Comments

1. 1. 

      Creator Nicholas Halderman on August 11, 2012

      I'm not sure we'll see any stretch goals, because I don't think there's much margin on the kits. That means more pledges translate into more work for them in getting thing shipped out, but not a lot more money. And the vast majority of their pledges have been for dev kits--at present I think they're slated to send out 4683 kits. They'll probably make some profit (I hope! it would help ensure that a consumer version will follow eventually), but stretch goals make a lot more sense in projects like video games, where the cost of producing and distributing extra rewards is small.

   2. 

      Creator Shaun Huang on August 9, 2012

      Stretch goal doesn't have to be for hardware changes. It doesn't even need to be an additional deliverable item.
      If you have already looked at the budget and how the pledge amount fits with it, your stretch goals could simply be that if you had X amount more than that is already pledged, you could get additional resource for this and that. Ex: additional QA resource for driver, specific enhancement to documentation (more code snipets for the API), hire someone to maintain a wiki, etc.

   3. 

      Creator Carlos Acevedo Rodríguez on August 9, 2012

      @Michael Stum. I think you are underestimating the importance of the resolution for achieve an immersive and “realistic” 3D experience. Don´t forget, the main Rift objective is the virtual “reality”. You can’t separate the sensation of reality with the resolution: higher resolution = textures closer to the empiric reality. Dude, the reality is totally conditioned for our sensitive (the eye is the most important, of course), if you have a reduced view, the reality will be reduce too (for this, I use glasses, lol). Obviously, I don’t mean the resolution is the most important, the other 3 factors (that you mentioned) are very important too, but the resolution is not (can't be) a secondary issue…

   4. 

      Creator Michael Stum on August 9, 2012

      I think Gamers want a thing that works and is supported by as many games as possible, since that's what sells stuff. Resolution sounds important, but really, it's possibly the least important thing. The glasses must be comfortable to wear, have low latency and need a wide game support with a good, useable and well documented SDK. So anything that can be done on these 3 fronts easily trumps resolution.

   5. 

      Creator Marc Olivier Chouinard on August 9, 2012

      I'll go with everyone else with that I'm glad the specs wont change... I do hope some last minute change can be done to improve latency and better precision, or at less make sure if firmware update are available that we can do it (even if it require a low cost additional jtag). But as far as resolution goes, if all the top of the industry who tried it say it worth it for a dev, then do it quickly so you can shift focus and get hard at work at the better higher resolution version.

      I would love to hear about support your going to get from the different game engine. I personally like Unity 3D these days, and I saw they are interested... But will they really support it with the optic distortion stuff that was done in Doom 3 ? I think Unity 3D is a great fit since they offer a free version so anyone could give it a try.

      As for more content that could be available at launch... I was thinking that you could look at the Blender modeling tool and their Open Source Movies project. It might be interesting to try to render in 3d with the large field of view... And actually maybe even larger so we can do some small head movement to see around. I understand the movie like Sintel wasn't visually built for this and wont look that amazing... But it could be a low cost nice visual demo of the capability of the Rift.

      Also some basic tool to just display youtube 3d content with the short field of view might be interesting.

      But I think Unity 3D is really the engine that should get the full support at launch... It allow for really quick content creation and is easily sharable. I know it not really up to you, but I really hope Unity team do support it in all it glory ;)

      Can't wait to get my hands on it !

   6. 

      Creator Michel Baumann on August 9, 2012

      I perfectly understand that you can't upgrade the dev kit. But I still think stretch goals are important. Perhaps you can add a set of video tutorials or overall a more user friendly programming environment. A.lot of gamers with little coding background are backing, stretch goals could help them, to at least play around with the dev kit.
      Maybe you could even add support to another game in a stretch goals (even if it is somewhen down the line) - or program a little virtual world to play around in. There is a lot of stuff outside of improving the hardware that you can add in stretch goals and I really encourage you to do so.

   7. 

      Creator Wookiee on August 9, 2012

      Good to hear! glad no one persuaded you to upgrade the devkit, it is after all for developers to get in ahead of the gamers so that there can be games for the gamers when it comes out for consumers. There is a point to be made with increased resolution however, (if there will be a diference between the devkit and the consumer res) If the devs are using one res and the consumer model is at a higher res it can impact art direction. (admitadly not too much) but it is hard to scale up for a product that we can't test on (especially if we are capitalising on the wide viewing angle and periferal vision.... say horror games that this would work WONDERS with). Any chance of having the display swapable with a higher res one down the line? (purchasable through your site) Just hope the dev kit is still slightly modable/upgreadable to specs that will mimmic the consumer version.

   8. 

      Creator Carlos Acevedo Rodríguez on August 9, 2012

      I perfectly understand you don´t risky to improve the technical specifications (I mean resolution, especially). You plan to ship the dev kits before the end of 2012, ok. But, I think many gamers want to join in the test of the early Rift, and they want a better resolution (a bit better, at least). So, I think many of gamers can wait (and upgrade their pledge) more months and pay more for a Rift “gamer” kit prototype. I also think many of gamers have a decent PC (a high end GPU and CPU, at least), so, you perfectly can create a Rift “gamer” kit and the gamer can test it in their PC. This will have a lot of feedback for the final version (issues about Crossfire and Sli compatibility, AMD and Nvidia drivers, how it work with multithreading CPU, etc.). It is just an idea for achieve an awesome final product. Thanks ;)

   9. 

      Creator Kornel Kisielewicz on August 9, 2012

      As a strech goal you could promise the people that ordered a dev-kit at least a slight-to-moderate discount on the consumer version once it arrives! If the discount promised would be reasonable, I'm sure it would attract many more people who now have a hard time deciding whether to order the dev-kit or wait for the consumer version!

      And it would be an epic bonus indeed :)

   10. 

       Creator Rob on August 9, 2012

       Quick clarification: GDC Europe, Gamescom and Unite are all in August, but PAX east is not. Did you mean PAX prime 2012, or PAX east 2013?

   11. 

       Creator Jacob Varns on August 9, 2012

       Did you mean PAX Prime/West? Because PAX East isn't until next spring. I sure hope you're at PAX Prime. I'd love to see it before they ship. I really can't wait to start programming for this thing.