to maintain the same design philosophy while keeping a sharp eye on finding low- cost alternate components.


“We know that to have an immersive


experience, viewers must provide a field of view that’s greater than 90 degrees,” said Bolas. “To achieve this, we tried two unconventional approaches. Te first was to use off-the-shelf LCD displays rather than microdisplays, gambling that the price performance curve would improve due to the proliferation of smartphones. Te second was to optimize the optics design to provide a large but lightweight field of view, gambling here that graph- ics cards would soon allow for real-time distortion correction.”


Bolas’ hope that organizations would incorporate these Socket designs into commercial-off-the-shelf products


is


about to become a reality: HMDs will soon approach the


experience of Wide5 but with a price point of $300.


A PIVOTAL DEVELOPMENT Oculus VR Inc.


is a newly formed


company, founded by former MxR lab assistant Palmer Luckey with Bolas’ VR development company, Fakespace Labs Inc., acting as a founding advisor. Luckey sought out Bolas in 2011 and earned a position at ICT’s MxR Lab through his knowledge of HMDs and enthusiasm for VR. After working on an assortment of low-cost immersive viewers and HMDs for ICT’s MxR and Medical Virtual Real- ity Labs, Luckey further developed some of


the MxR Lab’s Socket open-source designs and configured a new HMD.


Te result was the Oculus Rift™, a VR HMD and development kit that raised more than $2 million on crowd-funding website Kickstarter last


summer with


the promise of delivering a fully immer- sive virtual experience for roughly the


Te extent of immersion the Oculus Rift provides is pivotal on two levels. First,


the


price of a smartphone. A Feb. 17, 2013, article in Te New York Times (http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/ technology/oculus-rift-headset- aims-for-affordable-virtual-reality. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.)


noted


that using Oculus Rift is “like watching an IMAX screen that never ends. A snap of


the head to the left instantly shifts


the perspective inside the game in the same direction.”


Headlines from the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas hailed demonstrations


of the Oculus Rift


HMD as “amazing,” “groundbreaking” and “mind-blowing.” It provides capa- bilities lacking in most commercial VR offerings, including a wide field of view (110 degrees), stereoscopic 360-degree tracking.


lenses and Consensus from reviewers is that the


sense of immersion in the Oculus Rift exceeds anything commercially available. Te MxR Lab is conducting research to quantify the value of a wider field of view and has found, for example, that it provides significantly better distance esti- mation in virtual environments.


PHONING IT IN To jump-start its vision for market dis- ruption, ICT’s MxR Lab gave away more than 100 FOV2GO viewers, one of the first Socket designs, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers


ASC.ARMY.MIL 79


combined with content created by inde- pendent developers, it has the potential to revolutionize VR for entertainment pur- poses. More important, it illustrates how crowd sourcing and open-source devel- opment can make it easier to get better products into the hands of the warfighter, in less time and at a lower cost.


DO-IT-YOURSELF 3-D


ICT’s MxR Lab gave away more than 100 of these FOV2GO viewers, do-it-yourself virtual reality kits that turn a smartphone into a 3-D viewing device, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Virtual Reality Conference in 2012. This smartphone-based technology has found its way into Army training prototypes. (Photo by David Nelson, USC ICT)


SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY


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