposite of government work. There's no way in hell I'd want my company to take me away from the high-return world of hack programming and force me to read pages of documentation and requirements for each line of code I write.

Wife is addicted to crap TV. I would cancel my $200/mo U-Verse service in a second if she'd let me.

Well, I think both augmented reality and head-mounted displays in general will be hugely successful in the next few years. If nothing else, it will become the defacto way to watch 3d content like movies and sports. Just wait until you get to watch a game via the 'ball cam'! Immersive 3d, not the shitty TV or movie version, is really going to propel 3d content into the mainstream.

Then you have games. Imagine a wireless head-mounted display that connects to your smartphone. Suddenly the small screen is no longer the limiting factor. You can have rich, immersive worlds on the go.

What remains to be seen is how profitable the market will be.

No, Apple had patents. TiVo had patents. If Oculus doesn't have patents, there's a good chance they'll be only a memory in a few years.

Does anyone know what's so special about Oculus? Do they have some intellectual property that will make them money, or are they just improving on 30 year old ideas?

It seems to me that all we're waiting for are component prices(high res, compact LCDs and accurate, fast sensors) to drop. Sure, there will be some software work, but we already have stereoscopic support in game engines and now 3d media content.

Sure, there will be a lot of work crafting new interfaces and presentation schemes, but that's all software and design, not hardware.

Tracking an object like a head is trivial if you have the money to spend on industrial sensors. The technology is there, it just needs to be commoditized. It's like what happened when the wii-mote came out and helped drive down the price of accelerometers.

One could do it with a precision gyro and accelerometer... one could do it with a high-speed camera... with acoustic sensors... there are many ways to do it. Most of the delays happen inside the computer, so it's more of a software problem in my opinion.

There are a lot of VR solutions, they just don't cost $200. VR has been around since the 70's/80's... Here's one from NASA in '85: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Regardless of what you use to sense position, you're going to have to put it into an input at some point. Chances are that it will be USB provided the latency is acceptible. If it isn't USB, it will have to be some other standardized input. In any case, developers of competing glasses will have access to that same input.

VR is just too big, and really too old and mature, to be controlled by one company. People got into a tizzy because Oculus released prototypes, but you can bet other companies had similar devices which they didn't want to prematurely demonstrate.

I'm guessing FB bought Oculus because, like many of the folks cheering Oculus, they don't understand hardware.

I have no problem with a private individual or company doing this.

I have a big problem with the government, who has the ability to deprive me of my posessions, my freedom, and my life, being able to do this.

I wonder how else a private company can work with the government to get around restrictions placed on the government?