Project Santa Cruz – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

October 15, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Oculus Quest Completes Company’s First-Gen Lineup’

Oculus Quest, the newly announced standalone 6DOF VR headset (ex-Project Santa Cruz), completely stole the show at this year’s Oculus Connect with the promise of offering some very Rift-like experiences in a mobile form-factor. There was a torrent of news surrounding the headset and its upcoming apps like SUPERHOT VR, but what seemed to fall through the cracks was the revelation that Oculus Quest marks the end of the company’s first-gen hardware.

“With Oculus Quest, we will complete our first generation of VR products,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

Oculus Quest is due to launch sometime in Spring 2019 at $400 for the 64 GB version, including a pair of optically-tracked controllers, also dubbed ‘Touch’ like the Rift’s controllers. Tracking is handled by on-board, head-mounted sensors, so there’s no need for a PC or external sensors.

At Connect, Zuckerberg outlined that the company will be pushing forward with the three hardware platforms—Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Rift—as definitive classes of devices that will eventually see new versions in the second generation.

“So from here we’re going to make big leaps in tech and content for the future generations for each of these products,” Zuckerberg continued. “We’re going to build each of these as platforms, so everything that you build for them today is going to work on future versions of these devices. This is all still early, but [Go, Quest, and Rift] is the basic road map.”

You can view the full day-one keynote here on YouTube.

Hands-On with Oculus Quest – The Way VR Was Meant To Be

Modern virtual reality (VR) has been making promises for five years. Since the initial reveal of a duct-taped Oculus Rift through the development kits and up until the consumer launch, we’ve all been promised that the technology will eventually offer truly revolutionary experiences. It’s gotten closer to this Holy Grail, step-by-step, but it’s never been quite enough. Two years ago Oculus revisited that promise in the form of the Santa Cruz prototype, and today, it has come good: accelerating VR hardware in its goal of reaching mass market adoption through ease of use, so that we can all eventually experience something groundbreaking.

Oculus Quest (OC5) Santa Cruz, or Oculus Quest as it is now known, is an elegant piece of hardware design. It’s a recognition of the fact that everything we’ve seen so far has been good, but still falls quite short of one-size-fits-all. The Samsung Gear VR, the Oculus Rift and even the Oculus Go have changed the technology industry forever, but VR is still yet to change society: Oculus Quest takes all of the technological, market penetration and form factor lessons learned over the last five years and repackages them into something believable. Quite simply, Oculus Quest could have what it takes for VR to push beyond the novelty and cash-in on that promise.

Originally unveiled as a slightly fragile prototype back at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016, the device has come a long way in two years. The level of comfort offered is actually better than Oculus Rift despite including all the processing hardware on-board and, while we’re yet to get any official statements regarding field of view (FoV), it does upon initial (limited and controlled) testing appear to offer a slight improvement. The tracking of the head-mounted display (HMD) still occasionally suffers on erratic movement (sharp 180 turns or diagonal upwards swings) but for the most part it performs just as well as the Oculus Rift itself.

A slight issue that appears to have become part of the Oculus Quest since last year is controller tracking. Face Your Fears 2 – a horror experience from Turtle Rock Studios – didn’t rely on swift arm movement and so the predictive tracking worked seamlessly, however Project Tennis Scramble – a colourful tennis experience – required much faster movement often seeing your racket disappear from the field at the worst possible time. Whether this is a hardware issue or the software remains to be seen, but given the quality of the demonstrations seen when the Santa Cruz controllers were initially revealed last year it’s more than likely to be the latter.

Oculus Quest - Hero / Lifestyle Image Technical specifications of the Oculus Quest, such as processing power, GPU clock rate, battery life and storage capacity, have not yet been revealed. It’s not likely that such information will come to light any time soon, but the fact that it uses USB-C for charge and houses a much more efficient focal adjustment is good news right from the start.

So what does this mean for the Oculus hardware family? Oculus Go will continue to be the entry level device, but will the Oculus Rift represent the high-end? Will we see the minimum PC specification for Oculus Rift experiences increasing above and beyond that of Oculus Quest? Or will we see the Oculus Rift receiving a price-drop and being positioned as the awkward middle child? Only time will tell, but the next six-or-so months as we await the Oculus Quest launch will undoubtedly be very exciting.

