INTERVIEW NATE MITCHELL, OCULUS
HOW OCULUS RIFT PLANS TO RULE THE WORLD
VR is about to transform gaming forever. At least, that’s what Oculus’ product boss Nate Mitchell says. But what about publishing support? Or the price? Or that lawsuit? Christopher Dring asks the questions
I
t may sound preposterous, but Oculus Rift has quite a bit in common with Nintendo’s Wii. The high-tech wizardry of VR
may seem worlds apart from the more rudimentary implementation of motion control. Yet like the Wii, the Oculus Rift promises to seriously disrupt how games are made. And like the Wii, you really can’t
comprehend VR without trying it. That’s perhaps why there are
many skeptics over what Oculus (and indeed Sony) are trying to achieve. And it’s why both businesses really have to get the machine into the hands of as many people as it can. Because not only is VR something that works, it has all the hallmarks of the next big thing. The next Wii. “The TV ad for Rift is going to be
very tricky,” says Nate Mitchell, VP of Product at Oculus. “We want to have some sort of retail presence so people
can experience and understand it. My hope is that, like the Wii, once you break a certain threshold it becomes a situation where people go to each other’s houses and they’re like ‘Oh my God, you have a Rift? Can I try it?’ And they realise they have to have one right now and rush home to buy one. “But to get there, we need to have
some form of physical presence. I’d be skeptical buying a product like Oculus Rift without trying it before. It is an experience that’s impossible to explain. Everyone is definitely skeptical – I was before I tried the first prototype.”
VIRTUAL ISSUES During our interview, Mitchell is candid about Rift. Not just with his fervent belief that
VR is going to be massive, but also in the challenges it faces getting off the ground. Our first question was whether the price was going to be one that people could afford? “Yes and no,” he says honestly. “It’s tricky because we’ve always
said we want Rift to be around the $300 to $400 price point, and we have stuck to that because we really want it to be affordable, so that any person interested in VR can go out and buy. That’s still expensive but it’s important we aimed for that because we didn’t want to build something that is $1,000, $2,000 or $10,000 as you’d never see mainstream adoption. You’d never see a big publisher make a game for a platform that costs $10,000, because it’d only have 20 users.
“But the one challenge we do have with the consumer version of the Rift is that you are going to need a beefier machine. If you have an amazing gaming rig, you’re going to be fine. But for casual
$300
Oculus is aiming for a $300 to $400
price point for the Rift when it is released
games who want to get into VR, they are going to need to purchase a high-end gaming PC, and that’s a major hurdle right now.” So how can Oculus leap that
The second version of the Oculus Rift dev kit is out now
July 18th 2014 04
hurdle? We suggested to Mitchell that game streaming might offer a solution, or maybe Oculus could build a cut-price PC, or team up with one of the Steam Machines? “There are a lot of potential solutions,” he said, intimating that many of these ideas had been discussed at Oculus’ HQ. “But there’s definitely no silver bullet. We are trying to be upfront with where we are right now, because we want to drive this thing at 90 frames per second and we never want to drop a frame, so you will need high-end hardware. VR is so new, and we are still getting to grips with it. We really are going to consume GPU and CPU endlessly for the foreseeable future.”
www.mcvuk.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40