The return of virtual reality

December 20th, 2013, 00:20 Posted By: wraggster

Even without a proper commercial release, amateur developers have retooled favourite first-person games like Portal and Mirror’s Edge to work on the Oculus Rift.

The Oculus Rift booth treated GamesCom attendees to the strangest sight of the show this year. A dozen HD versions of the prototype headset were flown into Cologne to give visitors the chance to experience virtual reality. After enduring lengthy queues, testers sat back-to-back with controllers in their laps, headsets wired into pillars rising out of the floor. The games began and their visored faces stared blankly out into the watching crowds, twitching and turning in reaction to private stimuli.The scene wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a William Gibson novel, but that speaks to the huge appeal of the Rift. Virtual reality is one of science fiction’s most seductive concepts, but 2013 is the year that it finally became feasible, and even affordable, at a consumer level. Advances in miniaturisation pioneered by the mobile market now allow for lightweight, high-definition headsets, and the the $300 Oculus Rift prototype kit has opened up VR to both indie and big-budget developers.The results of their experimentation have only encouraged the growing hype around VR. This year, Valve released official updates to Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2 to add Oculus Rift compatibility. Modders have added VR support to Skyrim and Mirror’s Edge. Games like Slender: The Arrival and base-jumping sim AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome now have competent Oculus Rift support. The number of games with bespoke virtual reality modes continues to grow, even though the commercial unit is still some way from release.Developers are evidently undeterred by the fact that long-standing problems with virtual reality remain unsolved. The novelty of using the Oculus Rift doesn’t lessen the accompanying nausea that many users experience after extended use. Sudden head movement can create disorientating ‘image smear’, and first-person shooters – a natural fit for the Rift at first thought – struggle with allowing for separate arm and head movements.Contributing factors like the latency of the headset’s display, are problems that hardware iteration can solve, and they’re being tackled with encouraging optimism by some of the biggest brains in the industry. In November programming luminary John Carmack left id Software to focus on his role as Chief Technology Officer at Oculus VR. Carmack’s former colleague Michael Abrash is now part of Valve’s virtual reality team. His GDC 2013 presentation and posts on Ramblings in Valve Time provide an illuminating insight into the significant technical challenges that face VR hardware developers.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...rtual-reality/

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