March 16, 2018

Oculus to Talk Developing for ‘Santa Cruz’ Standalone Headset Next Week – a Step Closer to Launch

Project Santa Cruz, Oculus’ in-development standalone VR headset first teased back at Oculus Connect 2016, doesn’t even really have a proper name yet, but at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) the company will be dedicating an hour-long talk to the fundamentals of developing for the new platform. Giving developers more insight into the headset’s limitations could mean launch might be right around the corner.

When we first got our hands on the first publicly shown iteration of Santa Cruz back at Connect 2016, it was essentially a prototype microcomputer integrated into an Oculus Rift headset. It has since been developed into a bespoke headset, replete with several integrated optical sensors to not only give the headset itself 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF), but critically allowing for 6DoF controllers as well, meaning you get an experience much closer to a ‘tethered’ PC VR experience than mobile VR’s forerunners like Gear VR or the upcoming Oculus Go headset. In our latest hands-on with Santa Cruz, we got a brief sense of the sort of room-scale experiences the headset could run, but with Oculus sharing more insight into the headset’s limitations, it’s likely Santa Cruz is nearing finalization and heading toward launch sometime soon.

Entitled ‘Developing for Santa Cruz’, the talk will feature Gabor Szauer, Oculus Developer Relations Engineer; Rade Stojsavljevic, Oculus Head of Content Strategy; and Ryan Rutherford, Oculus Software Engineer. Here’s the description below:

Standalone represents an exciting new category for game development and an approachable first VR platform for developers new to immersive design. Members of the Oculus Engineering and Content teams will discuss the key differences between Santa Cruz and other headsets—and offer practical insights on design and development considerations for the future of VR.

The talk will be an ‘in booth’ session, taking place March 21st at 12:30 – 1:30 pm PT. If you’re attending GDC this year and interested in official Oculus talks, head over to the Oculus featured talks list.

We’ll have feet on the ground at GDC, so check back for more coverage when talks start on Monday, March 19th.

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December 5, 2017

Oculus File Patent for Curved Display

Modern virtual reality (VR) technology has not yet been around long enough to have properly established a standard tech cycle, but since it has been three years since the launch of the Oculus Rift heralded to launch of the new era of VR, experts are beginning to speculate on what we can expect from the next generation of VR headsets. A recent patent filed by Oculus may gives some clues.

The Oculus Connect event in October, 2017 saw the announcement of the Oculus Go, a standalone VR headset that did not need a smartphone or PC to power it. This device is thought to be aimed at a mid-range market in between smartphone VR devices such as the Samsung Gear VR or Google Daydream and high-end PC devices. Also announced was the Project Santa Cruz headset, which is designed to be a high-end device, equipped with a new display and new Fresnel lenses.

It isn’t clear at this point where the Santa Cruz headset will sit in the Oculus product range, if it will be a successor device to the current Oculus Rift, or will exist alongside it. A recently filed patent suggests that the true successor device to the Oculus Rift is yet to come.

Curved screens have become popular in certain tech products, such as sensors in high-end cameras, and certain models of televisions, particularly ones produced by Samsung. Oculus are also exploring this technology, as revealed by a patent filed at the World International Property Organisation.

As reported by Lets Go Digital, the patent shows a cylindrically curved display, a display type that has significant advantages for VR display, as it provides a wider field-of-view and also eliminates some optical distortions, which in other VR headsets needs to be corrected with lenses and software.

It is not considered likely that this technology will be applied to the Project Santa Cruz headset, and it is currently unknown where this patent technology will be used.

VRFocus will bring you further information on Oculus and its technology as it becomes available.

October 12, 2017

Hands-On with Project Santa Cruz – Getting Closer to Where VR Needs to Be

Oculus VR’s Santa Cruz was originally revealed at Oculus Connect 3, San Jose, last year. Today the company offered an update on the all-in-one head-mounted display (HMD), and a year in development has brought about some big changes. While the underlying technology appears on-par with the debut a year ago, the HMD itself has benefited from significant change.

The Santa Cruz HMD – now known as Project Santa Cruz – is essentially a redesigned version of last year’s cobbled-together HMD. It’s no longer an Oculus Rift with a micro-computer attached to the rear, and instead a HMD in it’s own right: it’s lightweight, soft to the touch and of a much better build quality. It’s also surprisingly small. In the first touch and use, the Santa Cruz HMD feels lighter and smaller than the Oculus Rift.

