Oculus Unveils New Virtual Reality Headset Prototype, Codenamed Crystal Cove

In just one year, the Oculus Rift has taken the gaming and tech worlds by storm with its mesmerizing and immersive take on in-home virtual reality. It’s been to several press-only and consumer trade shows, and has released one of many developer prototypes in that time, and its impressed people in even its early stages.

Now, at CES 2014, Oculus VR are showing off their latest iteration of the device, code-named Crystal Cove.

The key advantages this new Oculus Rift headset has over the original development kit is its higher, now HD resolution, a substantial decrease in blur and dizziness factor, as well as what the team at Oculus is calling a low-persistence-of-vision (which is a technique for handling image display on-screen to reduce blur).

One of the most substantial features of the Crystal Cove prototype is positional tracking, which, through use of an additional camera, allows the tech to know where your head is in 3D space. This allows for more precise head movements, like leaning or hunching. For example, if you were sitting in the cockpit of a space ship and leaned forward, your vision in-game would then slide forward, whereas it would remain stationary in the previous development kit.

This also, as Oculus claims, helps reduce the motion sickness some people have felt while wearing the Rift.

These broad changes to the Oculus Rift seem like great additions to an already well-designed product. The hard part now is, getting a manufacturing partner (or partners) to get the product to market and in the hands of consumers, which company founder Palmer Lucky has stated isn’t’t necessarily soon. But they’re working on it.