Oculus’ Brendan Iribe describes how they created ‘magical’ Oculus Touch virtual-reality controllers

Oculus VR chief Brendan Iribe went on stage on Thursday to describe the final version of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset that will ship to consumers in early 2016. That headset will come bundled with an Xbox One wireless controller, but Facebook’s Oculus division will also sell an Oculus Touch control system that enables you to translate more hand gestures into inputs for the virtual world.

These new controllers will make you feel like you can use your hands inside the world in a natural way, Iribe said. And they’re part of a larger evolving system that makes someone feel immersed and present in a virtual experience. Iribe is extremely sensitive to seasickness from imperfect VR movement, but he says that he can tolerate the VR experience much better with every new version of the Oculus hardware and software.

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Iribe was swarmed by everyone after he left the stage. He stayed around to answer questions afterward from the press. Here’s an edited transcript:

Brendan Iribe: We do everything we can to support them, but we’re funding our own Oculus studios, mainly funding gaming and entertainment. As the hardware matures and evolves and you get to those later generations, you’ll definitely start to see more social, more non-gaming. It’ll expand into different areas. Right now, most of the VR is focused on gaming and entertainment.

GamesBeat: With the Microsoft partnership, people are going to wonder if the Rift will work with Xbox One, beyond the livestreaming capabilities.

Iribe: Right now it’s just the livestreaming. It’s Xbox One streamed into your headset. You’re going to be able to do some new, incredible things with that. You can turn around and see the people you’re playing with in that multiplayer game, whether it’s Halo or Call of Duty or whatever. There’s going to be a lot of cool VR bits that are enabled, some new magic you get by playing inside the Rift. It’s not just going to be a big screen. It’s going to be a lot more. But that’ll take time to evolve. We’re not making any announcements or any plans around actually plugging in to the Xbox One.

GamesBeat: Is that going to be a customizable environment?

Iribe: Developers can do incredible stuff with this. Developers get access to this SDK and this hardware and they can go and decide what they want to send to your eyes. If they want to have things coming out of the screen, or if they want to put you in a plain-looking virtual theater, or a virtual theater on the moon, or something themed like the game itself, they can do that.

GamesBeat: Will constellation tracking be involved in this somehow?

Iribe: Constellation tracking will allow for a bigger room area. You will be able to move around it. We have a number of different things we’ll be talking about as we move forward on this. You should come to E3 and see the Oculus Touch experience.

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GamesBeat: How much does the headset weigh?

Iribe: We haven’t announced the weight yet. Part of that is going through the manufacturing process and actually seeing, as we go through, the different engineering validation tests and working out where we land.

The biggest thing with the Rift is that we’ve pulled all of the weight off the end of the headset. It’s all pulled back. When you pick it up, it’ll still feel like a VR headset, but as soon as you put it on, it disappears. It’s a lot like Crescent Bay. I’ve never used a VR headset that was lighter than Crescent Bay, besides one that they made out of duct tape. It’s a very lightweight headset. That’s our goal, to take all that weight off the front. It should be super comfortable.

GamesBeat: Is there any built-in lens fog solution in the consumer version?

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Iribe: I’d have to ask Ottman. He’s the chief architect. But I believe we’ve put in some extra coatings to eliminate fog. I haven’t ever had Crescent Bay fog up on me. I have had other VR headsets fog. It’s just naturally going to be less foggy.

To your question around the weight, the new strap design being this rigid body allows us to put sensors in the back. You only have one sensor out there and you get full 360. It also prevents it from this thing pulling on your face. If you were in the headset for a certain amount of time with one of the early Oculus dev kits, you’d take it off and have this great “Oculus face.” It’d leave an imprint. Over time, having that strap pull really hard on you, it does fatigue you. With the new strap system, you can tighten it, but it doesn’t get to a point where it pulls really tight on your face. It just locks in place and rests on your brow. It makes a big difference for long-term play.

GamesBeat: Have you gotten sick at all lately?

Iribe: I have not, not in Crescent Bay. I recently played Lucky’s Tale for two and a half hours and didn’t get sick, which was remarkable for me. I used to take minutes and I would be out, maybe even seconds. That game had some movement to it. You’d look down at this little character in this little box running around. The world moves a little bit. So, go figure, I was able to play two and a half hours straight. I beat the whole demo level they sent us. It was an incredible experience and I came out feeling good. I felt extra good that I could do that, and consumers are going to be able to enjoy it.

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GamesBeat: Do you think you did something that made that experience better for it?

Iribe: The system just continues to get better. The constellation tracking system, the software continues to get refined. It continue to get more and more precise and better tracking. The optical distortion continues to get better. The screen panels are getting slightly tweaked and updated. There are all these improvements. Every percent or two of improvement does make a difference.

Everybody is just different in the way that they feel in different experiences. Some people might not be able to handle a lot of locomotion and movement in one experience, but they can in a different one. We just don’t know. This is uncharted territory. You’ll see this first generation or two of VR—There will still be some challenges around disorientation in certain applications. But in the future, at some point, some few generations from now, I believe that any kind of nausea and disorientation will only be a factor in the software itself, the experience, not the system.

GamesBeat: With the Gear VR, I get used to it. The first time I played Dread Halls, I couldn’t do a minute or two. Now I can play an hour.

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Iribe: You’ll get to a point where people don’t even need to acclimate. They’ll drop right in and be instantly comfortable. We’ve had very few people have any sort of problem with even Crescent Bay, and it continues to get better. You’ll see this first generation land in a very good place, but it’ll rapidly evolve to a point where we forget about this challenge we’ve been in for the last few decades of VR.

