Oculus Rift – VR Update

There is an update on KickStarter.com about the status of the Oculus Rift, which is adopting the name Oculus VR. See the update here: Shipping Update, E3 2013 Recap and Oculus 0.2.3 SDK Release – Update #38 – July 4th, 2013.

This update is about the release of the 1080p developer’s headset.

Scroll down the page to the comments about EVE-VR. This is a tech demo of the EVE Online space adventure game. It blew people away and won awards. The reviewers are raving about the immersive quality of the experience.

Oculus Rift 2013-21

There is an interesting video about how Oculus VR™ (OVR) is changing the game design paradigms. I came across it in my Facebook browsing. 22 minutes. Nate Mitchell is speaking at GDC 2013 (Game Developers Conference) which ran from March 25 to 29.

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I’ve written about what I think the user interface problems will be. This video really gets into some of the problems and how people are handling them.

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Oculus Rift Update 2013-20

Jo Yardley, of 1920 Berlin fame, has an update on the Oculus Rift from Rod Humble. See: Rod Humble: Oculus Rift already in Second Life, want to make it excellent. The title pretty much says it all. But, Jo provides some interesting background making it worth the read time.

Oculus Rift COmpared to other display systems.
Oculus Rift Compared to other display systems.

I think Jo is somewhat representative of builders like Loki Eliot, Penny Patton, and others that create fantastic builds. I expect many of that caliber builders will be looking at their builds though Oculus Rift eyes.

I suspect that a shift to Oculus Rift will change how Second Life is built and experienced. While I am looking forward to the Oculus Rift arriving in a retail version I am probably not as excited about it as Jo. It will affect all the things she says it will affect. But…

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Oculus Rift Integration

There is a good article on FastCoLabs: What’s The Big Problem With Developing Oculus Rift VR?

It seems it is not that hard to integrate into a game. Team Fortress 2 has an Oculus Rift interface now. Valve, the owners and operators of Steam, helped create the interface.

Joe Ludwig, one of the Valve programmers behind the Rift implementation, said, “Figuring out how to combine mouse and keyboard input with head tracking was not very well explored territory, so we had to break some new ground there.”

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