Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey’s Brainchild was the most sought after demo in the Game DeveloperThe s Conference, held I n San Francisco. This virtual reality prototype aims to bring games much closer to reality than ever before.
Started as a Kickstarter project, it went on to become one of the most successfully backed projects with lot of support from developers from all around the world including Gabe Newell of Valve. The Irvine, California based company showcased its first prototype last year, which featured the Doom 3 BFG Edition and successfully pulled it off, but the glasses were bulky and players felt nauseated after spending 15 minutes on the device.
But now, the prototype featured at the conference had reduced weight by a lot, it did not the pull the head down. It features stereoscopic 3D, a 110 degree field of view, low latency head tracking, and all of this within a hundred bucks. There was a huge queue waiting to try on these glasses at GDC and it was worth the wait when they got to play Adhesive Games’ free-to-play multiplayer game, Hawken. The experience was thrilling when players got to experience the game as a mech robot, being able to run around, jump onto buildings and also fall off in one vertical dive and all of this felt very realistic. The only problem reported was the low pixel density of the screen. Luckey promises that this will not be the case when the consumer version ships out early next year.
"Developers who start working on VR games now are going to be able to do cool things," said Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. "This is the first time when the technology, software, community and rendering power is all really there. The doors are already open, people are already telling us things they want to do with the Rift that they can't do with traditional games."
Developer Kits are already being distributed to developers all over the world. Rumours are that other console companies like Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox 360 may already be venturing into VR technology.
Started as a Kickstarter project, it went on to become one of the most successfully backed projects with lot of support from developers from all around the world including Gabe Newell of Valve. The Irvine, California based company showcased its first prototype last year, which featured the Doom 3 BFG Edition and successfully pulled it off, but the glasses were bulky and players felt nauseated after spending 15 minutes on the device.
But now, the prototype featured at the conference had reduced weight by a lot, it did not the pull the head down. It features stereoscopic 3D, a 110 degree field of view, low latency head tracking, and all of this within a hundred bucks. There was a huge queue waiting to try on these glasses at GDC and it was worth the wait when they got to play Adhesive Games’ free-to-play multiplayer game, Hawken. The experience was thrilling when players got to experience the game as a mech robot, being able to run around, jump onto buildings and also fall off in one vertical dive and all of this felt very realistic. The only problem reported was the low pixel density of the screen. Luckey promises that this will not be the case when the consumer version ships out early next year.
"Developers who start working on VR games now are going to be able to do cool things," said Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. "This is the first time when the technology, software, community and rendering power is all really there. The doors are already open, people are already telling us things they want to do with the Rift that they can't do with traditional games."
Developer Kits are already being distributed to developers all over the world. Rumours are that other console companies like Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox 360 may already be venturing into VR technology.
Badri Narayan Mohan of XI - A
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