I sold mine. In 5 years, maybe I'll try again. It needs 2-3 generations of improvement, at least, before it's suitable for development work. Currently, the resolution is so bad you can't even display legible text within the 3d world.
By all accounts, the HD prototype that's floating around looks really, really swell.
It's not that farfetched to imagine a future where plenty of programmers sit 'jacked' in, into an Oculus Rift to code.
Life imitates art. Sadly, William Gibson novels may seem less beautifully strange to future generations. ;)
In the end it looks like good ol' 1981-era IBM PC 320x200 CGA graphics - and if you do the math on the pixel size you'll see that's about the same angular pixel density.
At the moment, the dev kit Rift's low resolution is not quite suitable for serious text editing. Also, we are clearly going to eventually want free-floating windows instead of Deskope's side-by-side desktops. But, it's a start and moving forward the path to near-future VR desktops is pretty much clear.
With one huge virtual display I'd be able to see where things are out of the corner of my eye or with a quick glance.
To bad Rift for now is focused on Windows for now, I'd love to see a Compiz DE make use of this.
When the first generation of a technology looks this good, it really makes you excited for the 2nd and 3rd generation.
It took the right technology (low-power SoCs that are nevertheless fast enough for desktop PC level UI performance, better batteries, compact capacitive touch screens, SSDs – and all that together at the price of a budget PC) plus the right software (not just a desktop OS) to make it work.
It seems and I hope we are at a similar point with VR. The tech is finally good and cheap enough, plus the software mature enough to allow developers easy integration.
Hopefully it will work out.
(Also relevant: The Hype Cycle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle But I’m never sure how much confirmation bias is in that way of seeing the world – but it seems to apply to a great many things.)
Talking with other people, they said that a side effect of this process was that the electrodes kind've hurt, and none of them would do it again.
This article hit the nail on the head when he stated that the Rift is already a perfect fit for simulator games.
Tame video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bytIGCeGxo but I would not call it SFW. Search youtube for Hydradeck oculus rift for a large collection of vids, most are very safe for work.
Mechwarriors, Descents, Freelancers - anything where your in game "avatar" isn't tied to the camera can benefit immensely from the technology.
Mind you, it seems that's partly because TrackIR's manufacturers NaturalPoint had trouble attracting support from FPS developers. From the guy who was apparently product manager for NaturalPoint http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/385-oculus-rift-headtrac... :
> Thanks for the kind words. My larger point is that they have already won the battle, whereas NP and TrackIR only conquered one genre - flight-sim. OR doesn't really need the sim community, unless it completely flops with shooters. We make up less than 1% of gamers. I'm more sensitive to this stuff because I was in charge of TrackIR business development while I was at NP and I mainly left because I could not crack the shooter genre. It was really frustrating and I remember all these shooter devs and engine devs (including Gabe Newell when I showed him our mod for HL2 with head tracking)) laughing at me when I explained how cool TrackIR was and what it could do. They ALL told me it was a cheat and they would never take the time to implement special code to support a 3rd party device outside of a mouse and keyboard. Drives me nuts. What made them change their mind? The stupid screen? Weird.
That said, regardless, space sims are going to be insanely awesome. I'm looking at you, Star Citizen.
The last few days I've been having an absolute blast playing Half Life 2. Hands down the best experience I've had in the Rift so far. While some say FPS are a difficult fit for head tracking I'm finding it to be very natural/immersive.
And this is all with the first generation low-res dev kit so I'm really excited to see what next generations bring.
