Oculus opens pre-orders for new, improved dev kit
Crystal Cove-enabled, 1080p unit begins shipping in July.
Oculus has opened up pre-orders for its new improved dev kit, DK2, with a price-tag of $350 and with units expected to ship in July.
As with the last Oculus release, it's not the final commercial build, although it's a significant step towards that. "We've had some huge breakthroughs in the last year, trying to find what VR needs to be for consumers to accept as something that's really good. DK2 isn't quite that, but it has all the core features that the core product has," Oculus' Palmer Luckey told Eurogamer.
DK2 features a 1080p display, as well as the Crystal Cove camera that improves the quality of head-tracking. At 440g, it's also significantly lighter than the units that have already shipped.
"The resolution will go up, the weight will go down, latency will go down. But the important thing is we need to ship now, because of things like low persistence, we're confident in what we need to ship, and we're able to start moving towards actually making it."
How close exactly is DK2 to being the final product? "Internally we already have things that are very, very close, so it's just a matter of taking what's in the lab and making it into something real. We've had a pretty good track record of that so far - taking prototypes, making them into developer kits. Now we just need to take our prototypes and make them into a consumer product. I'd say that DK1, that was the zero per cent mark, and DK2 is probably around the 70 per cent mark."
