After months of seeing reaction videos on youtube, I was finally going to be able to check out Oculus Rift. I was at IndieCade 2013, in Culver City, and OR had a decent-sized booth for the independent games festival. More importantly, they had about a dozen demo stations, fitted with makeshift HD versions of their headsets.
The last time I had the chance to check out OR was at E3, where I missed it by mere minutes. It was my fault though since I put off heading to the demo area just before closing time.
But now, it was finally my chance, and I was brimming with excitement.
The developer on hand told me I could wear the headset over my glasses, and that I should, particularly since I'm near-sighted. Fortunately, the goggles fit over my glasses without any discomfort.
My demo station featured a rudimentary flight simulator. Only a keyboard was used for controls, with the arrow keys used for direction, and the space bar for throttle. Looking was done solely via the headset.
The little prop plane I flew in sat calmly on the water in the middle of an ocean, with polygonal clouds in the blue sky, and small islands nearby. The graphics were rudimentary, but high resolution. Despite the lack of realistic graphics, I was immediately struck by the level of immersion provided by having my vision completely dominated by the screen sitting inches from my eyes.
That is the first part of the virtual reality trick that OR provides. Your eyes only see the video game world. Although I did notice borders on the left and right periphery of my vision, they did little to detract from the immersive ocular experience.
The other key component to the VR experience is the perfectly accurate and super responsive head tracking. As I was flying around in the little plane, I moved my head around the cockpit, looking out of the glass canopy - above, and below me. The headset tracks your head movement, but not your eye movement. I initially thought this might detract from the realism but it did not, since the field of view is expansive enough to accommodate wherever your eyeballs look.
I banked my plane to the left, and as I did, I looked over to the left, and immediately had an odd sensation of vertigo - a true sensation of height, and speed, as if I really were up in the air, flying over an island.
The head tracking is rather keen as well. The engineers designed the headset to accurately represent the physiological movement of the head. And since our eyes are not in the middle of our head, OR takes that into account, representing your head movements incredibly naturally.
After being wowed by the flight sim, I tried out another demo, which was a first-person demo that essentially took you to different (including some fantasy) environments. This demo was controlled by an Xbox controller, with the left thumbstick controlling the movement, and right stick to control the looking. Although the OR headset was fully capable to control the looking, I found myself simply using the controller to look around. As a result, the experience wasn't as immersive as the one I had found in the flight sim.
Other attendees expressed the same sentiment - when there are controls to control the looking, it's just more simple to use the controller.
All of that said, OR has enormous potential, and the devs certainly think so as well. They think OR will become a peripheral as essential as the modern tablet is. I suppose we'll just have to see about that.
The last time I had the chance to check out OR was at E3, where I missed it by mere minutes. It was my fault though since I put off heading to the demo area just before closing time.
But now, it was finally my chance, and I was brimming with excitement.
The developer on hand told me I could wear the headset over my glasses, and that I should, particularly since I'm near-sighted. Fortunately, the goggles fit over my glasses without any discomfort.
My demo station featured a rudimentary flight simulator. Only a keyboard was used for controls, with the arrow keys used for direction, and the space bar for throttle. Looking was done solely via the headset.
The little prop plane I flew in sat calmly on the water in the middle of an ocean, with polygonal clouds in the blue sky, and small islands nearby. The graphics were rudimentary, but high resolution. Despite the lack of realistic graphics, I was immediately struck by the level of immersion provided by having my vision completely dominated by the screen sitting inches from my eyes.
That is the first part of the virtual reality trick that OR provides. Your eyes only see the video game world. Although I did notice borders on the left and right periphery of my vision, they did little to detract from the immersive ocular experience.
The other key component to the VR experience is the perfectly accurate and super responsive head tracking. As I was flying around in the little plane, I moved my head around the cockpit, looking out of the glass canopy - above, and below me. The headset tracks your head movement, but not your eye movement. I initially thought this might detract from the realism but it did not, since the field of view is expansive enough to accommodate wherever your eyeballs look.
I banked my plane to the left, and as I did, I looked over to the left, and immediately had an odd sensation of vertigo - a true sensation of height, and speed, as if I really were up in the air, flying over an island.
The head tracking is rather keen as well. The engineers designed the headset to accurately represent the physiological movement of the head. And since our eyes are not in the middle of our head, OR takes that into account, representing your head movements incredibly naturally.
After being wowed by the flight sim, I tried out another demo, which was a first-person demo that essentially took you to different (including some fantasy) environments. This demo was controlled by an Xbox controller, with the left thumbstick controlling the movement, and right stick to control the looking. Although the OR headset was fully capable to control the looking, I found myself simply using the controller to look around. As a result, the experience wasn't as immersive as the one I had found in the flight sim.
Other attendees expressed the same sentiment - when there are controls to control the looking, it's just more simple to use the controller.
All of that said, OR has enormous potential, and the devs certainly think so as well. They think OR will become a peripheral as essential as the modern tablet is. I suppose we'll just have to see about that.
