diy programmed oculus rift dk1 screen 7 lcd panel manufacturer

I have wanted virtual reality ever since I watched "The Lawnmower Man" as a kid, my first attempt at virtual reality was the VictorMaxx Stuntmaster in the 1990s, LOL, yea it was bad, next was Elsa wired shutter glasses, a Nvidia card, and a CRT monitor, that was early 2000s, worked well but gave me headaches, and did not play well with my prescription glasses, after that I gave up, everything that worked well was to costly, and everything that was cheap was not worth using, but then not to long ago, I kept hearing about the Oculus Rift, and I wanted one, but even at $350.00 its a little to costly for me to buy unless I save up for a few months, so I decided to try DIY, and to keep the cost low, around $100.

I put in an order for an Air mouse today should be here later this week, I found out that when using Vireio Perception that the Oculus Rift settings seem to work better than just side by side, the Oculus Rift settings let you see more of the game, one problem I have is that some of the hot glue holding the LCD to the Plexiglass has came lose, but it should be an easy fix, the Plexiglass may not have been clean enough or might be to slick, I will clean the Plexiglass with alcohol and then rough up the Plexiglass a bit with sand paper before hot gluing it again.

I have been looking for demos or anything to play with and have been pretty disappointed, most seem to not want to work or go into VR mode because they fail to detect the Oculus Rift

I then covered the screen with the piece of sheet protector, at first it was hard to notice a change, but when playing a real video like one of the Oculus Rift GoPro movies on YouTube the image is improved, it is a very small improvement, but I like it, reminds me of an old 1980s CRT TV, LOL.

I used the file "FoculusEDID1.dat", and my screen went dead, but I was able to re-flash with the one I made up, but it kinda scared me, LOL, ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP, later this week I am going to make up another EDID that works just for my LCD and see what it does, and not just use a copy of the Oculus Rift EDID, I am thinking all you need is to change a few values to fool the Oculus Rift software, and leave everything else alone in your original EDID.

but then I ran into a problem, my LCD would not stay programed with my custom EDID, every time I cut power to the LCD it would revert back to the factory EDID, that BTW was not even correct for the LCD

I like my DIY Rift a lot, but its got a few shortcomings, its heavy, and its low resolution, playing older games like Unreal and Quake are amazing, but trying to watch video is just awful, and some games like GTA San Andreas don"t fair so well with the low resolution, its a mixed bag.

I think there is a place for a cheap low resolution version of the Rift, and I know it can be made at the $100-$150 price range because I made one, the question is how low a resolution can you go and it still be usable, I think the 1024x600 LCD I use is the bottom limit, and I think 1280x720 or 1280x800 is the lowest "acceptable" resolution for something factory made.

I would have loved to get one, but my credit card will not work for overseas orders, but I can buy stuff through Amazon thats from China, not to happy about the month long or longer shipping, but I can, I had that $50 screen with only two days of shipping, that"s why I got it, it was quick and cheap, later I might upgrade to a better screen, but I kinda want to wait for the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and I hope it comes out at the end of the year, or sooner, but I think I remember something about 2015

Its got a lot more to it than the DIY EDID spoofer I made LOL, I am using it right now, unfortunately it does not seem to like being programed from the computer, and would not copy the EDID from the DIY EDID spoofer, maybe it needs something I don"t know about to work with the EDID spoofer, it will copy the EDID from a monitor with no problem, and I was able to program my LCD with the modified EDID, then use the ConnectPRO to copy that EDID.

The ConnectPRO does help me because its better made than my EDID spoofer, and unlike my LCD that loses the custom EDID after it loses power, the ConnectPRO will store the EDID until you press its DDC button, I just wish it was easier to program with a custom EDID, I may keep an old junk LCD around just to flash with my custom EDID so the ConnectPRO has something to copy it from LOL, another option "might" be that the EDID chip on the ConnectPRO could be programed directly with something like PonyProg, I did see a 24LC02B on the bottom of the ConnectPRO.

the only thing I dislike is that it came un-programmed, it does not have any EDID programmed, and will not work out of the box on a computer, you will have to program it using something like this:

I printed a second copy of the 3D printed parts because I had modified the original parts too much and also used some more aluminum carpet trim, BTW I got an 8 foot long piece of aluminum carpet trim for $7, I looked at flat aluminum stock, it was double the price.

After using it a little, its much better, but the screen door problem is back, but its something I can deal with, but I do wonder if I should have applied some laminating pouch to the LCD before I put it together, I worry that removing the screws from the 3D printed parts to many times will strip the holes out, it"s a large improvement over the 1024x600 LCD, and videos are just good enough to watch now with the 1280x800 LCD, I wish I had started with the better LCD.

Well, its not 100% better, I know I went from 512x300 for each eye to 640x400 for each eye, but it feels about 50% to 60% better, it seems strange to me that just a few more pixels makes that huge of a difference, BUT there is a difference in LCDs however, the new LCD seems to have more LCD ghosting, the new LCD also has "some" rainbow effect on different objects and text, so its not perfect.

