Next step? You wanna hide behind something? You actually crouch behind a virtual object...no more "automated hide by pressing 'X' ". You will be far more interactive. Imagine using this with Kinect, or Playstation Move....equipped with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. Imagine actually dodging attacks with body movements. It's the ultimate marriage of the physical and virtual world...

They just need the same technology in gloves or as you say a kinect mapping all your movements, a pad on which you can walk in every direction.

Holodeck here we come.

To hell with Skyrim, bring on the Virtual Valerie.

Ah man! Does it come with Mario Tennis?

I was a big fan of VR when it was the new thing in the 90's, even wrote a school paper on it (so what if it was just elementary school I really hope this type of tech is supported by more engines (Epic, Valve, Id, Unity, and published in-house) because I want more of this!

As soon as the Occulus Rift is out, I'm buying a gaming PC for FPS, Racing and Flight simulator. God game could also be cool with VR...

I want one....

Gonna need some way to prevent people from falling over and hurting themselves. Assuming this gets married to motion control at some point, we are going to see a LOT of people getting injured when they go ass over tea-kettle and crack their head open on a chair or table.

I preordered one in september! Getting mine in late March / early April And it does support Unreal Engine 3 and Unity as far as I remember.

I'm more excited about this than any other upcoming technology.

SO EXCITED

Ought to be perfect for racing sims. I'd worry about not being able to see my controls for flight sims, though. For older and simpler planes it might be okay, but for modern stuff there is no way you'd be able to get by on just the controls and buttons you can access by feel.

UnrealEngine and idTech 4 (i.e. Doom 3) are already supported. Valve have made noises about experimenting in-house (if you're interested in the technical side Michael Abrash posted a really interesting article on latency and Occulus responded in kind)

Dunno what Unity are doing, but Star Citizen will definitely support it.

Personally, I'm hopeful, but it'll be a cold cold day in hell before I play an FPS with some bloody kiddy controller.

Imagine the damage to your living room!

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I'm very interested. This could very well be the next big thing. What I don't get is why it is that a little Kick-started start-up can make this work but Nintendo couldn't with the Virtua boy - nor could Sony or other companies with their goggly video glass things.

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*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 7:11am PST - promote requested by dag.

When they dropped him at the end I can only imagine how stomach-churning that's going to be. I loved/hated jumping off the Agency Tower in Crackdown for example. Can you imagine that jump with this??

Honestly, I'm pessimistic. I work with Virtual Reality for a living and I find head mount displays (even premiere research quality head mounts with top notch head/body tracking) to be a shitty experience. I'd rather nvidia glasses done well. My main complaint is with the very short optical distance between your eyes and the display.

Even with the latency thing, he kind of sets up and breaks down his own argument. He says, 2ms samples, so latency should be great! Then he says that they integrate over those samples to get an accurate measure... well... there goes your low latency.

Hey dude, what do you mean by: "Then he says that they integrate over those samples to get an accurate measure"

Could you elaborate?

Sorry, I was referring to the latency papers that @ChaosEngine posted. He mentions that their head-tracking sensor is capable of 2ms samples. That is indeed impressive for consumer level tracking. However he goes on to say that they use this "density of samples" to integrate a more accurate measure of position. In other words, they average over multiple temporal samples in order to achieve a more accurate spatial measure. However, if you do that, the samples you are using to produce a head position instantaneously is at least partially influenced by spatial information collected more than 2ms ago. When you do this too much you'll get sluggish head tracking which lags the head, and can often make people sick. However so can the alternative of low-latency though spatially noisy head tracking. That will just look jerky and spastic instead of sluggish. It's a balance, but his suggestion that they chose to average suggests that they needed to due to noise in their custom sensor. I have no doubt these guys have done a better job than previous attempts at low cost HMD systems. I just don't think they've done anything ground breaking, and even the cutting-edge technology I find unsatisfying.

I'm not sure they need to do anything groundbreaking. Sometimes, it's just a combination of the right product, built from common components at the right price and put together with the right marketing.

Risking the ire of the apple haters here but look at the iPod. There wasn't really anything particularly special about it. There were plenty of other MP3 players around with similar (or better) specs at the time, but the iPod is the one that succeeded.

