By Staff Writer: Logan Tesmer
Soon the world of gaming will not just be sitting on your couch with a controller in hand, watching a television screen. The development of the Oculus Rift is the beginning of the future virtual reality gaming. The Oculus Rift not only brings you into the virtual reality of the video games you play, but allows you to go into worlds of your favorite TV shows and movies.
The original development of the Oculus VR was not a consumer success. A year passed and the developers released their work on the DK2 (Development Kit 2). According to Oculusvr, DK2 uses a low persistence OLED display to eliminate motion blur and judder, two of the biggest contributors to simulator sickness.
The new kit uses positional head tracking so consumers can move at 6-degrees-of-freedom, which allows them to peek around corners or look closer at objects in front of the in the virtual reality. Positional head tracking gives the user a realistic feel of reality. Without it, real world motions are lost.
Recently Oculus VR showed off the ability of their product by releasing a video of the DK2 recreating the wonderful world of the grocery store. The video gives you a tour of the British grocery store of Tesco, and then near the end it turns into a soccer stadium that is sponsored by Tesco. The video was an ad campaign for the store but it sure gave the Oculus VR a lot of hype.
The gaming company of Sony revealed their virtual reality system at the Game Developer’s Conference of 2014. The system is compatible to their PlayStation systems. Sony’s VR was developed in secret and privately funded for over three years, whereas the Oculus Rift was publicly funded on Kickstarter for only a couple of years.
“We’ve been doing VR for this project for about three years, so we definitely started before Oculus was even funded,” Sony U.S. R&D senior software engineer Anton Mikhailov tells Digital Trends in a GDC interview. “Certainly, they brought a lot of steam to the whole VR ecosystem, so that’s been a great help for us as well as them. We’re not ignoring their contributions. We think they’re a fantastic group of people who are very excited about VR, but we started our project quite awhile ago.”
Oculus Rift was purchased by Facebook for two billion dollars on March 25.
As both companies work to develop further into the virtual reality, the consumers of the world will just have to sit and wait as our realities are going to change in the upcoming years. The more realistic the systems become, the less real our world will become.