I have tried many more games and the LCD ghosting only seems to be in a few games, not in all of them, but the rainbow effect on bright white text I have seen on most games, not sure whats going on, might just be software, also some games work well with head tracking, others seem to have a drift, or they always seem to have a lean, maybe another software problem.

Could you tell what the need is to edit the EDID? Do you have to do the above steps or can you just flash the bin file straight from the dk1 to your EEPROM? This is just to insure maximum compatibility?

nah89 wrote:Could you tell what the need is to edit the EDID? Do you have to do the above steps or can you just flash the bin file straight from the dk1 to your EEPROM? This is just to insure maximum compatibility?

The 1024x600 LCD I first used, used different settings in the EDID than the Oculus Rift EDID, if I had used the unedited Oculus Rift EDID on the 1024x600 LCD, it would have had the wrong scaling, refresh rate, colors would have been off, stuff like that, the 1024x600 LCD will not work properly with the unedited Oculus Rift EDID.

So the N070ICG-LD1 LCD may not be an exact match, but it"s close, I still may have to edit the EDID later, like the color settings or timings, but for now the N070ICG-LD1 seems to work well with the Oculus Rift EDID.

Something I want to add, the RX-S702 / TKH702S automotive monitor I got the 1024x600 aa0700023001 LCD and controller from had the wrong EDID from the factory, it was using an EDID from a regular desktop monitor, but it worked, scaling was pretty good and colors were nice, so you don"t always need the correct or perfect EDID, just one that works.

It"s interesting that that LCD is so much cheaper than the defacto one used for the diy rifts. Even without the controller board the N070ICG-LD1 LCD comes out to around 50. I wonder if anyone has done a build with it?

When looking at it I understand that the HDMI pin 17 goes straight to A0, A1, A2, and VSS, pin 16 goes to SDA and VCC with the 5v coming from the USB to it with a 47K resistor connecting it to the cable coming from SCL and then also has another resistor between SDA and VCC. Pin 15 goes to SCL and then is also connected to the cable coming from pin 16 with the resistor. Right? Also why does the box mention pin 18 for 5v if it"s not connected to the spoofer circuit?

It"s interesting that that LCD is so much cheaper than the defacto one used for the diy rifts. Even without the controller board the N070ICG-LD1 LCD comes out to around 50. I wonder if anyone has done a build with it?

When looking at it I understand that the HDMI pin 17 goes straight to A0, A1, A2, and VSS, pin 16 goes to SDA and VCC with the 5v coming from the USB to it with a 47K resistor connecting it to the cable coming from SCL and then also has another resistor between SDA and VCC. Pin 15 goes to SCL and then is also connected to the cable coming from pin 16 with the resistor. Right? Also why does the box mention pin 18 for 5v if it"s not connected to the spoofer circuit?

Here is the image I found back in the mid 2000s, using a 24LC21 chip for a Sony PSone LCD, it might help you understand a little better, back then people were trying to use the Sony PSone LCD in cars, for computers and video projectors, but it was not designed for that, so people hacked it

but then ran into problems, first was that 75Hz was giving me discoloration, but 70Hz worked just fine, the second problem was that my main display would only do 60Hz at 1280×800, and for most stuff I clone the displays, when you clone displays it uses the lowest refresh rate, so I was back to 60Hz, then I tried Steam, the Steam games like Half-Life 2 use an extended display setup for VR, showing the game on the extended display not the main desktop, but Steam kept switching displays in VR mode, showing the desktop in my DIY HMD, or a blank screen, when I tried running Half-Life 2 and selecting VR mode in game it said the VR hardware was not detected, but the Oculus Rift configuration utility shows everything plugged-in, not sure what"s the problem.

For now, leave the factory protective plastic cover on. On the backside you will find the only connector you need to be aware of, a mini-LVDS female that is used both for input and power supply (highlighted in red). Be very careful as you manipulate the screen because it is rather fragile and you don’t want to end up with a cracked panel like I did.

Next, let’s inspect the controller board. The board pictured here is an NT68674.5X. Using this exact model isn’t a requirement as long as you have a datasheet for the board you bought (ask the seller).

Connecting the board to the display will either be the easiest step in building your HMD or the hardest. To make it easy you should buy the LCD screen and the controller board from the same seller and ask them for the proper LVDS cable. I am going to assume that is what you did, if not I recommend you reach out to someone with an electronics background and plenty of soldering experience to help you build this cable.

Be very careful when connecting the LVDS cable to the screen. The male connector is very small and it is hard to tell which side is up. Try it both ways carefully – it should not take much force to slide it in the proper way.

If everything is in order, Windows should immediately recognize your assembled components as an external monitor. Next you need to run a few tests to make sure your LVDS cable isn’t noisy. A well-made LVDS cable has a few specific pairs twisted together to reduce noise. However most cables you will find on EBay are not properly twisted which can lead to visual artifacts. To make sure your cable is good, you should load several different images on your LCD screen, the more images you try, the better because sometimes the artifacts only show when a specific color is displayed.

