Twonk Hammer All kinds of S#!T
Like it was pulled right out of The Sims, a virtual reality simulator that is supposed to actually work will be available to purchase for in-home use by 2013. This thing is no Virtual Boy!
“The company Oculus was founded by veterans of Guitar Hero developer RedOctane, interface software developer Scaleform, and cloud gaming company Gaikai, Oculus today launched a campaign to raise money for its first product — a virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift. The company claims the stereoscopic 3D headset has a huge field of vision – 110 degrees diagonally – and will overcome the latency problems that plagued previous VR gaming peripherals.”
Seeing is literally believing, I am not 100% convinced that this will finally be the affordable widescreen-in-your-face experience that we have been promised by many other companies. If this is as affordable as a cheap 19” monitor I can see it taking off and being a reasonable investment, but if it ends up being ridiculous like the rest I would rather spend that money on a 3 monitor setup with surround video. The issue with something like this being very expensive is the fact that you may spend $500~$1000 on this thing that only you can enjoy. You invite your friends over to see your new game, and they get to watch it on the lame sub-19″ that you had to buy because you couldn’t afford anything bigger after the VR headset. They do have a Kickstarter up for their first headset named Rift, and for those that donate over $300 you can get a copy of Doom 3 BFG that is designed for this type of technology along with some signed memorabilia.
“The Rift is developed by a team of industry veterans passionate about changing the way people experience video games forever. We’ve tackled projects of similar scope: we’ve designed and manufactured consumer hardware; we’ve built well-adopted software development kits for the game industry; and now we’re excited to build a product that can so radically change the way people play their favorite video games.
Join us in the movement to take games to the next level!
-Oculus Team”
With a team as promising as this we can only hope that the Rift will be a huge accomplishment, and bring an affordable in-depth experience to gamers everywhere. John Carmack interview at E3:
Sources:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/01/oculus-rift-virtual-reality-headset-kickstarter/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