It could just be that the background level of technology has reached a place where it's now feasible to do decent HMDs.

We are going to look so stupid while playing games soon.

I agree with you in general. I think it will be a successful product potentially. I just think people are going to find themselves disappointed given all the hype. I just don't think the technology is satisfactory even on the cutting edge. It would be like all (even the best) portable mp3 players sounded like finger nails on chalk boards. Apple came along and made an affordable "finger nails on chalk board sounding portable mp3 player" and we all expected everyone was going to be jumping to buy one rather than simply continuing to listen to their nice home stereo instead.

Just as a first order critique. Do you really think gamers are going to settle for 640x800 screens that subtend even wider visual angles? With 800 pixels over 90 degrees you're talking about a nyquist frequency of 5ish cycles per degree. That ain't exactly a retina display. That's like a tenth the resolution of a retina display on a linear dimension, or one one-hundredth the number of total pixels.

I think this thing will have a highly anticipated launch and peter out as people find themselves preferring to game with their traditional interfaces instead.

I want this on while I'm having sex. Augment reality so my wife is... well, whoever I want her to be. This means you don't even need to factor looks into a marriage. Just always live in augmented reality. Like, "Hey babe, you can be a feminist now and not wear make up or ever do your hair again! Just let me wear this ALLLLLL the time." Sorry... I'm ahead of myself and technology. And my wife.

If you die in game while wearing the Occulus Rift, do you die in real life?

I cant wait for this this to hit! Amnesia would be more frightening than any movie or book. I cant get passed the prison Lvov as it is!

Speaking of movies, that would be a trip. We have 360 degree cameras now...

Though I wouldn't like to be the editor.

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I was thinking the same thing. Sometimes it's not groundbreaking technology, just putting the components together in the right way. (iPhone)

STOP IT YOU PEOPLE I HAVE ENOUGH OF A HARD TIME AVOIDING WORLD OF WARCRAFT WITH ALL OF MY MIGHT WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TURN ME INTO A MUSHROOM HEY IMAGINE WHAT SUPER MARIO WOULD BE LIKE WITH THIS AMAZING THING YOU COULD GO AROUND STOMPING GOOMBAS LIKE IT WAS REAL NO I CANT GO THERE LOOK AT WHAT YOUVE DONE TO ME YOU EVIL PEOPLE QUICK SOMEONE GRAB THE POWER CORD TO MY COMPUTER AND PULL IT OUT BEFORE ITS TOO LA

One thing that interests me is the control aspect. By definition, this is only viable for a first person view point. You could maybe use it for 3rd person, but that seems kinda pointless.

Currently first person games assume 2 main control inputs, position and direction. I'm ignoring action based inputs (shooting, reloading using, etc) because this doesn't really change those. Right now, an FPS essentially assumes your body always faces the same way as your head. If you run forward and look right, you turn right.

This will have to change for this, or it's pointless. Essentially you'll need 3 inputs, position, direction and head orientation. That's doable with this system, but I'm not sure how it will affect gameplay. I certainly don't want to aim using my head.

Depends on what you are aiming maybe. Like, if you're using a blow dart or a lethal lugie you could turn your head to shoot...

Here's a question.

I am playing Amnesia and I've soiled my pants, I approach a corner and want to look around the corner. I think my natural reaction will be to physically, in real life, lean forward a bit while physically facing left or right. Can this device detect that, and move my in game char forward in some way if I lean forward?

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Ha. I think I've got to try this game. I want to soil my pants.

I bought a dev kit via the kick starter - I can't wait for experiencing this in March/April and test out some game ideas to test some game ideas.

I am not afraid to say I have been waiting my entire life for a good version of this idea to be implemented. BRING TO ME.

They need to fix that tilt thing. In real life, tilt your head, does the world tilt? No, your brain manages to keep the view of the world right side up.

And it will continue to do so.

If they don't compensate for the head tilting then what you're describing is what would happen...

They explain that the world does not tilt like it shows on the monitor, the world stays level as you tilt your head, they also state this is the first device to ever accomplish this. Search for "Oculus Rift Gameplay This Week / Demo" on youtube by user lockergnome for the video.