During a session at Oculus Connect, the company released the totality of the Oculus Rift DK1 plans to the public. Under an open-source license, anyone can now freely download the blueprints of the company’s first VR headset and even manufacture their own.

At Oculus Connect during a session called Building the First Rift Development Kit,Oculus Engineer Nirav Patel spoke about the challenges associated with the company’s first VR headset, the DK1.

At the end of the session, Patel, on stage in front of the audience, logged into the Oculus GitHub account to hit the publish button on the repository containing the essential elements of the DK1, including firmware, circuit board and mechanical designs, and the accompanying documentation.

“I can’t wait to see all of the Chinese knockoffs… God help us all,” Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe teased during his keynote presentation the following day. “But we do believe that this is important. It’s important for the hackers and the makers out there to be able to pick this up, take that tracker, glue it on to different things… take some source code, change it, modify it, ship it, make something awesome.” he continued.

While backers of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter ended up with what looked to be a polished DK1 development kit, the at-the-time 10 person company had little experience in manufacturing and shipping a hardware product. Patel, a former Apple software engineer, elaborated on the manufacturing process and its challenges during his session.

Speed was a major concern. The company aimed to have the DK1 shipped some five months after their 2012 Kickstarter. “Our initial ship date was December, but this turned out to be incredibly unrealistic. Even our later date was really aggressive,” said Patel.

With a design that lacked important specifications, like the type of foam that should pad the unit from the user’s face, Oculus made several trips to China to work directly with their manufacturer to make changes and evolve the design into something that could be mass produced.

Oculus had to find creative solutions to challenging problems. They found that they couldn’t send the expensive rate tables, a spinning apparatus used to calibrate trackers, to China—perhaps because the trackers often calibrated with such tables find their way into military equipment. Instead, Oculus rigged up some turntables to be computer-controlled and used them in the calibration process.

The young company also had to deal with a major change while working on the manufacturing process. The 5-inch screen to be used was discontinued and they had to scramble to find an alternative. They ended up with a 7-inch display which meant making adjustments to the design of the DK1.

“We had this mad rush to switch to a 7-inch panel… it meant that the panel didn’t match the rest of the design, including the optics. But it was a tradeoff we made for the sake of getting units out the door and content made as quickly as possible,” said Patel.

There are lots of reasons that someone might want a head-mounted display. Camera operators and radio-controlled vehicle enthusiasts typically like these because they keep the sun off of their screen while working outdoors. Aside from those practical purposes, strapping a high-definition display to your head is just cool. Add some motion sensors to that and you’ve got a homemade Oculus Rift Virtual Reality display!

The electronics involved are fairly simple, consisting of a screen, a 9-DOF IMU board, and an Arduino. You can find the schematics and code on their site.

Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality headsets developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a division of Meta Platforms, released on March 28, 2016.

In 2012 Oculus initiated a Kickstarter campaign to fund the Rift"s development, after being founded as an independent company two months prior. The project proved successful, raising almost US$2.5 million from around 10,000 contributors.Facebook for $2 billion.

The Rift went through various pre-production models since the Kickstarter campaign, around five of which were demonstrated to the public before reaching its commercial release. Two of these models were shipped to backers, labelled as development kits; the DK1 in mid 2013 and DK2 in mid-2014, intended to provide developers with a platform to develop content in time for the Rift"s release. However, both were also purchased by many enthusiasts who wished to get an early preview of the technology.Oculus Rift S.

Through Meant to be Seen (MTBS)"s virtual reality and 3D discussion forums,Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and longtime MTBS discussion forum moderator,head-mounted display that was both more effective than what was then on the market, and inexpensive for gamers.

In June 2012, during the E3 convention, Carmack introduced a duct taped head-mounted display based on Luckey"s Oculus Rift prototype, which ran Carmack"s own software. The unit featured a high speed IMU and a 5.6-inch (14 cm) LCD, visible via dual lenses, that were positioned over the eyes to provide a 90 degrees horizontal and 110 degrees vertical stereoscopic 3D perspective.

Two months after being formed as a company, Palmer"s Oculus VR launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign on August 1, 2012 for their virtual reality headset, named the Rift. The main purpose of the Kickstarter was to get an Oculus Rift prototype—now referred to as DK1 (Development Kit 1)—into the hands of developers to begin integration of the device into their games.

The Rift DK1 was released on March 29, 2013,screen door effect and making individual pixels less noticeable. The LCD is brighter and the color depth is 24 bits per pixel.

The 7-inch screen also makes the stereoscopic 3D no longer 100% overlapping, the left eye seeing extra area to the left and the right eye seeing extra area to the right, in which there is no 3D depth perception. The field of view (FOV) is more than 90 degrees horizontal (110 degrees diagonal), which is more than double the FOV of previous VR devices from other companies, and is the primary strength of the device. The resolution is 1280×800 (16:10 aspect ratio), which leads to an effective of 640×800 per eye (4:5 aspect ratio). However, since the device does not feature a 100% overlap between the eyes, the combined horizontal resolution is effectively greater than 640. The image for each eye is shown in the panel as a barrel distorted image that is then corrected by pincushion effect created by lenses in the headset, generating a spherical-mapped image for each eye.

