Thursday, May 02, 2013

Oculus Rift part 2

Mike, the guy at work with the Oculus Rift (also my immediate boss), let me borrow it for the weekend, so I spent what feels like a lot of this evening setting it up. I say setting it up, what I mean is, trying to set it up.

Everything plugged in and powered on, I wasn't getting anything. I didn't know if it was the cables, the drivers, the graphics card, Windows being a jerk, or if I'd somehow damaged the Rift while gingerly taking it out of the box and setting it on the desk.

It turns out, as near as I can tell anyway, that the graphics card is the problem; its second monitor port appears to be non-functional. I've updated the drivers and restarted the machine more times than I can remember tonight, but it won't pick up anything I plug into that second slot - even the monitor, which works fine on the first port.

The Rift, of course, also works on that first slot, but it proved very difficult to set up, test, configure, tweak and use a head-mounted VR display with only its video output, so in the end I gave up.

I can see the appeal of the Rift, and if it had worked I'd be dashing around City 17 feeling violently ill right now instead of typing this. But in the circumstances, I've got to take some comfort from the fact that I didn't spend $300 on this headset that I can't actually use without spending upwards of £100 on a new graphics card to go along with it.

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