Facebook’s subsidiary Oculus has unveiled the prototype for a new virtual reality headset designed for gaming that offers 360 degree head tracking called the Crescent Bay.
Oculus is an American virtual reality company which declares its mission to be to develop immersive virtual reality technology that’s wearable and affordable,
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The company states that it’s The Rift uses custom tracking technology to provide ultra-low latency 360° head tracking, allowing you to seamlessly look around the virtual world just as you would in real life. Every subtle movement of your head is tracked in real time creating a natural and intuitive experience.
The new device was first introduced at the company’s Oculus Connect developer conference in Los Angeles. It includes integrated audio.
Along with the new hardware, Oculus created original demo content, which it calls the “Crescent Bay Experiences, ” developed in-house by its content team specifically for Oculus Connect.
The company’s CEO Brendan Iribe said, “Crescent Bay has the presence we need for consumer VR. It’s not the consumer product, but it’s much closer to the final thing.”
Along with the integrated audio in Crescent Bay, Oculus says that it is working to build the hardware and software that developers need to create high-fidelity VR audio experiences for the Rift. A great audio engine for VR has to reproduce cues that arise from the interaction of sound with the scene, to fully convince the human perceptual system, the company explains.
In a post on its website, Oculus declared, “As part of our audio initiative, we’ve licensed RealSpace3D’s audio technology, a software stack developed over 10 years based on technology from the University of Maryland. RealSpace3D’s tech enables high-fidelity VR audio with a combination of HRTF spatialization and integrated reverberation algorithms.”
Oculus Connect was a developer conference held on Friday and Saturday that brought together engineers, designers, and creative people from around the world to share and collaborate in the interest of creating the best virtual reality experiences possible.
Oculus was acquired earlier this year by Facebook for $2 billion. Not bad for a company which was founded only a few years ago and which considered raising a measly $2.4 million in a Kickstarter campaign to have been “an enormous success.”
