The team over at Oculus VR - makers of the Oculus Rift VR headset - has been expanding of late. It now has more than 20 in-house engineers working on their headset technology and other secret projects. One of their newest hires is Tom Forsyth, previously a software architect working at Valve on the Team Fortress 2 VR integration.
Project Holodeck producer James Iliff and lead developer Alex Silkin are wandering about onstage, completely blind to their audience. Both men sport an Oculus Rift head-mounted display, allowing them to physically look around in their virtual world. Two peripherals sit in each of their hands - that’s the Razer Hydra, providing optical tracking for their position in virtual space. A white orb, that of the Razer Hydra, protrudes from the top of their headsets, giving them the appearance of bobbies on some far-future beat. Both have a laptop strapped to their back, presumably to tie all of their expensive attire together.
They look absolutely ridiculous. But they're flying an airship.
If you’re both one who braves the unpredictable waves of Macintosh gaming and the proud owner of an early Oculus Rift headset - which, now I write it, doesn’t sound like an entirely unfeasible match - then this one’s for you. It’s started.
It seems like no game can say no to Oculus Rift support, and the latest news on the VR block is that Second Life already has support for the device. Developer Linden Lab are working hard to “make it excellent".
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I’ve just emerged, blinking, from City 17. I’ve been tinkering with Half-Life 2 on the Oculus Rift. And I’m a bit breathless. Speechless.
The Oculus has drawbacks: the screen is too low resolution. To get a decent effect you need to tinker with calibration settings. Motion sickness is a real problem.
But know this: playing a game of the quality and caliber of Half-Life 2 in Virtual Reality is an astonishing, incredible experience. It works. It’s as good as you’re dreaming it to be.
Internal experiments at Oculus taught us to want it; proof-of-concept videos in Garry’s Mod and six rounds on Badwater brought it within reach. Now it’s here. In the early hours of this morning, Oculus and Valve shipped a beta version of Half-Life 2 that incorporates Rift VR support.
What’s in a name? In this case, everything you need to know. Minecrift isn’t the localised Kiwi version of Mojang’s world-beater I first suspected it to be, but rather a portmanteau of ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Rift’, the VR headset which has been astounding us daily since Oculus began shipping out dev kits 42 days ago. Even in its infancy, the mod’s basic stereoscopics add tangible depth to a game already adept at providing moments of acute vertigo. Take a look.
Simulation in Euro Truck Simulator 2 is about to get a whole lot more simulate...y, SCS Software are working on integrating virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift into their game about trucking. Soon you’ll be able to look freely about the inside of the truck cab, physically nod at passing motorists, and fall asleep behind the wheel by actually falling asleep behind the wheel.
Ever wondered what it’d be like to star in the climactic moment of [HO BOY WHAT A SPOILER - Ed]'s first season? Better really think about what that might mean before you answer. No? Of course not. But that’s what the euphemistically-titled Disunion, a tiny game designed for the Oculus Rift VR headset, wants to do for you.
The developers behind Kickstarter project Road Redemption have been tinkering with the immersion drive, AKA the Oculus Rift, to try and make riding virtual motorbikes whilst smashing in skulls as exhilarating as possible. The motorbike combat racer will support the VR goggles if the Kickstarter hits its stretch goal.
Look at these men playing with VR goggles, twisting their heads around and having fun. The man who resembles a young Graham Linehan is Nate Mitchell, who works for the Oculus Rift team and still smiles every time he watches people wear his virtual reality headset. Meanwhile the man actually wearing the contraption works for DICE, developer of, among other games, Battlefield 4. Earlier in the year EA and DICE were reportedly investigating the possibility of bringing Oculus Rift support to the Frostbite Engine, which powers Battlefield, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Now, it seems, they're investigating it a whole bunch.
Whipping my head round to trace the path of a rocket that was rapidly closing on my rear, looking for the moment to hit my afterburner and escape the payload before it connected with my fighter’s fuselage... that was the moment that EVR came together. EVR is special. EVR is new. EVR is a 6v6 space dogfighting game, built for the Oculus Rift and set in the Eve universe, taking place in the violent cold blacknews of New Eden.
But it leaves a question. What does this mean for Eve Online?
Oculus Rift dev kits began shipping out to buyers at the end of last month, and are already yielding examples of third-party wizardry at a rate of about one magic garage gadget per week. Today’s comes courtesy of a modified version of VBjin, the long-running emulator for Nintendo’s infamous eye-enemy console thing.
Everyone has been tinkering with virtual reality as more Oculus Rift developer kits arrive on people's doorsteps everyday. Their testing ground: Team Fortress 2. Valve are hot on the case with fixes and patches, the latest primarily aimed at the VR mode. Also, the Linux version of Team Fortress 2 has has “Improved performance and stability", which can only be a good thing.
Oculus Rift developer kits are starting to flood budding developers everywhere, producing promising results in some of our favourite games. The we already knew that you could play Team Fortress 2 with the Oculus Rift, but someone has taken it a step further by combining it with a “Virtuix Omni Treadmill". It certainly looks like a lot of hard work, running around and fragging your enemies, but man does it look immersive.
Internet, bear with me. For a while from now, as each new game that gets support for the Oculus Rift, I, and other writers, will get needlessly excited and post videos of said game in action. This will settle down in time and normal activity will resume. Until then: virtual reality Mirror’s Edge.
Facepunch Studios have been showing off new player animations due for inclusion in Garry’s Mod’s next update. The animations expand the traditional camera-with-a-Colt FPS perspective to incorporate camera-arms, a camera-torso and camera-legs - just the ticket for a VR headset.
According to a new OculusVR blog post the company “started shipping" the virtual reality headset “on Wednesday, but we haven’t shared tracking information yet because the team is still tied up at GDC in San Francisco."
The upside of this tracking delay is that some backers will receive their headset before they receive their tracking updates.
Epic are working on a Oculus-ready version of their Unreal Development Kit that will be ready for developers to play with as soon as their headset arrives this coming April.
As well as releasing a version of their free game engine, the UDK, able to integrate with the VR headset, they’re working on integrating the Oculus into the full-version of their technology, the Unreal Engine 3, that powers games like Bioshock, Borderlands, and Mass Effect.
Yow! It’s been scarcely two days since our Rob whizzed around Badwater with the Oculus Rift, and - oof! - now we’re supposed to accept that Team Fortress 2’s VR support is in-game, right - ouch! - now? That’s a right old jab to the new idea receptors, that is.
