How would you like to experience a world just like you are experiencing your real life? Sounds almost too good to be true doesn’t it? Well a new head mounted display set to be released in a couple of years offers just that! Called the future of gaming, the Rift is a new breed of virtual reality displays which offers superior immersion and will quite literally get you in the game or whatever software you plug it with (as long as it supports the hardware of course).
Virtual reality headsets have been around for some time now. However they are bulky, very expensive and for all the promises made, the experience they lend is somewhat lacking. Putting on most of them does not make you feel like you are really immersed into the experience, rather it looks as though you are looking at a large monitor from a very close distance.
The technical nitty gritties of virtual reality
Most of us, when discussing immersion with our conventional monitors like to talk first about resolution, the higher the resolution the better the clarity, consequently the finer the immersion, (which basically means how real does the experience seem). However in virtual reality, resolution takes secondary precedence with the Diagonal Field of View (dFOV) that the device offers becoming the primary concern. Since in virtual reality you are watching a picture only inches away, the more your eye’s field of view is utilized, the better the immersion becomes. The human eye’s field of view is 180 degrees, up till now, most virtual reality devices offer dFOV of 30 degrees to 45 degrees, this leaves a lot of viewing space wasted and leads to what is called – the tunnel vision. Most of them also only support resolutions up to 800X600 pixels, a far cry from what today’s monitors can crank out. Finally, even these are ridiculously hard to find and insanely expensive with some of them costing $10,000 per piece!
Why the Oculus Rift is superior
The Oculus Rift is being offered as a solution for all of these problems. While the device is still under development, the consumer version is said to offers a dFOV of 120 degrees which is more than twice as much as what is currently available. It will support resolution up to 1920X1080 (Full HD) and will also have stereoscopic imaging (Real 3D). Also, the headset will have low latency head tracking, which means when you turn your head, your view in the game will change correspondingly. While its price has not been officially disclosed, sources close to the team developing it are betting it will be below $500 per piece when the device hits the markets.
The Rift is currently available as a development kit for developers to purchase at a price of $300 so that they can tune their software to utilize the hardware to the best of its abilities and report any bugs that might be there. So if you are a developer with interest in the subject go over to www.oculusvr.com and order your unit today. Remember! Most of the games and 3D software today do not support the device so don’t order thinking you can just plug it in and start playing Counter Strike right of the bat; the kits available right now are for developers only.
The first reports coming on to developer’s blogs who are tinkering with the Rift seem promising. Many of them are calling the Oculus Rift the best visual aid device that could possibly exist! The device has been well received by the developer community with many industry big wigs such as Gabe Newell of Valve Software and John Carmack of id Software endorsing the product and giving it their fullest support.