Trying Out the Oculus Rift
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4-rbYQXDbs
The video isn’t terribly informative, but it does show how much fun it is to play around with one of these things.
A few of my co-workers got together and funded the Oculus Rift Kickstarter and a bunch of us tried it out. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a virtual reality device that combines head tracking and stereo images to create a very compelling experience. It was a little blurry and there’s still some lag but wow, it felt completely immersive.
It’s not like you’re ever fooled into thinking that it’s real life, but it really does feel like you’re walking around inside a video game. I’ve heard that one of the first motion picture demos was of a train coming towards the screen and that audiences would run away because it felt so real to them. I think this might be somewhat akin to that. I mean, it wasn’t like I ever forgot that it wasn’t real … but I did feel vertigo looking over the virtual cliffs.
Also, I didn’t get motion sick in the few minutes that I tried it out but I got really dizzy as soon as I took it off. It was almost as if the real world took some adjusting to get used to again.