Initial prototypes used a Hillcrest Labs 3DoF head tracker that is normally 125 Hz, with a special firmware requested by John Carmack that makes it run at 250 Hz, tracker latency being vital due to the dependency of virtual reality"s realism on response time. The latest version includes Oculus"s new 1000 Hz Adjacent Reality Tracker, which aims to provide much lower latency tracking than almost any other tracker. It uses a combination of three-axis gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers, which make it capable of absolute (relative to Earth) head orientation tracking without drift.

The entire source for the Rift DK1 was released to the public in September 2014, including the firmware, schematics, and mechanicals for the device. The firmware is released under a simplified BSD license, while the schematics and mechanicals are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

In June 2013, a prototype of the Rift that used a 1080p LCD panel was shown at Electronic Entertainment Expo. This step forwards to twice the number of pixels as DK1 significantly reduced the screen door effect and made objects in the virtual world more clear, especially at a distance. The poor resolution had been the main criticism of the DK1.

A teardown of DK2 revealed that it incorporates a modified Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone display, including the front panel from the device itself.

In September 2014, Oculus once again presented an updated version of the Rift, codenamed Crescent Bay. This version has a greater resolution than the DK2, a lower weight, built-in audio, and 360-degree tracking thanks to the presence of tracking LEDs in the back of the headset.HRTF and reverb algorithms.SXSW 2015, titled "Explore the Future of VR", it was publicly announced for the first time that the prototype uses two screens instead of one as previously thought.

On May 21, 2019, Oculus began shipping a new VR headset known as Rift S.computer vision to predict what path the HMD and controllers are most likely to take.

The Oculus Rift runtime officially supports Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. The installation package includes components such as the headset driver (which includes Oculus Display driver and controller drivers), Positional Tracking Sensor driver, Oculus Service, and Oculus Home Application.asynchronous timewarp, and asynchronous spacewarp.

When the user puts on the Rift and no other content is being outputted to the headset, they are presented with Oculus Home. This is the default environment of the Rift, which presents them with a loft environment and a floating menu, allowing the user to launch VR applications they own, see if their friends are using the Rift, and purchase virtual reality content on the Oculus Home store from the headset.

Oculus maintains a market place for applications for the headsets. The listings are curated to only allow applications that run smoothly on the recommended hardware. Most listings are also rated on their comfort level based on their likelihood of causing motion sickness or number of jump scares. However, developers do not have to use Oculus Home to distribute content for the Rift, this being entirely optional.

Content for the Rift is developed using the Oculus PC SDK, a free proprietary SDK available for Microsoft Windows (OSX and Linux support is planned for the future).

The Oculus SDK is directly integrated with the popular game engines Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4, and Cryengine. This allows for developers already familiar with these engines to create VR content with little to no VR-specific code.

The Rift is an open platform, and thus developers do not need any approval or verification to develop, distribute, or sell content for it, and do not have to pay any licensing fees. The SDK, however, cannot be modified or reused for other purposes or hardware without permission.

Content developed for the Development Kit 2 using SDK version 0.8 or above are compatible with the Rift; however, content developed for the Development Kit 1 or with older versions of the SDK will have to be recompiled using the latest SDK version to be compatible.

On December 21, 2015, Oculus announced the release of their finalized Rift 1.0 SDK, combined with the start of shipping their final version of the Oculus Rift VR headset to developers.

At Oculus"s 3rd annual conference (Oculus Connect 3), it announced the new technology, called "Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW)". This technology allows the Rift to compensate for the dropped frames. According to Oculus, ASW reduces the minimum specs of a PC to run the Rift without any judder.

In May 2015, Oculus VR announced "recommended" hardware specifications for computers utilizing Oculus Rift, specifying a CPU equivalent to an Intel Core i5-4590, at least 8GB of RAM, at least an AMD Radeon R9 290 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, an HDMI 1.3 output, three USB 3.0 ports, and one USB 2.0 port. Oculus VR stated that these requirements would remain in force for the life of the first consumer model. The company also stated that while upcoming discrete GPUs for laptops may be able to reach the required performance for Oculus Rift, systems that switch between integrated and discrete graphics may not handle output in a manner that supports the device. Oculus Rift only supports 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 or later; Oculus VR stated that the device would initially support Windows only in order to focus on "delivering a high[-]quality consumer-level VR experience"; support for Linux and macOS will be developed in the future.

