Category: CV1

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Facebook Selling Refurbished Rift CV1s In US For $300 As Rift S Remains Out Of Stock

The Oculus Rift S and Quest are still out of stock, so in the US Facebook is temporarily selling a “limited supply” of refurbished original Rifts for $299.

That’s $100 less than the Rift S, which is priced at $399. The listing is only available in the USA.

The original Oculus Rift launched in mid 2016 for $600. This didn’t include the Touch controllers, which launched in December of that year for $200. In 2017, Facebook unified into a Rift+Touch package priced at $400- that’s what’s on offer here.

Facebook says any refurbished Rift will be free of visible cosmetic imperfections, have no scratches on the lenses, no dents, and any repairs used original components.

If you’re not happy with the headset, returns are available for 30 days. If there’s an issue with it however, there’s a 6 month warranty. That’s only half the standard warranty, and would actually be illegal in almost all other developed countries.

So how does the Rift “CV1” hold up in 2020? We got one of ours out of storage and played a little Half-Life: Alyx with it.

What Holds Up Well

The Rift CV1 is the only Oculus headset so far designed to be high end, rather than balanced with affordability. The headset has a premium feel with a cloth exterior, and more importantly it’s compact, light, and comfortable to wear.

Unlike the Rift S, the lens separation is adjustable, allowing it to accommodate a wide range of users.

The integrated headphones on the Oculus Rift are a lot better than they look

Rift features great integrated headphones. It was the first consumer headset to do this, pushing VR audio forwards- and leading to disappointment from many when Rift S and Quest were announced using a basic strap audio system with poor quality & low volume.

What Simply Doesn’t

The main problem with the Rift CV1 was always its tracking system. It’s awkward to set up, clunky, and often incompatible with motherboards. If you move your sensors at all you’ll need to redo setup. And unless you go to the effort of wall mounting them your controllers will track poorly when near the floor.

These problems get worse the more sensors you add. The Rift comes with two sensors in the box, but for high quality “room scale” tracking (today taken for granted) you’ll need to acquire a third.

While OLED panels give the screen great contrast, the relatively low resolution is jarring compared to modern headsets. You’ll find yourself leaning in much more often to read text, and distant objects will be hard to identify.

The biggest problem with the display system though is the “god rays” on the lenses. In high contrast scenes this can be incredibly distracting.

Should You Buy One?

$300 feels like a high price for a headset released four years ago. At the end of its life, the headset was offered for $350 brand new. We’d have expected this to be priced more around the $200 mark.

But it can still play any VR game the Rift S can. So if you just can’t wait for other headsets to come back in stock and you’re aware of the limitations, this could be your path into PC VR.

If your interpupillary distance is outside the recommended range for the Rift S, it may even be a superior experience for you.

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Rift CV1: Facebook ‘Evaluating Options’ For Replacement Cables Out Of Warranty

We’ve heard from a number of concerned owners of the Oculus Rift CV1 — Facebook’s first consumer-oriented PC-based VR headset released in 2016 — who are worried about getting replacement parts after its discontinuation earlier this year. So we reached out to Facebook and a representative wrote in an email “for customers who are still within warranty, we are still providing replacement cables as needed. As Rift is a product that is no longer in market, our team is evaluating options for customers outside of warranty.”

While acknowledging the concern, those words likely aren’t reassuring for people who are out of warranty and prefer the original headset and its mechanical “IPD” fitting adjustment. The feature physically moves the optics to directly align visuals in front of the eyes. The Rift’s replacement, the Rift S made in partnership with Lenovo, started shipping in May and makes those adjustments only in software. The difference could make the new headset a poor fit for some folks who liked the original but have a face shape and eye distance which doesn’t align well with the new optics. Facebook’s standalone wireless headset, Oculus Quest, also released in May and that headset does feature the mechanical adjustment. Valve’s Index VR headset is PC-powered and also includes the adjustment.

As of this writing, on the U.S. site for Oculus it is still possible to buy an original Oculus Touch Controller, Sensor, Facial Interface or remote while other replacement parts, like audio accessories and the cable to attach the headset to the computer, are no longer available.

