All eyes on Oculus Rift, the VR headset with a 20:20 vision of gaming’s future

April 22nd, 2013, 20:01 Posted By: wraggster

The most spectacular vision associated with Oculus Rift isn’t in the device itself; it’s in and behind the eyes of the creatives behind it. And we’re not talking about a single pair of orbs – there are many key people behind the visionary Palmer Luckey. Though his youthful vision is the most eye-catching, his team consists of people like the horribly-successful games entrepreneur Brendan Iribe (Scaleform, Gaikai), a former Activision CEO, and a former nuclear engineer called Jack MacCauley, who built the Guitar Hero peripherals.Beyond the superteam, the device itself justifies our so-far ad-hominem hyperbole. We’ve tried both the duct-tape-and-dreams prototype and the heavily-upgraded and final develop model and we can see, simply, it works. As we’ve written elsewhere, there are significant problems with the current generation of Virtual Reality – constraints like the lack of strafe-tracking and the restricted field of vision that means converting games over to the Rift is more difficult than developing games specifically for it – but we are seeing the tech develop at a breathtaking pace. Not in decades nor years, but months.When we tried out the prototype device at the Evolve conference last year, we played Doom 3 and a limited version of Unreal 3 on it. Though the experience was impressive, we had issues with the comfort of the headset and the resolution of the screen. This time around, we tried out Hawken on the new headsets, with their new much-improved displays. Playing the most beautiful recent PC game on it was enthralling; standing on edges we felt genuinely vertiginous, impacts felt real and disorientating, and it added much to our enjoyment of the world. It’s the first non-essential peripheral we’ve been interested in buying since the Gyration Ultra mouse (which eventually became the Wiimote, remember).

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...amings-future/

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