Dangerous is still coming to the Oculus Rift

Those following virtual reality developments woke up to some surprising news this morning, with headlines blaring that Frontier's high-profile space sim Elite: Dangerous was dropping Oculus Rift support in favor of the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. Those headlines were especially surprising considering that Elite: Dangerous had been one of the best showcases for the Oculus Rift development kits so far (just ask our own Lee Hutchinson).
It turns out that those initial headlines were wrong—or at the very least misleading. Elite: Dangerous is still planned for the Oculus Rift, as it has been all along. "This is not true. I wish people would check their facts," Elite CEO David Braben tweeted in response to one of those early headlines.

The source of the confusion seems to be a statement Frontier gave to Eurogamer, saying that "right now, we've chosen to focus on SteamVR. We haven't cut an exclusivity deal with any VR manufacturer, and we're still working with Oculus on Rift support."

Even though Frontier mentions the lack of exclusivity and continued work on Oculus support right there in the statement, Eurogamer's headline somehow became "Elite: Dangerous doesn’t officially support Oculus Rift..." That take was quickly parroted by numerous other outlets.

Frontier did stop supporting new versions of Oculus' dev kit SDK in October. At the time, though, the company said it was waiting for a final, stable development environment from Oculus rather than continually reworking the game for frequent pre-release revisions to the SDK. That final environment was released by Oculus in late December. Frontier reiterated this position today in posts on the Elite forums. "In case people are alarmed by the headline or confused on the details, we thought it best to reiterate what we've been saying since the release of the Oculus 0.6 SDK," Frontier Head of Community Management Zac Antonaci writes. "As quoted in the story, we are actively working with Oculus and will keep the community updated as soon as we are able to do so."

Further Reading

"I can confirm that there is no deal to release Elite on HTC first," Antonacci continues. "Valve released a stable driver before Oculus but we remain in close contact with Oculus."
Translation: Frontier is working on versions of Elite: Dangerous for both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Valve's headset is getting Frontier's immediate focus because it was the first to give the developer a finalized development platform to work on.

That's news in and of itself; it's surprising that the Rift version isn't a central concern for Frontier just over two months before the Rift will begin shipping to early-bird buyers. But it's not the potentially market-fragmenting news that was originally reported.

Asked for further comment on the story, a Frontier spokesperson told Ars "we’re not offering direct comment because the story isn’t true."

Oculus “Quill” Turns VR Painting Into Performance Art

Art doesn’t have to be an end product. Thanks to Oculus’ new internal creation tool, Quill, illustrators can draw in virtual reality and let audiences see their creations come to life stroke by stroke around them.

Quill works much like Tilt Brush, the VR painting app Google acquired. Using Oculus’ Touch controllers and motion cameras, Quill users can select different brushes and colors, swing their hands through the air, and each flourish appears instantly within the 3D canvas. Oculus has no plans to make Quill available to the public like Tilt Brush or its own sculpting tool Medium, at least not yet, and is reserving it for its own illustrators.

Oculus Story Studio built Quill to make its new VR short film Dear Angelica, where hazy watercolor drawings let a daughter explore the fantastical memories of her movie star mother. Oculus announced the film’s production at Sundance 2015 and it will be released later this year, but it’s now showing off a few scenes. Dear Angelica lets you watch flying fish, dragons, and a child’s bedroom be birthed into being one line at a time, reacting to where you look.

Even if Oculus doesn’t publicly release Quill, it could inspire a whole new medium of VR performance art by showing how to add dimensions of time and 3D space to live illustration. The order and cadence of Quill brushstrokes could let artists infuse suspense, humor, or crescendo into the journey of creation.

I sat down with the Oculus Story Studio team, including Wesley Allsbrook, the illustrator for Dear Angelica. She told me why Quill is such a leap forward for VR, and even gave me a crash course so I could paint a derpy little shark onto her 3D masterpiece.

Drawing Through Space And Time

“He made this tool for me to paint in space and time — something I’ve dreamt about all of my life” Allsbrook tells me. She’s referring to Inigo Quilez, a VFX supervisor for Oculus.

