Oculus Rift - Virtual Reality

[Tbone]

Honestly, I will sell a kidney for this once it's consumer-ready (hell, I'm tempted to shell out $300 for the dev-kit version). Virtual Reality has always been a childhood dream of mine, and from what everyone is saying at CES, this is the beginning of that future.

[Manic Velocity]

[Subb]

Aaaahahahahahaha @ Manic.

[likwidtek]

Poor Manic.  :/

[Manic Velocity]

Don't tell me you wouldn't want to hyperjump around Megacity in first-person VR.

Don't tell me that.  Because you would be lying.  And lying is a sin.

[Tbone]

When they talk about the Rift, they keep saying "I wanted to be able to actually jack into my games, like jacking into the Matrix". SOLD, SIR!

[Sared]

Fucking WANT.

[Tbone]

CNET - "There's a scene in "The Matrix," where Neo first jacks into Matrix after leaving it via the red pill. The screen gets all warpy, and zooooom abruptly he's standing somewhere else. It's not much of an exaggeration to say this is what it's like putting on the Oculus Rift. The lenses, holding a distorted promise of what lies beyond, rise towards your face. At the same time the mask blocks out visual reality, the virtual one comes into focus...

I guess what it comes down to is this: the Oculus Rift is the virtual reality we've been promised since the dawn of video gaming, and really, the early days of science fiction. It leaps past all other attempts at the technology and moves into the realm of total immersion. The feeling is so natural that it's effortless to suspend disbelief that you are standing in that place, in that world. And that's with the prototype's crappy LCD screen and early pre-pre-preproduction software and drivers."

[Mharz]

What strikes me about this is will I need a swivel chair so I can look behind me?  Will I even be able to sit and turn in a reactionary way fast enough?  So many cool ideas will stem from this.

[Tbone]

I imagine it wouldn't take much to tweak the emulator to create a first person Rift version of MxO. It took them a day to tweak Doom 3 to work with it. It doesn't have to have many working functions - just allow me to walk around Mega City in this thing and I'll be happy!

I was up til 7 in the morning looking at interviews and reading articles on this thing. My freakin VR obsession is back with a vengeance!

[Erathaol]

This may be the coolest thing ever.  Though, I almost wish I never saw this because I can't have one NOW.

[Anamodiel]

[Tbone]

What's crazy is that game developers and tech reviewers aren't saying "this has some potential". They're saying "this is it - this is what we've been waiting for". They're blown away.

For those who haven't researched it, Palmar is just this kid who, like most of us were in the 90s, was obsessed with VR. He bought almost 50 different VR headsets (don't ask me how a 20 year old has that kind of money) before finally saying "this is all shit - I'm gonna make my own". He started making his own and, with the technology that's come out in the last 3-5 years, he was able to put together something pretty amazing. He is a moderator on the mtbs3d.com forums, and there the Doom 3 creator latched on to his project and started showing it at demos.

Palmer was just gonna send prototypes to enthusiasts using Kickstarter for basically no profit, but it took off. Instead of $250k for enthusiasts, he did Kickstarter and got $2.5 million from developers. So what's the big deal about this?

Low latency headtracking, stereoscopic 3d, 110 degrees field of view. When you wear it, you don't see a screen. The lenses warp the screen all the way around your FOV (while software warps the image to compensate for this). The head tracking is so precise and has such low latency that it simply feels like you are looking around in a simulation. The stereoscopic 3d gives it the perfect depth so that your eyes and brain are literally looking into the distance at objects rather than something poking out of a screen.

Now they're just refining the nuance. They want to put a higher res display in it and lower the latency even further. The one big thing they still need to add is positional tracking (which they say will be in soon). Positional tracking means that you can lean forward or backwards and it knows you're moving your head closer or further away. Right now it can do horizontal, vertical, and even roll, so positional is the last step.

After that it's just having enough support from game devs (who are already scrambling to make content for it) to launch in commercially. There are little things that need to be considered (cut scenes, game menus, huds, walk bobbing animations, etc.), so previous games will need to be tweaked work effectively. The good news is that this is all being developed for the PC, so even if the game developer gets lazy, you better believe there's gonna be mods and hacks for every game imaginable if this thing takes off like it should.

Anyway, I gotta get ready for the raid...getting distracted by this again. Blah!

[Manic Velocity]

"No one can be told about the Occulus Rift... You have to see it for yourself."



About a third of the way through the video, the presenter tells the reporter to look up to get a sense of scale on the buildings, and the guy instinctively lifts his hand to point up at what he's looking at.

I think that's a pretty clear indicator of how this thing affects you.  He subconsciously reacted as if he were standing at the base of a real building.

[Tbone]

Haha... "Dude, you should have a demo of you telling us this shit as like, Morpheus, or something".

If tech reviewers have this kind of reaction, you can only imagine how the general public will react when/if this thing goes mainstream.