Oculus Rift

[bgalbraith]

If you aren't familiar, this is a new attempt at making actually good VR headset by having a wide field of view and low latency responsiveness to head movements (http://www.oculusvr.com/).

I was an early backer of the Kickstarter campaign and just received my dev kit tonight. I tried out their demo program where you wander around a small Tuscany Villa scene. It's actually very impressive, even with the lower pixel density you get in the dev kit version of the Rift. My main concern so far is with motion sickness.. the immersion worked well enough that moving at a normal FPS rate on a linear rail is actually rather unsettling and jarring. It totally messes with your vestibular sense.

[exilajei]

I'm pretty excited about the potential for something like this. If it proves to be successful/something players genuinely enjoy using, I think the first person genre could be changed forever. That said, I'd be way more interested in using the Oculus Rift to play something that's more about the player exploring and interacting within an environment as opposed to just shooting some dudes (but that'll be impressive as well, I'm sure). Giving developers the ability to employ a real and tangible sense of space is a super cool thing.

[bgalbraith]

Absolutely. There is another Kickstarter out there (still a few days to go) for a game that addresses this environmental exploration specifically with the Rift interface in mind http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...s/posts/441905. It will be very exciting to see where things go with this. The key will be if it can prove to be worth the cost.. and not just be another expensive peripheral with limited support.

[GibbonBlack]

I just got one of these this weekend and it's pretty amazing. I'm really hoping that, whilst I know the novelty will wear off, I'll still be into it and get my monies worth. So far I much prefer the 3rd person games, BlazeRush and Lucky's Tale over things like Adr1ft (which is mind blowing anyway) or EVE: Valkyrie.

The 3rd person stuff just seems more fun.