On October 6, 2016, Oculus VR announced lessened hardware recommendations, now suggesting an Intel Core i3-6100 or AMD FX 4350 CPU, at least a GeForce GTX 960 or equivalent graphics card, two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, and Windows 8 or newer. The company stated that these lower requirements were enabled by the adoption of motion interpolation; on systems that cannot handle full 90 frames per second rendering, the drivers will allow software to render at 45 FPS instead, and generate frames based on differences between them to send to the headset to maintain its frame rate. Oculus promoted that these changes lowered the average hardware cost of a PC meeting these specifications to US$500 and would also enable certain laptops to run Oculus Rift.

In June 2018, Oculus VR updated its recommended OS spec to Windows 10. While Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users would still be able to access the standard Rift experience, newer features and apps might require an upgrade to Windows 10.

Existing games with a first-person or fixed-camera perspective can be ported to VR with some development effort. However, Oculus has stated that the best virtual reality experiences are those that are designed, from the beginning, for the Rift.

At the release event for the Rift in June 2015, Oculus announced 9 launch titles for the Rift, including CCP and Edge of Nowhere by Insomniac Games. It also announced that it was working with other developers including Final Fantasy developer Square Enix, Rock Band developer Harmonix, and The Order: 1886 developer Ready at Dawn.

In July 2015, Oculus revealed that it was fully funding more than 20 second party high production value games made exclusively for the Rift, one of these being Insomniac"s Edge of Nowhere.

In July 2017, Marvel announced in the Disney"s D23 event that it will be bringing 12 superheroes of theirs to VR with an Oculus exclusive game called Powers United VR.

Oculus is including Oculus Cinema as a free application, which allows the Rift to be used to view conventional movies and videos from inside a virtual cinema environment, giving the user the perception of viewing the content on a cinema-sized screen.Oculus Cinema will also have a networked mode, in which multiple users can watch the same video in the same virtual space, seeing each other as avatars and being able to interact and talk to one another while watching the video.

The Rift also offers the opportunity to view new types of media that are impossible to view on regular monitors; 360° 3D videos and "virtual reality movies" (an entirely new medium).

Spherical videos (commonly called 360° videos) can be viewed simply by the user moving their head around, and the Rift opens up the possibility for stereoscopic spherical videos (commonly called 360° 3D videos). In September 2014, NextVR announced that they would be using a $200,000 camera rig to produce 360° 3D content for the Rift, including short films, as well as live streaming live events such as sports or concerts in 360° 3D.

The Rift also supports a new medium of entertainment experiences, which Oculus calls "virtual reality movies". Oculus has established Oculus Story Studio to develop this type of content for the Rift, a team which has multiple former employees from major VFX companies such as PIXAR and ILM. Oculus Story Studio showed off its first VR movie, Lost, at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, gaining positive reviews from attendees.

In May 2015, AltspaceVR launched a public beta for DK2 owners to try out their social VR platform. AltspaceVR allows people to inhabit a shared virtual space with spatial voice communications, cast content from the Internet on virtual screens, and interact with objects (allowing activities such as playing chess or other board games). It also supports extra hardware like eye tracking and body tracking.

In May 2015, Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, announced that they too were working on a new virtual world, codenamed Project Sansar, built for virtual reality headsets such as the Rift and Gear VR. Like Second Life, Sansar will be hosted on Linden"s servers and lease virtual land to players, on which they can build and sell virtual items and services (which Linden will take a cut of). Linden Lab hoped to release Sansar by the end of 2016.

As well as the consumer uses, the Rift has attracted significant interest from industry and professional spheres for productivity enhancement, visualization, and advertising.

A number of architecture firms have been experimenting with using the Rift for visualization and design. With the right software, the Rift allows architects to see exactly what their building will look like and get an understanding of the scale that is impossible on a traditional monitor.

In early 2015, Audi started using Rift Developer Kit 2"s at dealerships to help customers configure the car they are interested in, as well as to see what driving a race in the car would be like.

The Norwegian Army has been experimenting with the Rift Development Kit 2 to allow for a greater situational awareness of armoured vehicle drivers and commanders.

The use of Oculus Rift on an innovative virtual operator station assists the control of a teleoperated military mobile robot Tactical Robotic System (TAROS). Human operators can have intuitive control and mediate 3D view from stereovision cameras.

Some online casinos have started using Oculus Rift to provide a unique online casino experience, allowing the user to play slots and experience the lobby of a casino through their VR headset.

ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, which in turn owns Id Software, presented a lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the Oculus Rift was the product of intellectual property owned by ZeniMax, developed by John Carmack during his time working for Id Software. The jury ruled partially in favor of ZeniMax, finding the defendants did not steal trade secrets but had violated a non-disclosure agreement. Facebook and some of the Oculus corporate officers were ordered to pay a total of US$500 million.

The Oculus Rift received generally positive reviews from gaming and tech websites. Wired gave 9 out of 10 stars to Oculus Rift and wrote, "The long-promised virtual reality headset is finally here, in a remarkably well-made and accessible device."

Will Greenwald of PCMag recommended the Rift once the price had dropped, writing, "The Oculus Rift comfortably produces an immersive, crisp virtual reality experience that will continue to improve with the development of new software, which has been steadily coming out on both the Oculus store and SteamVR. Now that the Rift costs two-thirds of its original $600 price and includes the Oculus Touch controllers and second external sensor that enables whole-room VR, it earns our Editors" Choice for PC-based VR headsets."

