Sunday, July 10, 2016

Lab suspends Oculus Rift development for Second Life



Linden Lab has announced that they have pulled their Oculus Rift viewer, citing limitations within the platform and the desire to concentrate on other priorities within Second Life.

Bugs including the ability to render some objects, loss of 3D stereoscopic perspective and colour distortion were amongst some of the show stopping problems leading to their decision.

The announcement by Oz Linden says:

Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn't meet our standards for quality, and so we've now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.

By definition, Project Viewers aren't ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we're working on, so that you can see what we're up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we're not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.

We can't say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.

We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we're creating Project Sansar, a new, separate platform optimized for VR).

We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.

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