Thought this may be relevant here.

John Carmack Joins Oculus as CTO

My understanding is that game development for the console has been lackluster so far. Do you think his name being associated with Oculus will help stimulate that? Clearly he's not going to be writing a lot of games as a CTO, so it's not like he'll personally turn the situation around.

My guess is he would most likely lead in improving the performance of Oculus.

I wish mine would hurry up and get here :-(

Carmack as CTO can only mean good things ...

- Dan

Their SDK isn't quite up to scratch when it comes to professional game middleware, so having a CTO who's not only used a lot of middleware, but has also developed major engines will surely help in that area :)

My understanding is that game development for the console has been lackluster so far.

I'd also avoid calling it "a console" -- it's just a type of display device for your PC.

Their SDK isn't quite up to scratch when it comes to professional game middleware, so having a CTO who's not only used a lot of middleware, but has also developed major engines will surely help in that area

My understanding is that game development for the console has been lackluster so far.

Well the consumer version isn't out yet, so you shouldn't expect much mainstream support for it yet either.

I'd also avoid calling it "a console" -- it's just a type of display device for your PC.

Ah, I misunderstood what the project actually was. I thought is was a self contained portable gaming unit. Didn't realize it actually required PC to run. Oculus status downgraded to "meh".

Their SDK isn't quite up to scratch when it comes to professional game middleware, so having a CTO who's not only used a lot of middleware, but has also developed major engines will surely help in that area

My understanding is that game development for the console has been lackluster so far.

Well the consumer version isn't out yet, so you shouldn't expect much mainstream support for it yet either.

I'd also avoid calling it "a console" -- it's just a type of display device for your PC.

Ah, I misunderstood what the project actually was. I thought is was a self contained portable gaming unit. Didn't realize it actually required PC to run. Oculus status downgraded to "meh".

Status should be the other way around : yet another console that won't pick up & have no one dev for it = meh. A new real tool that can be used with any compatible game on PC = not meh at all.

I'm happy Carmack joined. He seems to be very clever with hardware stuff, and has already been working on similar technology before and after Occulus Rift had been announced. He's very aware of the obstacles and opportunities facing the Rift.

Also, I'm very enthusiastic about the Rift itself - either the Rift or headtracking (perhaps via the Kinect) would add great immersion to games without much work for developers and without much extra processing required.

I also agree with ranakor - yet another a self-contained console would be horrible. We have had, what? Eight of them in the past year and near future? No thanks!

But a new hardware peripheral that works with your existing computer, that'll help encourage other hardware manufacturers to develop similar offerings and lead to lower prices and greater support in games? Yes please!

Ever since I watched the video I linked to above, I was certain headtracking would be integrated into the this new generation of consoles - and with the last generation's steps in that direction, including the PS3's EyeToy, the Wii's motion controls and ultraviolet cameras, and the 360's Kinect, I'm really surprised it hasn't been!

I also agree with ranakor - yet another a self-contained console would be horrible. We have had, what? Eight of them in the past year and near future? No thanks!

But a new hardware peripheral that works with your existing computer, that'll help encourage other hardware manufacturers to develop similar offerings and lead to lower prices and greater support in games? Yes please!

But isn't that exactly what the Rift is not? Unless I grossly misunderstood what's on Wikipedia and in the company propaganda, you need to use a "special SDK" to use it. In other words, it is the same shit as all those hobby engineer products.

3Dconnexion's SpaceNavigator comes to mind here. I bought one of these back when they were "big hype" because it's so awesome, such a great help for modelling, and many programs including Blender support it. Turned out it was good for next-to-nothing and Blender didn't support it at all (eventually a homebrew developer snapshot did). In the mean time, like 3 years or so later, it is indeed supported, but even so, it's more of a nuisance than a help. Using the numpad to align and the mouse to dolly is a hundred times faster and easier, and zooming doesn't work very well either way in any case.

Well, maybe with Carmack overlooking the Rift, it doesn't get as desastrous as I'd anticipate.

What I'd really like to see is a "de facto standard for devices that give 6DOF values" (with a single easy, usable API), so at least every mainstream program supports them, and supports them properly, and in the same way.

This, and real support for 3D on standard devices -- not the shit that e.g. nVidia is marketing, and not some "use our special SDK" shit either. What's so darn hard in providing for example an OpenGL implementation that has proper left and right front buffers (as by the spec) instead of doing some hacks to duplicate geometry based on some driver heuristics or having to use Oculus' super special SDK? Why force the developer into doing shit stuff like choosing particular render target sizes instead of letting him decide what is 2D and what's 3D?

Having Carmack on board will help convince the corporates that this particular prototype isn't just some "hobby engineered product", and that it actually might fly, which help convince them to spend money on supporting it, which could help it get widespread support.

There has been a lot of improvement in sensors over the last few year, maybe now is the technological sweetspot where you actually can start to build cheap HMDs that work really well. At least Carmack seem to think so.

Of course you will need some kind of SDK when you provide input data that isn't widely used yet... I'm sure the Oculus guys would love it if their SDK some day could find its way into the default distribution of some platform SDK, or would be standardized in some other way, but until that happen, well... you need an extra SDK. But I don't think that is such a big deal. You can't wait on standardisation when you are on the front line of technological advancement.

The oculus SDK isn't that super special, you just need to provide a split-screen image to it, and correct for the optics, and the SDK provide you with some helper functions to set up your projection matrix... apart from enumerating device and get input data, that's about it.

But isn't that exactly what the Rift is not? Unless I grossly misunderstood what's on Wikipedia and in the company propaganda, you need to use a "special SDK" to use it. In other words, it is the same shit as all those hobby engineer products.

The SDK can be used to write plugins for existing games - there are already mods for many popular games out there to enable Oculus Rift support. Skyrim, Mirror's Edge, everything from Valve, most modern shooters...