To write the words “A Brief History Of Oculus” is a bit funny — because really, the company’s very existence has been brief. From the launch of their Kickstarter campaign to their massive acquisition, just 601 days had passed.

On August 1st of 2012, Oculus launched their Kickstarter campaign. For a company with such ambitious (if newfound) plans — to revive an entire genre, to succeed where so many had failed only a decade ago — they had a rather modest campaign goal: $250,000. That’s less than some of those 90’s VR headsets from Palmer’s collection cost when they flopped onto the market.

This dev kit (or Oculus Rift DK1, as it came to be known) gave most people their first glimpse at Oculus’ potential, and it made one thing clear: this little $350 dollar headset was already better than everything that came before it. But it wasn’t perfect.

Its low resolution screen (combined with magnification lenses that helped wrap the image around your view) made even the most beautifully rendered 3D environment look dated. It was like you were sitting too close to an old TV, or staring at the display through a screen door (aptly, this shortcoming quickly came to be known as “the screen door effect”)

Meanwhile, complaints of the headset causing motion sickness weren’t rare. That low-res screen, the early software, the lack of positional tracking — it all swirled together into something that managed to make some people’s inner-ears flip out and their stomaches turn.

Despite the flaws, Oculus managed to sell every last one of these headsets that they could make. They’d sourced enough components to make around 65,000 units of this first iteration — on February 21st of 2014, they officially sold out.

Based on a prototype that Oculus had started showing a few months prior, Developer Kit 2 (or DK2) fixed or improved upon many of the original headset’s flaws.

That old low-res display? They bumped it up considerably, from 640×800 in each eye to 960×1080 — increasing the overall pixel count by over 100%. That “screen door” effect isn’t completely gone, but it’s much, much less noticeable.

As for the motion sickness? Oculus figured out that much of it was triggered by the display’s tendency to blur motion. They countered this in three ways:

They decreased the latency of the headset (the delay between you moving your head and the content on screen reacting accordingly) from 60 milliseconds to 30 milliseconds

Barely one year passed between Oculus shipping their first developer kits (March 29th, 2013) and the start of pre-orders for version 2 (March 19th, 2014), but a ton happened in that time.

At the end of March 2013, Oculus found support from two big video game development engines: Unity gave all Oculus developers free access to their pro-level engine for 4 months, and Epic Games began giving away a new, Oculus-enabled version of their Unreal engine to anyone with a dev kit.

On June 17th, Oculus raised their first, big, traditional VC (as opposed to Kickstarter) round of funding. They’d raised $16M from Spark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Just six months after their first round, Oculus raised again in December of 2013 — this time, it was $75M from Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, and Formation 8.

Valve, one of the most gaming world’s most lauded companies, pledged to share their virtual reality R&D with Oculus. Weeks later, one of Valve’s lead VR researchers joined Oculus

Before the acquisition, Oculus had two big checkboxes left on their to-do list: to ship all of those pre-orders they got for the second development kit, and, eventually, to finalize and ship the consumer product.

One of Oculus’ biggest strengths has always been in the way that people perceived it. You just wanted to root for them — and how could you not? It’s the tech world’s favorite tale: a brilliant whiz-kid turns his garage project into a company, makes millions.

Add in the fact that the company launched on Kickstarter, and Oculus had seemingly locked in its cred as something “homegrown”. Something “indie” — even when they went on to raise nearly $100M from traditional venture capitalists.

So of course, them being acquired by Facebook was met with backlash from some of their biggest fans. To them, Oculus was like their favorite band — and this was them “selling out”.

Within hours of the announcement, the top post on reddit was a drawing of reddit’s mascot laying flowers on Oculus’ grave. Many pledged to cancel their DK2 orders, and instructed others on how to do the same. Notch, the creator of Minecraft, immediately (and quite publicly) killed the company’s plans to build an Oculus version.

Oculus insists that they’ll remain absolutely independent at Facebook, publishing not one, not two, but immediately took issue with the term. “This is not an exit,” they wrote back. “Oculus stays independent.”

If you"ve picked up this book, you probably already know that the Rift is a virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD). You may have one of your own already or maybe you’ve tried one out and were, like us, blown away by the intense immersion. Even if you"ve only read about the Rift in passing, if you watch demo videos and reaction shots, you can often see the look of incredulous delight on peoples" faces the first time they use the Rift.

With the increased field of view (more than double what you get with a typical monitor!) and head tracking to change the viewpoint (the wearer just turns their head to see what they want, no need to use a mouse or joystick to orient), the Rift represents an opportunity for people to view your work in a way they never could before. When thinking about developing for the Rift, the question is less “Do I want to support the Rift?” and more, “Does my application benefit from VR?” This boils down to asking yourself if your application presents a view into a world or environment. If it does, then wouldn’t the application benefit from the view being better?

