Monday, April 11, 2016

Consumer Oculus Rift Blues ...

It started so great .. I was so excited! .. my free consumer rift (I was a DK1 backer) arrived on the 6th of April!

Unfortunately I didn't have time to actually try it until the next day.

But then .. I plugged in my Oculus Rift and .. nothing.

I downloaded their compatibility tool and it said that my Intel i7-3930k processor isn't good enough, even though it's a lot faster than their minimum Intel i5-4590 processor according to all kinds of benchmarks.

So I got a little frustrated



Then I started wonder if it was a software issue .. after all, it didn't automatically install anything when I plugged it in.


I do vaguely remember seeing this piece of paper in the Oculus Rift box that had a web address on it, but somehow it got lost.

I tried to find something on the oculus home page, looked for "downloads" or "drivers", but it didn't turn up anything. All I could find was the SDK stuff.

Finally I turned to twitter .. thankfully @Clavus helped me out


Searching for "Oculus Home" finally made me find https://www.oculus.com/en-us/setup/.

Why was this virtually impossible to find from the main site?
Who knows .. I just know it cost me a lot of time.


Finally some progress though!


After lots of uninstalling/reinstalling stuff & browsing I found the location of the error log.


Now I managed to continue the installation


And then ..


Literally the first blue screen I've seen in years ..

I try again ...


So I guess the Oculus Rift really doesn't want to work with my onboard USB 3.0 ..
... even though I never had any issues with it before ...


Fortunately @Clavus came through once again


So I bit the bullet and ordered an USB controller card. Since it worked for @Clavus I figured that it would be a safe bet.

4 long days later my PCI USB controller finally arrived..

I wasted time making the mistake to think that the incorrect connector was supposed to be attached to the card. Oops!


So now everything should go smooth now, right?


So I try to try to use the repair option of the Oculus Setup.exe, which starts to re-download hundreds of megabytes of data ... again


So I try to reboot, un- and re-plugging cables in and out, but to no avail.


Finally I give up. My Oculus Rift simply doesn't want to turn on.



PS. I'm going to assume that these installer problems will go away eventually, once Oculus starts realizing the problems with it.

And hopefully they'll make their USB code work with older USB plugs as well.

Now, I know I got the Rift for free, and I am grateful. But I have to be honest; had I bought the Rift, after buying a Geforce Titan for it and it still didn't work, I'd ask for my money back and buy a Vive instead. (and I'm saying that as an Oculus fanboy)

I know that you're supposed to have an expensive system to run a Rift on anyway, but it's unreasonable to force people to upgrade stuff that doesn't need upgrading.

My system worked fine with the DK1 and DK2, I see no technical reason why it shouldn't have been made to work with the consumer Rift as well...

I really hope this will be fixed somehow .... :(


Only bright side is that it's not a distraction anymore, I need to work on my real-time CSG Unity plugin anyway!



Update:
Tried to re-install oculus software since apparently new version was released.

The result:



Update 2:
Tried it at work: