The Verge - Oculus Rift: the future of virtual reality is here

Immerse yourself in fear: how Oculus Rift could change horror games

2013-05-13T18:00:08Z

You kneel down on a wooden platform, several feet above a crowd of murmuring onlookers. To your right is a man, shouting, apparently getting the people riled up. As your gaze continues upward, you have just a moment to notice the blade resting above your neck before — thwack! — suddenly it comes down, and your head starts rolling.

Disunion is a guillotine simulator for the Oculus Rift. Like many of the demos available for the fledgling virtual reality headset, it's a bit rough: The crowd is nothing more than cardboard cutouts and the entire experience lasts just a few seconds. It also makes far less of an impact the second time you try it, since you know what to expect. But Disunion shows the frightening potential of the Rift. While...

Valve gives 'Half-Life 2' official Oculus Rift support

2013-05-10T05:50:28Z

Last month, Valve blockbuster Half-Life 2 got an unofficial port to the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but now the publisher is making things official in a new beta build. Polygon reports that Valve’s lead programmer behind the Oculus Rift port of Team Fortress 2, Joe Ludwig, posted the news on the Oculus developer forums. Ludwig notes that the Rift port of Half-Life 2 is "a bit more raw" than Team Fortress 2’s, pointing to UI issues with the HUD and zoom controls. If you have a Rift developer kit, you can try the port out now, but personally, we’re not sure we’re psychologically prepared to deal with Ravenholm’s marauding zombies in all-encompassing virtual reality.

'EVE Online' developer builds a virtual reality space dogfighting simulation using Oculus Rift

2013-04-26T22:53:02Z

If you had any question whether the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset would lead to desirable new games, just ask any of the 1,500 people who attended FanFest 2013 in Iceland this year. There, EVE Online developer CCP showed off "EVR," a proof-of-concept game, which stuffs players into the virtual cockpits of a 360-degree turn-and-burn multiplayer space dogfighting simulation that appears to be set in the EVE Online universe. If reports from the conference are any indication, attendees who tried the game were extremely impressed.

It looks something like this, if you can imagine this trailer inside the wraparound 3D view of a virtual reality headset:

Presently, the demo uses a standard gamepad to fly around and fire weapons, but the...

'Half-Life 2' gets virtually real with unofficial Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra motion tracking

2013-04-24T02:03:06Z

In most video games where guns are involved, you're always aiming where you look. Now, with the help of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headgear, the Razer Hydra motion controller, and a couple of software mods, early adopters can move their head and arms independently in the immersive dystopian virtual reality of Valve's Half-Life 2.

Building on the Vireio Perception software driver — an independent project which specially formats images from a variety of popular PC games to fit the Rift and other 3D screens — one Nathan Andrews has been working on a mod for Half-Life 2 that disconnects your gun hand from the rest of your character's body, so to speak. Originally, he attached a Hillcrest motion tracker to a plastic gun toy so he...

Run, walk, and jump with the Oculus Rift using Virtuix's 360-degree treadmill

2013-04-22T22:06:05Z

Joysticks could be a thing of the past: Virtuix will soon debut an omni-directional treadmill that can track gamers as they run, walk, and jump in every direction. The device — aptly dubbed the Omni — works alongside the Oculus Rift to form an encompassing virtual reality experience that fully replaces traditional movement controls. The company has shown off support for games including Crysis Warhead, Team Fortress 2, and Skyrim in a series of YouTube videos, but we're told that the device will work with all PC games when it's released.

Virtuix is aiming to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the Omni around the end of May or the beginning of June, and it's targeting a price of $400-600 for the device, a company representative told T...

Virtual Rx: how Oculus Rift could revolutionize mental health

2013-04-22T14:15:04Z

It's been hailed as the holy grail of virtual reality gaming, but Oculus Rift might soon be much more than that. Though they've yet to reach the hands of regular consumers, the headsets have already been evaluated by a preeminent expert in virtual reality therapy, or VRT, the practice of immersing patients in virtual realms to treat mental health problems. His verdict? "They're a game changer for the work that we do."

"I have no question that Oculus will revolutionize virtual reality for clinical purposes," Dr. Albert Rizzo, a research scientist at the University of California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), told The Verge. "This system is going to be about so much more than playing games." Rizzo received an Oculus Rift...

Oculus Rift teardown shows how one display becomes a 3D world

2013-04-10T12:36:48Z

Now that the Oculus Rift developers kits are finally shipping out, the teardown team at iFixit have gotten their hands on one and reduced it to its bare components. Despite the rather bulky size of the dev kit, it turns out there isn't much in there — as we've heard before, there's a single 7-inch LCD with a resolution of 1280 x 800. That works out to a 640 x 800 resolution for each eye, something we're hoping to see improve down the line to alleviate the blurriness we've experienced when using the Rift. There's very little else going on inside these ski goggles — a small motherboard holds an ARM processor and the motion-tracking gyroscope and accelerometer sensors necessary for the Rift to pull you into its world. While we know this...

Oculus Rift virtual reality headset developer kits are finally shipping

2013-03-29T18:22:03Z

It's been a long road for the Oculus Rift — the virtual reality headset's Kickstarter began back in August, and was supposed to ship by the end of the year. However, things were delayed till March of 2013, but the company just announced it has made it in under the gun: Oculus Rift developer kits started shipping out to buyers earlier this week. These shipments should cover those who backed the project on Kickstarter as well as those who have purchased the headset directly from the Oculus website. When we visited the Oculus headquarters a few weeks ago, we learned there were about 10,000 headsets ready to ship, but when we caught up with Oculus at the Game Developers Conference this week, we heard there were about 13,000 orders so far....