Oculus Rift Day 3: Games and the Future

The demos currently available for the Rift are packed with bite-sized fun and are a great window into what's to come, but of course what everyone's waiting for are the games. The support here is a little more lacking so far, but with enough dedication you can probably already get your money's worth.

Games

There are third party drivers around like Vireio Perception that are aiming to broaden Rift support to basically anything 3D with a first person controller, but the current early state has prevented us from getting it working. Which games do work, however, are Valve's Team Fortress 2 and Epic's Unreal Tournament 3 - via the Rift-enabled UDK.

UDK's Rift support isn't finalized but it can already be quickly enabled in any project. In the case of UT3, at least, while this turns on fairly painlessly, the standard implementation of shooting in the exact direction you're looking makes aiming a hilariously confusing experience. As far as we could tell support for other control methods are forthcoming.

Valve has dedicated a lot of effort already to Rift support for their free-to-play shooter. With in-built calibration and around a dozen control schemes you can easily equip the most pain-free setup for your eyes.

To play devil's advocate, what becomes more and more painfully (literally) obvious as you use the Rift is the damage the low-resolution panel causes to the experience. Reading and comprehending most UI elements is a fuzzy, eye-wateringly difficult effort in futility. This is where future hardware options need to step in, speaking of which...

Predictions (a.k.a. Speculation)

The most exciting part of the Rift is not what it currently does, but what the success of this early kit means for the future of the resurgence of VR. I've found my entire Rift experience dominated by exciting expectations as to what the future holds.

The next revision of this product - whether it be a second dev kit or first release product - should release fast, before the end of the year, even. The technology that's getting crammed into these units; mobile phone screens and sensors, are advancing so fast that by the time a new phone comes out it's already outdated, and the same is clearly true for the Rift.

While this could prove a challenge to keep up with, it provides a great opportunity for Oculus. A new kit with better screen, and probably front-facing cameras and more platform support could be, and should be, just around the corner. VR just 12 months from now will look unrecognizable and could never have been predicted to move this fast before the Rift was announced.

And I can't wait to see what happens.

This concludes our mini Rift series. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it! Calum

Missed the earlier installments? Rift Day 1 - Rift Day 2

Oculus Rift Day 2: Developing with Unity 3D

Our engine of choice is Unity 3D and luckily enough, thanks to the great folks at Oculus, it has day 1 development support for the Rift. Not just token support either, this stuff is robust and documented. You can download the OVR library from the Oculus dev portal, and it plugs into Unity as easily as any Unity Package, a double-click and you're away.

Oculus provides prefabs for their two-camera setup, including one with a basic character controller. Adding basic Rift support to your games is as easy as choosing which prefab to add.

Unfortunately the Unity preview window can't go full-screen, so unless you like headaches, testing your game with the Rift requires a quick build. The Oculus plugin provides a button to make this an express procedure.

There are a few issues to be aware of regardless of the game you make; camera clipping through your avatar's shoulders, the low resolution making distant detail and text difficult to read, and rendering everything twice from two cameras. Like any hurdles in game development these can be addressed with time and effort.

Overall the process is essentially painless. Kudos to Oculus and Unity Technologies for this great integration.

Join us next week for our experiences playing a few Rift-ready games and some predictions for where VR goes from here.

Oculus Rift Day 1: Set up and Demos

In case you missed it Cardboard Keep received our two Oculus Rift developer kits on Tuesday. We were early backers of the Kickstarter and have been itching to get them ever since, and finally the day arrived. Since they're currently occupying the majority of our attention it seemed like a good idea to document some of this process.

Set Up

Attaching a Rift dev kit to your computer is the most painless experience possible, and puts other peripherals to shame. There are no drivers or custom set up hassles, it's literally plug and play. The only thing to take care of is setting it as your primary (or duplicated) monitor and setting the right resolution, and some software (like Team Fortress 2) even takes care of this for you.

Using the correct focal lenses and adjustments make or break the experience, and add a lot of downtime when switching between people with different eyesight.

As for using the device itself, as has been said all along, the low resolution is a big issue and is noticeable immediately, making it hard to discern details or read text from even a moderate distance. The other key function of the Rift, the sensor tracking, is phenomenal, with the only disappointment being the lack of positional tracking. Both of these issues should hopefully be fixed by the release version hardware.

Demos

There were only a dozen or so demos already available on Tuesday and there aren't many more now, but it's still early days. We've tried everything we could find and there are many different preferences across the team.

Proton Pulse - Calum and Rob's favourite

This demo, the third or fourth we tried, immediately grabbed Calum and Rob because of it's great atmosphere and use of the Rift itself as the (only) input method. The game plays like a first-person breakout where you play as the bat, and it is fantastic.

RiftCoaster - Tim's favourite

The name says it all; an Oculus Rift Rollercoaster. This seems to be the first public non-Epic made Unreal Engine demo, and rockets you through a coasterized version of Epic Citadel.

Sixense Tuscany - Blair's favourite

The basic Tuscany demo made by Oculus themselves was repurposed by Sixense as a demo for their motion controller, the Razer Hydra. It takes the basic walk-and-look gameplay of Tuscany and adds hands, physics objects you can grab and some you can set on fire. While the Hydra itself has accuracy and stability problems - even more prominent next to the perfect tracking of the Rift - the demo is impressive and unique, and it shows the promise that a motion controller with functionality as solid as the Rift itself could lend to the VR experience.

Planet1 - Glenn's favourite

Planet1 is a basic hover-car/Mars rover hybrid that gives you atmospheric flight controls across an alien surface while being bombarded by meteorites. It demonstrates scale and velocity from the eyes of the Rift. Glenn loves this demo because controlling a vehicle delivers a more immersive feel than a biped when your legs in the real world are staying still.

Join us tomorrow for a first-look into developing with the Oculus Rift and Unity 3D!