GamesBeat: Do you have one more rev of hardware to go before you ship? Where are you on prototypes?

Iribe: The Rift that we showed today, that’s it. Now we’re going through engineering, validation, basically manufacturing tests. We want to get this right. That’s why we took that extra time, to make sure that when we ship, we ship with confidence, with quality, it’s all there and nobody should have any problems.

GamesBeat: It takes discipline to not hit that holiday slot.

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Iribe: It does. There are shortcuts we could have taken to get there, but we would have jeopardized the quality. We wanted to get it right. It’s only a few months. You’ll be very happy, I think, with the quality. This is going to feel like the first really professional PC-based VR headset.

GamesBeat: What about the controller situation? If you have this controller out there that’s optional, how do you get game developers to build for that?

Iribe: There needs to be killer content. More consumers will be there. In this early generation—Developers need years with an input device to make compelling content. They’ve had decades with game pads. They’ve now had a few years with game pads in VR. They’ve started to make some great experiences.

When we first launched the Kickstarter, within a few months we didn’t have all this content. It took a few years to build up this content. With the controllers, as we start to get out there and attract VR controllers, it’s just going to take a while for developers to get their hands on these things, learn how they work, figure out how to make experiences with them that are compelling. Those games will take six to 12 to 18 months for developers to make a piece of content. You’ll see that when we launch the Rift. Oculus Touch is optional, but within a short amount of time there will be enough content where we’ll bring Oculus Touch in.

But the game pad is going to be one of the best controllers for a lot of content. This is still early days. I could be totally wrong. It’s so early we just don’t know yet. But when you put hands on the touch controllers and see your hands, this works well for first-person experiences where I want to see my hands, where I need to see my hands. In a lot of games you don’t want to see your hands. You want to move a little character around in a third-person view. Lucky’s Tale, the Xbox One controller is the best controller. It’s the best controller for Chronos and a lot of what we showed here today.

You’re going to have a different set of inputs for other first-person experiences. That’s not going to be everything that’s in VR. That’s going to be some category of VR. If they want to show your hands, they’re going to be using hand controllers. Then there will be a lot of first-person and third-person experiences where they don’t want you to see your hands. They want you to just invisibly control some character or some scene. They’re not going to need the touch controllers.

GamesBeat: Have you spent any time with the touch controllers? What are they like to use?

Iribe: They’re awesome. They’re magical. You have to try them at E3. They’re as magical as the Rift is when you put it on and you don’t expect it to be as good as it is, because you’re just so skeptical about VR. Right until that moment when you slip in and everything changes. Oculus Touch is similar. You put on the headset and as soon as the controllers are in your hands, you look down and think, “Wow, those are my hands.”

We’ll continue to make them better. We like to set expectations. This is just the beginning of hand presence. Now you can actually see them. But what you want to do over time is see them perfectly. You want to get to a point where that’s your thumbnail, that’s exactly you. You want to look down and really think, “Those are my real legs and my real feet.” Maybe I’m dressed up differently. Maybe I’m textured differently. But the more I can see myself, the stronger the sense of presence is going to be, the more I’m going to believe I’m in that environment.

Oculus Touch is the first generation on this longer-term path toward fully getting your hands immersed. We believe in the power of finger presence as well. You don’t hear that from everyone. That’s something we’re committed to. We have a long-term vision built around our sensor technology, built around optical sensor technology. The only way you’re going to get your full body into the experience is going to be with optical sensor technology.

GamesBeat: There will be cameras built into those rigs to see the position of your fingers? How would it do that?

Iribe: Not in this generation. It has a gyro built in, as well as the constellation tracking system. That same external sensor is able to track that. We’re also going to be showing, at E3, multiple sensors that you can use. Imagine you could put two sensors in front of you and track an even wider volume. That’s what’s great about this sensor system.

GamesBeat: Is it a little bit like Valve and HTC, or very different from the lasers that they’re using?

Iribe: It’s a different mechanism. We’re focused on optical tracking. We see a long future in leveraging the camera technology that is being used in every cell phone and being able to put—These are very inexpensive. If you wanted, over time, to have a lot of rich 3D reconstruction, both of your hands and the environment, you want to start putting sensors on headsets. You want to start putting sensors on controllers, and not just externally. With optical sensors, they’re small and light. You can put them on. We see a long future in optical tracking.

GamesBeat: How long do you think it will take until VR is as widely accepted as consoles or mobile devices?

Iribe: Realistically, it will take a while to get to the ubiquity of cell phones, where there’s billions of people with smartphones. This has been around for 30 years. It started as a personal computer. It shrunk down and shrunk down. Cell phones have been around 20 years or so. It’s going to take a while to get to where there are hundreds of millions of people in VR. I do absolutely think it will happen, but it will take time.

This is the very beginning. Today there are zero consumers in VR. We’re about to ship the first consumer VR product. Other people are going to ship the first set of consumer VR devices, and we’ll start to get some number of people, hopefully from hundreds of thousands to millions, in VR. But it’s just the beginning.

GamesBeat: You talk about V2 and V3. How long do you think the iterations are going to take?

Iribe: We’re going to move very quickly. That’s one of the things we’ve decided internally. This isn’t going to be like console cycles where they’re five, six, seven years long. We’re going to iterate quickly. We want to increase the whole experience. Whether it’s resolution, optics, tracking, everything is going to get better very rapidly. But it’s going to be incredible right now, today, with the Oculus Rift.