This is of course a big deal, as Project Santa Cruz involves mounting all of the compute power within the frontend of the HMD, alongside the tracking cameras. Maintaining comfort through balance would be difficult, but here Oculus VR has pitched the compute power to a standard which, although inferior to a high-end PC, is more than capable of outdoing any of the current mobile HMDs. Oculus VR aren’t being drawn on specification just yet, but did reveal to VRFocus that the current internal processing power is higher than most smartphones currently on the market.

This was evident in the first of two software demonstrations available. Featuring Bogo, a character that appears very similar to some of the aliens that appear in Oculus Rift launch title Farlands, the player can interact with the creature by offering fruit, stroking its head and playing fetch with a stick. Movement is of course encouraged and the tracking holds up perfectly well with both fast and deliberate forward, backwards and sidesteps. This demonstration was obviously designed to showcase the Santa Cruz HMD’s six degrees of freedom (6 DoF) tracking as Bogo would freely move around the player in all directions.

Of course, one of the biggest new additions on this front is the motion-controllers. Offering the same 6 DoF tracking as the HMD itself, the controllers sit somewhere between Oculus Touch and the motion-controller launched for the Samsung Gear VR earlier this year. A touchpad is accompanied by Home and Back buttons, while a trigger and grip button are positioned for index and fore fingers. The same Constellation tracking seen on Oculus Touch controllers is in place, and while they won’t be tracked when behind the player due to the HMD-mounted cameras, the volume in which they can be tracked remains impressive.

Much like the HMD itself, the motion-controllers are of a decent build quality. Lighter than Oculus Touch and ergonomically designed to fit comfortably within a normal holding position, they currently operate using regular AA batteries. VRFocus was informed that the controllers are in fact less far into development than the HMD and will likely see significant changes prior to launch, but even at this stage they appear to be comfortable and perfectly capable of delivering a high quality immersive experience.

One year on, Project Santa Cruz has answered a lot of questions about the future of the technology, but has also posed many more. Oculus VR has suggested that Project Santa Cruz will act as a third pillar between mobile and high-end VR, but how will that pillar be supported? How will it be priced? And, with HMD sales still not setting the world on fire, how can the company avoid cannibalising their own sales next to the Oculus Rift? It may be yet another Oculus Connect until those questions are answered, but right now the hardware is looking ready to take up the challenge of heading towards a consumer market.

October 11, 2017

Oculus ‘Santa Cruz’ Standalone Dev Kits Coming Next Year, Including 6 DoF Controllers

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg took the stage today at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s VR developer conference, to tell the crowd that the high-end standalone Project Santa Cruz VR headset will be heading to devs next year and it will be coming with 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) controllers.

Update (10/11/17): In the confusion of the avalanche of updates from Oculus, it was incorrectly reported that Santa Cruz was a wireless PC VR headset when in reality it is a completely standalone, high-end mobile VR headset.

Project Santa Cruz is a high-end standalone headset with inside-out tracking, something that’s differentiates itself from the newly revealed Oculus Go mobile headset because it uses the a high-end, head-mounted mobile PC to drive the headset’s graphical abilities and comes with 6DoF controllers similar to Touch in function.

Oculus says in a blogpost announcing the headset dev kit and 6DoF controllers that “[g]etting the infrared LEDs on our new Santa Cruz controllers to work with the sensors used for inside-out tracking on the headset was a significant computer vision, design, and engineering problem. This is a milestone we’re proud of. By using four ultra-wide sensors, we achieved a large controller tracking volume, allowing for natural and unrestricted movement.”

Ever since building Rift, our dream has been to bring the magic of a PC VR experience to an untethered form factor. That’s why we were so excited to share our early work with Santa Cruz at Oculus Connect last year. Although that first prototype had a full-blown mobile computer strapped to the back of your head, the feeling of freedom you got when first experiencing fully untethered positionally-tracked VR remains unparalleled.

Today, we showed the next phase of Santa Cruz development, delivering hand presence with two positionally tracked controllers. This is an important, industry-first milestone that brings the magic and incredible design expertise of Touch into a completely standalone experience.

The Santa Cruz headset includes 4 camera sensors to allow for a wide field of view, allowing for both inside-out positional tracking and the controller tracking that allows for a seemingly full range of motion. The controllers integrate infrared LEDs to accomplish 6 degrees of freedom.

Zuckerberg told the crowd that “Santa Cruz headsets [will be] in your hands and the hands of developers in the next year.”

The company say they’ll be sharing more updates on Project Santa Cruz soon.

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