This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer"s closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.

The former Vice President of Engineering at Oculus, McCauley was instrumental in the creation the first two Oculus Rift development kits. The Rift is out now, but McCauley is moving forward. He"s currently working on a new VR tracking system, which he hopes will solve many of the platform"s issues surrounding motion sickness.

I recently had a chance to talk with McCauley about his time with Oculus, the cirumstances around his departure, VR"s gaming potential, and what VR will look like in the future. Here"s what he had to say.

JM: Right, but I lack the ability to distinguish between buzz and hype and reality, and so I"ve been burned so many times, now I just wait, until I can get it in my hands. I wasn"t a VR guy, I was a videogame guy, and virtual reality and stereopsis tried to do that for years, and it just wasn"t there because the cell phone screens that we can use now were not high enough pixel density. It was not a good experience.

I thought that it was profound enough, and the technology that was being used, which came from mobile phones. These little sensors that are in mobile phones - the gyroscopes, the 9-DOF, MEMS components were finally in mass production and being shown in applications in similar devices, which made sort of rudimentary rotations and head position possible - just very fundamental stuff. It didn"t eliminate the motion sickness stuff, which many people experienced with DK1, it was terrible. But I could see where it was going, I could see the cell phone screens. The 4K stuff was being talked about. I said, "It"s just a matter of time before there"s a cell phone screen with 1080p, and a little bit beyond that, there"s going to be a cell phone screen with 4K resolution. So now we have a really good display, and we have these sensors." And I said, "Those are the parts that are naturally going to fall into place, and will be there." I knew from looking at DK1 and the foamcore prototype from [Oculus founder Palmer Luckey] that it was just a matter of time before we were able to crest that wave and get that newer stuff in there.

JM: Palmer, I met... so, here"s the story with that. Brendan goes, "There"s this guy named Palmer Luckey. He"s a VR enthusiast. He"s hooked up with [John Carmack]." I met [John Carmack] at Oculus, but I knew who he was. He works in a different area than I do. I"m a console guy, I work with the consoles, game consoles. I"m not a PC gamer guy. I was, years ago, but I migrated into consoles because that"s where I could find work. So, anyways, to make a long story short, Brendan told me [Carmack] was working with Palmer. Palmer had given him a prototype. Carmack had modified it and added a few small things to it, but basically, took Palmer"s formcore prototype and wrote a test application around it.

They didn"t have a building or anything, and we were meeting people down here in Livermore, basically. I think they were using Brendan"s apartment a little, but we filmed the Kickstarter video here. We redecorated the place for the Kickstarter video, we rented furniture, we set the place up to basically look like it was a functional place. And it was, for all intents and purposes. I had already engaged the factory about potentially making DK1s. We launched the Kickstarter video, we sold 10,000 pieces. And I thought at the time, if it"s 10,000 pieces, and we sell that many, that"s not enough, but it would be OK. So I took the thing to China and I produced it in China. All of the things that you see there, the design work, everything on DK1, I did completely in China. We only had ten or fifteen people at the company.

I brought prototypes back to Irvine. People tried them out, they hated them. Too heavy, uncomfortable. So we"d change a few things, and I ironed out some things. But to be honest, it"s a pretty simple thing. It"s got an [inertial measurement unit] in it, which is the motion sensing system, and a screen and a commercial display controller that we programmed in Taiwan. We tuned it to Nvidia, tuned the panels and the motion – when you make a display, it has to be tuned. It takes specialized equipment. You don"t realize when you see your phone, but the display is tuned on a piece of equipment, and you set some registers and parameters, so the display is nice and crisp and the pixels open up quickly and close quickly. We tuned it to Nvidia and launched it, was successful, had very few returns, and people loved it.

Pretty soon we were selling and selling, and we sold 70,000 of them before we stopped making them. So, we made 70,000 of those, and in the meantime we started on a DK2. And DK2 we were trying to solve positional tracking - the vestibular issues, I think, and tried to have a walk-around experience. Brendan was also working with Valve. I wasn"t involved with Valve and what he was doing up there, but Valve had their own VR initiative, and how that started and who started first kind of opened a debate. My view is Oculus started first, in any measurable or meaningful way. But, Brendan had some prototype from Valve that Valve had been working on which was pretty good. It could show us the direction we were going to go in. It used two Samsung panels side by side. If you look on my Twitter page you can see it there, my kid"s wearing it there in my profile shot.

