How Oculus Solved Virtual Reality

(upbeat electronic music)

Virtual reality had this boom in the 90s.

I mean, first off, we were interacting with computers

in an all new way.

We had graphical interfaces, computers were networked,

the rise of the Internet had happened,

and you also started seeing a lot of companies

trying to bring virtual reality headsets

to a consumer market.

A lot of 'em launched, and all of them failed.

(virtual gun shoots)

And that's where Palmer Luckey comes in.

With an invention called the Oculus Rift.

So I picked up a lot of old gear from a variety of places

that I started to reverse engineer.

And I learned a lot from those.

I learned mostly what not to do.

(upbeat electronic music)

[Presenter] For virtual reality to work,

you need immersion.

And that comes from having a field of vision

that's wide enough that you see a world

that wraps around you.

This is only worthwhile if you have a wide field of view.

If you don't have that, it's just a television on your head.

[Presenter] Of course, the more that virtual world

wraps around you,

the more important it's gonna be for it to move

immediately and exactly to reflect the motion of your head.

If it doesn't, it leads to

something that's called simulator sickness.

And the culprit is something called latency.

[Palmer] In the past, people were saying, you know,

if you can get to under a hundred milliseconds,

then the user is not going to be able to notice.

But we're finding that people are sensitive

down to 20 milliseconds,

and even lower than that in some situations.

[Presenter] So how do you cut down latency?

Well first, you have to track the head.

And you have to track it a lot.

The thing we were really looking for

was a high data rate, a high sampling rate.

The faster you're getting your measurements in,

the less time there is between the actual movement

and the reflection of that to the display

in the virtual reality headset.

Today we're actually close to 20 milliseconds end to end.

So the Rift, it's a game peripheral, right?

You're going to use it to play games,

and it's gonna blow your mind.

But it also has a lot of promise for education,

for productivity, for cinema.

What excites me about the future is taking this

hopefully polished and rock-solid thing, shipping it out,

and seeing the amazing things that people build.

This has been the best time for VR in a very long time.

There's been more virtual reality software created

in the last year than in the last 20 years combined.

So if one thing's clear, it's this:

Three years ago we thought VR was dead.

Looks like it's back to life.

(upbeat electronic music)