Oculus Connect 6 will be hosted by Facebook on Sept. 25 and 26 and we expect major updates from Facebook announced at the event across all of Facebook’s VR efforts.

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Community Download: How Many Headsets Do You Think Oculus Has Sold?

Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.

According to market research firm SuperData, as quoted in CNBC, Facebook’s Oculus Go VR headset has sold two million units, Quest had sold 1.1 million units and Rift had sold 547,000 units since the start of 2018. According to Oculus Co-Founder and inventor of the Rift, Palmer Luckey, that’s not accurate.

Luckey took to Twitter to say that between the Gear VR and CV1 Oculus Rift combined the number is actually well over 10 million. The implication is that the company has sold more than these figures allude.

But we don’t actually know for sure at all because Facebook doesn’t release sales figures for its products. All we can really do is guess. The same goes for HTC, Valve, Microsoft’s Windows VR line, and most other headset manufacturers. The only company that’s really been transparent with regular sales figure updates is Sony. As of May 2019 Sony has sold over 4.2 million PSVR headsets. That’s likely even higher by now.

So, that brings us to the issue at hand: How many VR headsets do you think Oculus has sold? In fact, why not just ask: How many VR headsets, period, do you think have been sold? Do you think between the CV1 and Rift S there are more than one millioin yet? Between all of the multiple types of PC VR headsets do you think there are more than the 4.2 million PSVRs yet?

Let us know your thoughts on headset sales down below!

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Remaster Your DK1 And DK2 Content To Win A Share Of $10,000 In This Contest

Remaster Your DK1 And DK2 Content To Win A Share Of $10,000 In This Contest

If you’re a VR or AR content creator that developed experiences for either the Oculus Rift DK1 or DK2, then you could potentially win up to $10,000 for remastering your content for the CV1 in this new contest from WEARVR. The deadline for entries is May 1st, 2018, at 12:00PM BST.

Back before the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive officially launched almost two years ago, the Oculus Rift had a series of developer kits that content creators used to make some of the world’s first true consumer-facing VR applications. The DK1 and DK2 were the predecessors to Oculus’ CV1 and early adopters of the technology were treated to some absolutely groundbreaking and imaginative creations for the time.

A lot of those experiences have been lost to the evolution of the internet though. The fact of the matter is that a lot of these apps aren’t even compatible with the CV1 and then after Oculus shut down the Oculus Share website that was used to house all of those creations it was unclear what would happen to many of them.

Lots of apps have since been polished, expanded, and released as full games and experiences, but many of them have also been forgotten. Now thanks to WEARVR, there could be a resurgence on the horizon.

The contest rules are as follows:

  • The original content must have been made available for the Oculus DK1 and/or DK2,
  • Your Remastered Competition entry must work on the Oculus Rift CV1,
  • Your entry can also be remastered for the HTC Vive or other contemporary VR platforms as well, but must include the CV1,
  • The entry must include some manner of enhancement over the original (visuals, audio, controls, content, etc) that makes it contemporary with new releases on the Oculus platform,
  • Finally, read over the Terms and Conditions for additional details.

WEARVR will select the four best remasters as the winners and split the $10,000 between them. If you’re interested in submitting a piece of remastered content, just fill out the form on this site and register for a WEARVR developer account.

What are some of your favorite pieces of DK1 and DK2 content that you’d love to see remastered for CV1? Let us know down in the comments below!

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Chronos Review – Prepare To Age Oculus CV1

Chronos is a Third-Person RPG for the Oculus Rift available from the Oculus Store which was developed by Gunfire Games and is an exclusive title for VR and Oculus.

At the start of Chronos you are given the option to choose whether you wish to be a male or female protagonist. Then you have the decision to make: to carry an axe or a trusty sword from the start. Whatever your decision is it won’t have much impact on your playthrough. After this you are then taken to the village elder. Here, through shadow theatre you are told the story of the game and of how you have been chosen to take on this great evil and save your homeworld from the Dragon.