Allsbrook was tasked with drawing up the memories explored in Dear Angelica, but was frustrated trying to translate her 2D illustrations into VR. Over barbecue chicken wings one night, Quilez decided to build what Allsbrook needed as a hackathon project, and she named the tool after him. Here’s a video of her using it:

Oculus Story Studio’s technical founder Maxwell Planck explains Quill could assist with storyboarding, concepts, production design, and more. “Coming from computer animation at Pixar, we’d use a lot of illustrations to inform what we’d eventually build in 3D, but there were as a lot lost in translation.” He hints that after illustration, Oculus is trying to figure out the best way to handle cinematography elements like lighting and camera angles in VR. It might end up building an in-VR editing tool like Visionary VR.

Unfolding Around You

The experience of watching the Dear Angelica teaser and then drawing with Quill is overwhelming. The moment I stepped out of it, this was the stream of consciousness I typed out.

On Dear Angelica:

The genesis of image. Taking a journey to the output rather than simply arriving there. It feels participatory, responding to fill your gaze with motion. You choose whether to marvel at what’s already appeared or follow the brush strokes. You become spaceless and bodiless, as images spawn underneath and looking up at you while simultaneously inhabiting the more common planes. 

On Quill:

Creation becomes performance. It’s VR watercolor. There’s suddenly a relevance to what order I draw. jokes and feelings can emerge from the order, and you can build suspense through quickening the pace of visualization.

They’re both jaw-dropping. Imagine the infinite white construct of The Matrix. But in Dear Angelica, rather than filling with racks of guns, dainty streaks of color materialize around you. You can walk around and through the art as it emerges. If you want to inspect the tiny riders upon the dreamy dragon, you simply lean in close. Otherwise, you can spin in circles to see the latest brushstrokes emerge. While not overtly interactive like a video game, Dear Angelica adapts to your field of vision, dynamically moving the brushstroke action in front of you.

Director Saschka Unseld says Quill “makes sense with Dear Angelica on a story level because the main character is recalling memories. When I remember things, it usually starts with small, fuzzy details and then it grows.” That’s exactly how a few wisps of color evolve into drawings like this:

A drawing within Dear Angelica

In the second scene, the strokes start slow, filling in the desk and dresser around the bedroom, creating suspense. But as the music builds to a glorious crescendo, the strokes appear faster. The whole rooms springs to life as the bed and the main character Jessica are drawn into being in the center.

This is how Quill enables performance art. The artist’s choices of what to draw first impact the emotion that’s conveyed. Quill could produce humor by showing one figure character’s reaction to something you don’t see yet, then slowly drawing it in as a punchline. Or an artist could create tension or release by speeding up or slowing down the pace of their strokes.

Quill relies on Oculus’ Touch controllers

Creating In VR For VR

When it’s my turn to paint, I quickly discover the pallete, a cube that spawns from your left hand. Turning your wrist reveals the different sides, that include a color selector, brush sizes, opacity controls and more. It’s simple to select them with your right hand on the fly as you draw, giving a distinct feeling of dexterity. You can also grab whole portions of your drawing to re-angle or move them.

Dear Angelica illustrator Wesley Allsbrook

I draw the gray outline of my shark with a ribbon-esque brush with little depth. Then I switch to a sphere and enlarge it to fill in between the lines like a kid in a VR coloring book. Holding the cursor on any color on the canvas lets me instantly sample it. Drawing an exterior on the 3D figure is a bit tricky, as it’s easy to press too far and end up painting on the inside rather than the outside. It takes a few tries to get sharky’s toothy grin right.

I’m no artist, yet Quill was instantly intuitive. Making something worthy of a VR film will take skill and practice, but blunt sketches were easy just minutes after strapping in.

That’s why I see the rapid-prototyping potential of Quill as even more important that Dear Angelica. VR producers are constantly plagued with trying to develop scenes, characters, or action in 2D and then port them into 3D where everything works different. But with Quill, they could simply draw rough concepts of what they want, when and where. Finally, artists will be able to create in VR for VR.