JM: Yeah, so, my story, and my position on this thing, and this changes... I call Brendan and I said, "You"re not referring to me as a founder anymore." And the story is, "There"s only one founder, and it"s Palmer." Well, that"s not true. Palmer being very young at the beginning of that company and a VR enthusiast, enthusiastic nice guy, he"s a really nice person. Palmer doesn"t have any job skills, he"s 19. What do you know when you"re 19? You can kind of do some stuff. He hired big guns to produce the thing, and that big gun was me. And I know how to make stuff, that"s what I do. I consider myself crucial to the success of that company. If they didn"t have me there and my connections in China... no one wanted that thing. [Ed. Note: We reached out to Oculus for comment on this.] Even after we had all the hype on DK1, we interviewed with Foxconn, Flex, no one wanted to touch Oculus, because it"s too risky, and they didn"t need us. They"re making iPhones. They"re perfectly happy turning out iPhones 24/7. We went to my friend"s factory to produce it, it"s a personal friend of mine, I said, “Can you help me?” I said, "I"ll throw this project in and this project in, we"ll put it all into one project for you, we"ll make some money on it." And she said, "No, I don"t want to get involved in it. And who are those guys, how well do you know them? Do you know anything about their character?” I said, “Trust me, I"ve got good intuition on this." I always say that to her.

And so, we had to pay them a lot of money up front, we had to pay them three quarters of a million dollars cash to get started. So it was challenging to find a production partner. Now, 70,000 DK1s say we made money on them, we made pretty good margin in them, and the company was actually in the black, from the startup hardware company, which is amazing. That never happens. But we didn"t have enough capital to grow. We could pay our bills and stay afloat for a while if we kept selling DK1s, but we"d be like GoPro. We had to come out with another product, so we did DK2. To try to answer your question, I consider myself a founder. I think the founders are Nate, Mike, myself, Palmer, and Brendan. Those are the five key early employees. So, I get irritated by Brendan now referring to me as early employee, which wasn"t true. Brendan"s version of reality often changes. He"s a sales guy, that"s what they do, right? He"s a good sales guy, he"s the best.

This is the third or fourth thing I"ve done that"s been a smash hit, and I"m pretty happy with the outcome of it. I want them to succeed, and I want Oculus to beat those guys, our competitors. Can they do it? No one knows. If I were them I would be extremely worried about Sony. Sony does not do things without really thinking their way through it. They"re very smart, the company"s very well run. Facebook"s well run, but Sony"s very well run. They don"t take big risks. They take risks, but not giant ones, and VR"s very risky. For them to do this means that Sony sees something in it. There are people at Sony who are hardcore executive gamers, have been doing it for 25 years, know this product and know this business so well, and they"re on board. If I were Oculus or Oculus and Vive, I would be worried about them. I told Brendan very early on, "Brendan, Sony"s going to get on this thing, they"re going to do this, and they"re going to kick your ass, they"re going to kick our asses." I said, "You"ve got to be worried about them. Every time they"ve gotten into something like this they"ve done really well, with the exception of some other things."

USG: I was going to ask, what was the culture like early on in Oculus. You had Brendan, who you described as the pitch man, and then you had Palmer, who was very young. What was it like?

At a corporation or publisher, I"m not going to name any, or a large company with a blue F, it"s not really about that. It is about that, but it"s not really about that. It"s about gaining your own position in the company, and naturally people want to get recognized for what they"re doing. So, to answer your question, I"ll go to a studio and sit at Burnaby, at EA Burnaby for two or three years, no problem, or I"ll go to a studio, Red Octane or Neversoft, I have no problem, I"ll sit there for days and days and days and love it. But going to work for a corporation, it"s just not my thing, it"s just not for me. So, to answer your question, when everything"s going well and we"re all bailing – for instance, Nate, Palmer and myself all went to China to work on DK1. Palmer and Nate and I were at the factory working on it together. Neither of these guys knew how to work on anything, but we"re all trying to get it done, and I just loved it. It"s fun. The enthusiasm and the energy and the commitment by the people. Like I said, we were working, I was working, I"d go to work at 4 or 5 in the morning, I"d get off at 9 or 10 at night every night. Then at the factory I stayed awake for three days working, didn"t sleep once. But it was all voluntary. No one forced me to it, I just dug it.

To answer your question, Oculus was coming up, I saw the magazines, people were asking me about it. I didn"t really occur to me what it was. I am going to reserve my opinion on where VR is going to go until it actually happens. It could absolutely go upside down. These things do sometimes. No one knows why. Tesla could absolutely go tits up, pardon the expression. It could. I"ve seen that before. Apple did go belly up, almost. Apple Computer was almost out of business. People were hedging with what was going to happen to them. When they came out with the Macintosh, Steve Jobs predicted 10 million units, they sold 30,000. Because it was a $12,000 machine. So, pricing is very important. So, you never know what"s going to happen. Apple, the stodgy old people that run companies, very conservative companies like Palmolive and Coca-Cola would have continued to sell the Apple IIe, because it was selling well, instead of thinking, "We better stop selling this thing and come up with something new really fast." Well, if it was a company run by a bunch of old people, they would say, "No, don"t do that. We"ve got security, we"ve got revenue, we can pay our bills". Back then, Oculus was... they were risk takers. I"m a risk taker. I do risky stuff, like putting revenue into GoPro, and other things like that. I do, and I lose. I"ve had so many companies fail. I"ve done like ten of these things, or twelve, and the number of hits I"ve had is pretty low.