Chronos is like the younger brother of a Dark Soul’s game. It’s not as big or as hard as its older brother but it still packs a punch and won’t go down without a fight. And fight you will. The combat in the game is not anything new or exciting. You attack, block, parry or dodge and that’s pretty much it. But as simple as the controls are there is much more to it than that. Every enemy is a threat to you and if you don’t take them seriously they will punish you even if you have beaten them 5-10-20 times before.  There is an art to each character type, a certain pattern that you will have to find to dispatch them. Of course this will depend on your style of play and the weapon you use.

The world in which the game starts is a post-apocalyptic one, although you don’t spend a lot of time. here, because to kill the dragon you must enter the labyrinth.  This is set in a high fantasy world and not just full of monsters but also puzzles to slow your progress through the labyrinth. The puzzles are generally light and don’t take lots of time to figure out but trekking back and forth to find a missing piece is the real challenge. There is no hand holding with Chronos so when you do move around you don’t have a map so you can sometimes get lost or take a wrong turn. However, as you’re in a labyrinth you really shouldn’t find it a doddle to get around anyway.  The further you get through the labyrinth the more doors you can open that connect back to previous parts of the chapter. This will allow you to skip parts of the labyrinth that you have previously explored and avoid the enemies that occupy the halls if you die. Save Points are giant gemstones that you use to teleport from the outside world into the labyrinth and also to move throughout it. Unfortunately, they are sparsely scattered around the maze and you will have to battle hard from one gemstone to the next.

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Chronos is an RPG but for anyone looking for the level of character detail and tuning that you would get from RPG’s like Skyrim will not find it here. You have four attributes to work with; Strength, Arcane, Agility and Vitality, and you earn points to upgrade these through combat experience only. Your character will always be of warrior class so even if you focus more on the Arcane you will still be a warrior.  Your weapons come from exploring as there are no shops or mysterious strangers that will sell you a new axe for gold coins. All weapons can have their damage power upgraded by collecting dragon shards. There is a nice variety in the weapons you come across- Sword, Axes, Maces and my particular weapon of choice, a Spear, – although it is possible to keep the first weapon you choose and complete the game with it. There aren’t any side missions either that you can spend time doing to build up your character’s experience.

What Chronos does offer in an RPG way that I have never experienced before is that your character ages. When you die you get thrown out of the labyrinth back to your home world and as the labyrinth only opens once a year you must wait till then, licking your wounds and getting older before you can return. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in real time, in the game and you are just transported back to the nearest save stone that you last encountered. When you first enter the labyrinth you are a sprightly 18-year-old, nimble and quick. As you grow older though your strength will start to wane however you become wiser and more in tune to the arcane arts. This unique approach adds more to Chronos then you’d expect. You will die a lot in Dark Souls or Bloodborne and it’s frustrating, but with Chronos there seems to be a real price for being defeated over and over. This added a sense of dread that hung over me throughout my playthrough as if death itself was standing over me watching and waiting for me. The character appearance changes as the years pass and I felt it with the Hero as if the burden of their many years weighed also on my shoulders.  Then as every decade of your life passes you get the option to choose a new perk out of three available. Some consideration is needed with each one of these options as what might work for you now might not be the best option later in life.

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As for VR, Gunfire has built an exceptionally beautiful world within Chronos and with the detail you feel as if they had crafted every stone from hand. I can see why a developer would perhaps prefer a game this beautifully made in VR as the player can appreciate the design and detail up close compared to a more traditional screen. Aside from enjoying the view, there isn’t a lot VR offers here. Your POV is at a fixed position in every area you walk into as if you were a CCTV camera watching your Hero throughout their journey. For a game that relies on being able to dodge and parry a lot, I found a few times that I would end up getting stuck behind an enemy as they blocked the camera, which was especially frustrating when you died because of it. I was constantly either luring an enemy to an area where I had a better view or moving around the camera POV to take a better position to attack.

