Did you know that the displays inside the Oculus Rift are simply mobile phone screens? For its E3 showing, the virtual reality headhugger has received an upgrade to its cellphones, thereby bringing the peripheral into the defined world of 1080p.
In the Rift's previous incarnation, each eye saw a resolution of 640x800. According to Polygon , the upgraded hardware means that that figure has now been bumped up so that each eye sees a 960x1080 portrait display, making our favorite game worlds all the sharper to behold. Above is a screenshot of Epic Citadel in the 720p dev kit alongside a screen grab from the newer, shinier, 1080p dev kit. This is not necessarily the display that'll be used in the consumer version; we should instead consider this a taste of things to come.
CEO Brian Iribe says that there have been no issues for the developers who received Oculus Rift developer kits, as its software development kit is built to scale to resolution. There's no word on when developers will access the new HD-ified Rift—Iribe says that this prototype only really came into being in the handful of days before E3—but he says things will only get better from here. After all, cellphones are only going to continue to get better, and with that, so will the Rift's displays.
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