industry veterans

Oculus Rift Headset Aims for Affordable Virtual Reality

Again and again, headsets that promised to immerse people in wondrous, three-dimensional worlds have bombed with the public — held back by high prices, ungainly designs and crude graphics.

But now the bonanza of cheap, high-quality components created for the mobile electronics market, coupled with some technology innovations by a Southern California start-up called Oculus VR, could bring within reach the fantasy of many a video gamer: a virtual reality headset that costs just a few hundred dollars and puts players inside games like no television set can.

Resembling an intimidating pair of ski goggles, the Oculus Rift, as the headset is called, envelopes the vision of people who wear it in vivid, three-dimensional images. The sensation 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.

That connection between a player’s point of view in the game and the real world makes the experience feel more natural when, say, the game character is surrounded by a group of armored knights.

The company’s design, which is about to be delivered to game developers, is already creating buzz among industry veterans and battle-scarred believers in virtual reality.

Cliff Bleszinski, a former game designer at Epic Games who led the creation of its Gears of War series, said that the first time he wore the Rift headset, “I gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed back at me.”

“The next big thing isn’t always a brand-new technology that you never heard of,” Mr. Bleszinski said. “It’s this thing that existed 10 years ago and quietly got better.”

Despite its missteps in the consumer market, virtual reality has become commonplace for a number of industrial and military applications, where the high cost of headsets — from $1,000 to $50,000 — has been less of an impediment. Hospitals use the headsets to train surgeons, while the United States Army has used virtual reality to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, in part by exposing soldiers to short simulations of combat.

The mass market has been far more elusive, in large part because the components in the headsets were too costly.

Many of the crucial parts in the Oculus Rift are the same components found inside smartphones and tablets, including the headset’s 7-inch display and its sensors for detecting head movements. Because those parts are already being pumped out in enormous volumes in factories in China, Oculus can create a product that is likely to end up costing consumers something between $200 to $300.

“I’ve said this before, so you can’t totally trust me on this, but really, really I believe this is the time,” said Mark Bolas, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and a longtime virtual researcher who is an adviser to Oculus VR.

Elements of the Oculus headset are based on the virtual reality research by U.S.C., which has freely released headset designs for others to use.

Still, most venture capitalists would rather finance a hot-dog stand than a high-risk virtual reality start-up. Oculus instead used the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to harness the enthusiasm of virtual reality fans and to take orders so it would not produce too many headsets. It raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter and received orders for 10,000 headsets.

The first ones, which Oculus says will begin shipping next month, are still rough around the edges and are primarily aimed at game developers.

Oculus is mum on when it will ship a version for consumers, hinting that its target is next year.

If the company is successful, it will have a lot to do with Palmer Luckey, the 20-year-old founder of the company, who seems to have wandered out of a casting call for unconventional, young technology entrepreneurs. He pads around his office in bare feet, munching on cookies. He refuses a chair during a meeting, preferring to sit cross-legged on the floor.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/technology/oculus-rift-headset-aims-for-affordable-virtual-reality.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

DealBook: New Sun Valley Start-Ups

SUN VALLEY, Idaho — As their companies move toward public offerings, Andrew Mason of Groupon, Mark Pincus of Zynga and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are leading a new wave of Internet billionaires.

So who will head the next generation of multibillion dollar start-ups?

The agenda for Allen Company’s Sun Valley conference could provide some clues.

This week, the program features three young guns of Silicon Valley, all under the age of 30: Brian Chesky, the co-founder of AirBnb; Drew Houston, the founder of DropBox; and Adam D’Angelo, the co-founder of question and answer site Quora.

The three are scheduled to deliver presentations on Saturday morning to an audience that will most likely include Bill Gates, Mr. Zuckerburg and the founders of Google.

“It’s humbling,” said Mr. Chesky in an interview on Wednesday. “A year ago, I was working in the living room of a three-bedroom apartment.”

The new class of promising start-ups highlights the rapid speed by which Web companies are now forming and gaining traction. AirBnB, for instance, had roughly a dozen employees last year. It now has about 150.

The company, which helps travelers connect with users who have available rooms, has made 1.9 million bookings since it began operations in late 2008.

DropBox, a data storage service, has gained more than 15 million users in the last year, according to Mr. Houston.

“What’s amazing about this time, is that companies are getting started from nothing, and becoming incredible institutions in years, rather than decades,” Mr. Houston said.

Mr. Chesky said: “Adam, Drew and I are somewhat representative of how fast technology changes. Here you have all these industry veterans and moguls who have been doing this for decades and then you have us, basically working out of an apartment a year or two ago, with virtually no business. And now we have this huge opportunity.”

At the Allen Company conference last year, a daily deal upstart named Groupon garnered significant attention. One year later, Mr. Mason’s company is on the cusp of a billion-dollar-plus initial offering. The site also shared the stage with Square, which recently closed a $100 million financing round that valued that company at $1.6 billion.

The upward momentum in technology is certainly catching people’s attention. The trio of founders have been talking to several business leaders this week, including John Donahue, the chief executive of eBay; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; Mr. Mason; and Henry Kravis of the private equity firm Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts.

The Internet mogul Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC, sat down with Mr. Chesky on Wednesday for a nearly 40-minute discussion, according to one attendee. Although Mr. Chesky declined to comment about specific conversations this week, he said he was talking to people about how to expand a business and how to be an effective chief executive.

“When you become an entrepreneur and you get to a certain level, you can no longer turn to your left and your right, you need to reach out to people who’ve experienced what you’ve experienced,” he said. “I feel really fortunate to be in their company.”

Mr. Chesky says he really appreciates the opportunity to attend, because he remembers a time when no one wanted to invest in AirBnb. Faced with the prospect of failure in 2008, the AirBnb team started designing and selling collector edition cereal boxes for the presidential election. The team managed to sell $30,000 worth of cereal boxes, which he described as its angel round.

“In the beginning, when we launched, no one noticed,” he said. “There was a point when we couldn’t get access to anyone who had access.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b8c149ed6e8f1cb4c9e7ca314bed55ae

Oculus Rift Headset Aims for Affordable Virtual Reality

DealBook: New Sun Valley Start-Ups

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