Virtual reality goggles are virtually here. Oculus VR, the company that is developing virtual reality headsets, has now released its second developer kit for its Oculus Rift headset.
This places Oculus Rift (OR) firmly in the hands of game developers who are working en masse to deliver the promise that virtual reality gaming offers.
Facebook, which acquired Oculus VR in March for $2 billion as reported by Tech Times, is asking developers to take part in its bug bounty program. Security researchers who locate and report verified bugs will be provided with cash rewards from Facebook that start at $500 and move on up from there.
Last year, Facebook paid out around $1.5 million to discoverers of legitimate bugs in Facebook software and products. That included individual payouts of up to $20,000.
What Facebook is looking for in the OR program are bugs in both the Oculus website and in the OR developer kit. The company is preparing to launch the CV1 (Consumer Version 1) of the Oculus Rift. As Facebook's first hardware product, it is imperative that the product hits the market as cleanly and as trouble-free as possible.
Facebook is not just looking for hardware flaws. It is also asking for bug reporting in the software, especially flaws that could be exploited by hackers.
"A lot of the issues that come up with Oculus are not necessarily in the hardware yet," says Neal Poole, a Facebook security engineer. "Potentially in the future, if people were to go explore and find issues in the software development kit (SDK) or the hardware, that is definitely of interest to us," he adds. The OR Development Kit 2 (DK2) is available for pre-order on the Oculus website.
The OR DK2 contains the newest SDK and a functional OR headset with HD resolution at 960x1080 per eye, a Low Persistence OLED display that eliminates motion blur and judder, which the company claims are two of the biggest contributors to simulator sickness, positional tracking and a 75Hz refresh rate. The headset has a 100-degree field of view and uses gyroscope, accelerometer, near infrared CMOS and magnetometer sensors.
In related, real, virtual reality news, online streaming video service and movie purveyor Netflix is experimenting with blending the OR with Netflix's interface. Just for fun, the company created a project called Oculix. Users wearing the OR headset can scroll mouse-less through Netflix titles by head-tracking the scans among a world of 3D floating titles. The company claims Oculix will not see the light of day as a future Netflix service.
Netflix already offers a selection of 3D films for rental, a program that started in January 2013. There are only a limited number of Internet service providers that offer the broadband capability to stream 3D Netflix videos, and the selection of streaming 3D films is not quite yet enticing.
