The first surprise of the Oculus Connect virtual reality (VR) developer conference in Hollywood, California has been revealed. Earlier event host Oculus VR announced that the first development kit (DK1) of its Oculus Rift head-mounted mounted display (HMD) was now open source. This means that anyone can now download the company’s full list of workings on the device and use them how they see fit.
Kicking off the Oculus Connect conference in Los Angeles this weekend, Oculus’s Nirav Patel announced that the original Oculus Rift developer kit (DK1) is now fully open-source, with the exception of the pieces that aren’t actually in production anymore—for instance, the display, which is no longer manufactured. “We don’t want everyone to have to take the same risks we took. We just want to share the things we learned so you don’t have to do that. We’re all in this to build virtual reality together,” said Patel. Those risks were the focus of Patel’s talk, which discussed the manufacturing of the DK1. “We found just about the roughest and quickest contract manufacturer we could find in China,” said Patel. “We were a ragtag group of ten people nobody had ever heard of trying to create a product nobody thought was possible.”