Allsbrook has certainly become attached to the idea. She says she’s already asked Inigo, “If they fire me, do you think that I could have a build?”

Oculus VR Brings A New Reality To The Gaming Industry

After walking the floor of the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, many gaming industry participants saw the virtual reality (VR) writing on the wall for the first time — and in a very realistic way. Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) gaming has arrived, or gotten extremely close, with the official ship date for the Oculus Rift VR viewer set for March 28 and current pre-order acceptance now taking place.

Some issues remain in the technology and user experience, not to mention the price point. However, barring a major misstep by the Oculus unit of Facebook, none of these remain permanent obstacles to prevent a long-term VR trend from taking effect in 2016 (according to aJanuary 2016 report from SUPERDATA forecasting an install base of about 38 million VR gaming consumers by the end of the year and a July 2015 Business Insider estimate of VR headset shipments growing at a 99 percent CAGR between 2015 and 2020, reaching $30 billion by that end date).

Game console makers feel the heat from PC VR

While the Oculus Rift VR viewer existed in the purview of developers alone since June 2015, with this January’s announcement, the mainstream gaming public will now have an opportunity to experience VR firsthand. However, most of these potential gamers could remain on the sidelines unless they upgrade from Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox consoles to a fully decked-out PC. That’s unless the console makers get in the PC VR game.

“Nintendo either needs to adapt or be left behind,” Tim Lynch, CEO of Psychsoftpc, tells me. “Microsoft already has its own VR/AR HoloLens in beta now for developers. And since Xbox is essentially a PC-based system, it is better equipped to meet this.”

Actually, Nintendo is playing a wait-and-see game, according to Joanan Hernandez, CEO and founder of Mollejuo, an augmented reality (AR) company with a mobile app called Terra Icons.

“Microsoft is betting heavily on AR with HoloLens,” he says. “Thus, the only direct competition for Oculus is PlayStation VR and HTC Steam VR. There’s space for the three of them — Oculus, HTC, PlayStation — at least initially.”

In fact, HTC does a great job with physical-digital interactions, according to J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, a global research and advisory firm. “And it might have some advantages over Oculus in the features department,” he tells me. “For example, by tracking your movement throughout a room using base stations.”

Demand for VR technology looks good for console and mobile gaming platforms.

Expectations for VR exist at a high level. And with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets scheduled to hit retail in Q1 2016 and Sony PlayStation VR in Q2, demand for VR technology looks good for console and mobile gaming platforms. “This is positive for both our video game and tech brand businesses,” Eric Bright, senior director of merchandising at GameStop, tells me. “During our GameStop EXPO September 2015, we saw customers wait in long lines to experience the virtual reality demos Sony and HTC had with positive feedback.”

Price point and immersion

Some industry observers have questioned the $599 price point that Oculus chose for the formal introduction of the Rift, such as Mike Goodman, director of digital media strategies at Strategy Analytics, a consumer-focused business consulting firm.

“Oculus views the Rift as a ‘premium’ product and has priced it accordingly; however, there is ‘premium pricing’ and then there is pricing yourself out of the market,” Goodman tells me. “While there is a small segment of PC gamers who think nothing of dropping $2,300 on a high-end PC, $600 for the Oculus Rift plus an additional $1,500 for a PC capable of running Oculus VR games and entertainment is just too much for most of us. Considering Facebook spent roughly $2 billion to acquire Oculus VR, they might want to rethink their premium price point.”

Rather than price, immersion will be the key factor in VR’s success.

— Olli Sinerma

However, others have seen that earlier breakthrough consumer electronics with elevated acquisition costs have gone on to perform well in the marketplace. It comes down to the value proposition of immersion VR versus price point.

“The future of VR will not be determined by its current cost,” Olli Sinerma, co-founder and project lead at Mindfield Games, developer of the forthcoming VR game P.O.L.L.L.E.N, tells me. “What Oculus can ship, it will sell, and others will develop cheaper alternatives like the already available Google Cardboard. Rather than price, immersion will be the key factor in VR’s success.”