Chronos has a perfect mix of frustration and enjoyment built into the game. You will work hard to beat it but never spend too long repeating the same area over and over. It’s a great warmup for other harder games of this type. I would have enjoyed Chronos as much playing it on TV as in VR but for the platform it’s great to see a well-designed, polished game available. GunFire are definitely a developer to watch from here on in. Chronos is shallow on the RPG elements but will find its fans that don’t want the depth of character development and hours of side quests that other games in the genre have to offer. Its aging mechanic I hope becomes something other studios will make use of in games to come as every death matters more in this game than any other I have played. There is a bite to Chronos but I enjoyed sinking my teeth into it as much as it sunk them into me.

 

 

 

 

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Technolust Review: TechnoLACKluster! Oculus Rift CV1

 

Technolust is a VR Narrative Experience from IRIS VR exclusively for the Oculus Rift. Following on from a popular Kickstarter campaign back in 2014 and being Greenlit for Steam, Technolust is available to download from Oculus Home and Steam now.

Technolust is set in a cyberpunk world where corporations now rule instead of governments. In this narrative, you are a silent hacker who is fighting back against the oppression that these big businesses have brought down on you and the people of the world, or at least this is what I could gather from the story. This world is dark, gritty and technology seems interconnected with everything around you. Hacking then becomes an essential part of the story and a way to stick it to the man and show you are a non-conformist.
The game starts when you are ‘jacked in’ to a cyber world which I would describe as MS-DOS meets Tron. Your character is just another nameless, faceless, voiceless, bodiless character. VR is supposed to be about immersion but it’s hard to get that when you feel that you are just playing as a floating camera. You float along until you find a file sent by one of your hacking friends which neither of you should have and after you receive it you pop back into the real world. From here your adventure really begins.

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You’re told the story through videos by the other game characters. These are then real actors playing the role, not just voice over or computer generated characters and the actors playing each role do perform exceptionally. There are other NPC’s scattered around the world, some of which are robots that seemed based on Star Wars C3PO. They are very helpful and polite but seem a little dim. I felt the NPC’s were just placed around to fill in the empty streets and try to bring life to the world. Plus, with every one of them being rooted to the one spot it doesn’t help to convince you that there is more going on in the city than just your story. The graphics work in the game for the most part. While you are in the darker areas such as inside buildings or in the city at night they are fine, however whenever you go out into brighter areas the lower quality really shows.

 

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Hacking is handled as a third person mini-game where you control an avatar that seems slightly constipated as it waddles around. However, that aside, I found these levels enjoyable as you go around shooting red enemies and collecting key cards to break through programs. Also, you come across Arcade machines and these also have their own individual games which include a 3D space invaders game and a cube version of Tetris where you stack blocks on all sides of a cube. I was impressed with how polished these games are and how well they controlled.
I’m all for games that don’t take you by the hand and guide you through the story. When you must overcome a challenge this is great. However, when you find yourself getting a little bored or detached from the story then this can become frustrating, not knowing what to do next or where to go. A few times I just really wanted to move on to the next section and didn’t want to wander around trying to figure out what to do next.

I could probably fill this review writing about the amount of Easter eggs that I came across and indeed the ones that I didn’t get. There were nods to movies like Total Recall, Robocop, The Matrix and the most obvious being Blade Runner. I always enjoy a nod to a movie or a reference here and there, but it felt at times that the story was suited more to the reference than for the sake of the plot. The end of the story left me confused more than anything and even after giving it a bit of thought I’m still foggy with what happened at the end. I felt no satisfaction or real conclusion to the story and for the most part I really didn’t care.

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I want to be immersed in a VR world where I can get caught up with everything around me. VR is somewhere I want to spend time but unfortunately I just wanted to get through Technolust. Even though after the credits rolled I feel I may have missed some things I won’t find myself longing for this world or have any reason to go back. I can get over a poor narrative in a shooter or action game when I have lots to do as it still fills my time with fun. On the other hand, when the game is solely based on narrative you want a story with emotion, to feel angry when you have been doubled crossed, or a terrible loss when a friend dies. Without all this the game becomes a bit of a walking simulator or in this case a floating simulator. I wouldn’t recommend anyone not to play Technolust. Maybe it’s right for you but for €19.99, I would want a bit more bang for my buck.

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