Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Jo Yardley has written up her firs hands on experience with the Oculus Rift (Rift). This is an excellent article that puts the state of the art in perspective. The current Rift’s are low resolution, but still impressive. See: Oculus Rift and Second Life. [youtube lcAaFAIZwH0] The day she saw the Rift the company was releasing … Read more
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.
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.
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…
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.”
Hamlet Au has an article titled: Oculus Rift Integration Coming to Second Life, Linden Lab Staff Confirm (Both Officially and Unofficially). I think in that article and in a previous article (ref) he makes several good points. And, it does look like Oculus Rift (OR) is coming to Second Life™. But, Hamlet doesn’t combine it with the LEAP Motion controller I think is needed to go with OR.
You are not going to be able to get a retail OR headset until at least 2014.
The video shows the OR with an omni-directional treadmill. That is NOT the kind of control system I am hopping for… but it might be good for me… but… how would that work in Zindra?
I am hearing lots about the Oculus Rift VR Headset. Some think interfacing it to SL would be a great addition to Second Life™. If you have seen the granny video, you have an idea of how impressive Ocular Rift can be.
Granny Video – 03:40 minutes.
There is no doubt she is impressed.