Install base barrier

But immersion alone may not ensure that Oculus will surmount its seemingly lofty sales tag. Other barriers beside the console makers represent plausible pitfalls for Facebook’s VR gear maker. The install base of VR-capable PCs presents the largest hedgerow for Oculus to jump over.

“Oculus’s $599 price point was higher than many expected, but that’s not the core inhibitor for adoption — it’s having a PC that’s Oculus-ready,” says Gownder. “Aside from PC gamers — and not even all of them — very few people have PCs with the needed specifications. Most people would have to buy the Rift and a $1,000-plus PC to use the device.”

Concurring with that perspective, Goodman opines that the vast majority don’t have PCs that meet Oculus Rift’s minimum PC requirements to run VR games and entertainment. Overall, Gownder estimates that only 13 million PCs globally are currently compatible with the Oculus Rift.

Which comes first, VR hardware or software?

Seeing that the install base for VR-capable PCs remains at a low level, the market might not yet exist. The classic chicken-or-the-egg scenario pops into view. Without a critical mass of hardware to run VR software, who will write the games? And with a lack of first-person shooters, etc., who will build PCs and consoles with VR compatibility?

“When it comes to consumer entertainment, the content dilemma poses a significant hurdle for adoption,” Maurice Patel, industry strategist, media and entertainment at Autodesk, developer of 3D design software, tells me. “Many VR headset manufacturers try to kick-start content creation by funding their own productions through initiatives like Oculus Studio. However, it will take several iterations of hardware and successful production projects before the technology is mature enough to warrant generalized, large-scale production of VR content.”

Today, VR is an exciting, bleeding-edge technology for exploring new ways of telling stories, driving gameplay and communicating ideas. Where it will go from here is yours to dream.

Oculus Rift getting the most support from VR game developers

It's hard to make someone wearing VR goggles look cool, but this person pulls it off. 

Kyle Orland 

Further ReadingAs new, high-end virtual reality headsets from the likes of Oculus, Valve/HTC, and Sony prepare to hit the market in the coming months, potential buyers may rightly wonder which VR solution is most likely to get a critical mass of support from the game development community. A new survey released ahead of March's Game Developers Conference suggests that, so far, the Oculus Rift is drawing outsized interest from those developers. 



GDC's 2016 State of the Industry Report surveyed 2,000 professional developers who attended the popular annual trade show during the past three years, asking about their current work and interest in various virtual reality and augmented reality technologies (among other things). The Oculus Rift was by far the most popular VR headset among the surveyed developers, with 19 percent of respondents saying they were currently working on a game for the device. A number of Rift competitors were well behind in a statistical dead heat for second place among active VR developers: Samsung's GearVR at 8 percent of respondents, Google Cardboard at 7 percent, and HTC Vive and PlayStation VR at 6 percent each. 



The Rift's lead extends to respondents' thoughts about the platform for their next VR game project; 20 percent say it will be on the Rift, compared to 9 percent for PlayStation VR and 8 percent for the HTC Vive. 

Before Oculus backers get too excited, it's worth pointing out that the Rift was still beaten out in the survey by the 25 percent of respondents who said they "are not currently interested in developing for VR/AR headsets." A further 44 percent said they weren't currently working on VR or AR games at the moment but were at least open to the idea of working on VR games. 

The Rift's lead in active VR game development might also merely be an outgrowth of developers' generally larger familiarity with Oculus' headset. A full 77 percent of developers in the survey said they had tried the Oculus Rift, compared to just 46 percent for Google Cardboard, 31 percent for GearVR, 21 percent for PlayStation VR, and 19 percent for the HTC Vive. As developers become more aware of the Rift's competition, those platforms may begin to see more developers actively working on them. 

Overall, the survey shows increasing numbers of game developers think consumer-grade virtual reality is more than a quickly passing fad this time around. A full 75 percent of respondents said that VR/AR "is a long-term sustainable business to be in," and 86 percent said such headsets will be in at least 10 percent of US households by 2030. That doesn't mean those developers see VR taking over the entire gaming world, though: only 27 percent of respondents said they thought virtual reality headsets would ever surpass the roughly 40 percent of US households that currently have a traditional video game console.