I’ve had my Oculus Rift Developer Kit Version 1 (DK1) for just under a year, after receiving my kit on April 11, 2013. In that year, I’ve built a few apps and played with a ton of other people’s apps from Oculus Share. My experience with the DK1 is that, while it’s good, it’s not great. It’s funny, because, while the low resolution and heavy screen-door effect were the two initial problems I had with the unit, over time, they took a back seat to another, more basic problem:
The Oculus Rift DK1 wire is fucking annoying. Not just annoying, but a lot of the time it ruins the experience of immersing yourself in the virtual environment. The new term that people are using for this is “presence.” When I’m wearing it, I can’t turn around fully without feeling the wire tickle my neck or hear the breakout box slide across my desk, which makes me worry that it’ll fall off and I’ll break it, so I take the headset off to make sure it’s safe. The wire undoes exactly what the rest of the kit is trying so hard (and succeeding, mostly) to do: immerse me in the experience. All the time that I use the unit, I fear of fully moving in any direction because the wire is there.
That wire has got to go.
I know that Oculus is working its hardest to reduce the latency between the time that you move and the time it shows the movement on the screen in the headset. I know that going wireless will increase that latency. But, hot damn, at this point, I’m almost willing to take a slightly more delayed response if I can do without the wire.
