EPTFirst, I have to give a big shoutout to my girlfriend Stephanie who got me the Oculus Rift for my birthday a few months ago. It was only an order form since the dev kit takes 2 months to ship, but it finally arrived this part Thursday on August 1st. Needless to say, I almost went full NINTENDO SIXTY FOUURRRRR kid when I was opening the package.
I'll be keeping this blog updated with my experiences with Oculus Rift. This first one will detail my first impressions and thoughts on the Rift and cover some stuff I didn't find in other reviews and writeups. Keep note: this is only the development kit which means the consumer version will have improved specs and be more user friendly.
Set up
The Oculus Rift is attached to a power box which requires three cable inputs. One for HDMI or DVI from your computer (in which you have to duplicate the screen of your main monitor to the RIft), one for external power, and one for USB which I assume sends head tracking information back to your computer. There are a lot of wires to account for, but was essentially plug and play.
The Rift is essentially a screen at the end of the rectangular portion that displays two separate slices of your Desktop, which doesn't make the entire picture when you put them together. The device is not meant to browse the Internet or anything in 3D, it's meant to play games that support a specific split rendering. On top of the screen are two lenses that you look into with your eyes, which have a particular curvature for the field of vision. Combined, the Rift envelops your eyesight with the virtual world. For people who don't have perfect eyesight, the Rift comes with 3 sets of lenses - A, B, C, which correspond to perfect eyesight -> very nearsighted users. As someone who always wears glasses, I chose C. For Team Fortress 2, I had to tell the game I was using the C lenses for it to reconfigure some settings.
Neat tidbits
The Rift basically duplicates the view of your desktop and splits awkwardly in half so only things properly rendered for the Rift can be seen. Still, if you enlarge YouTube videos of Oculus Rift gameplay, or view full screen images, you still get the same 3D immersive effect.
If you fullscreen this and connect it to an Oculus Rift, it works perfectly!
Into the Rift
I hopped into Ocean Rift, which is a tech demo that has you play as a diver who is exploring the depths of the ocean. The demo is fairly short, but it has you swim slowly forward while observing plant life, ship wrecks, large whales, and of course - sharks.
As I strapped on the Rift, my eyesight was immediately enveloped by the virtual ocean. When I began to move my head around, that’s when an insanely immersive feeling began to take hold of my experience. Even something simple like bubbles move up close to the screen made me pull my head back in reaction. Whales were almost frightening to swim near because of how the Rift has you perceive them nearly to scale.
Having objects in games to scale is an entirely new experience. Gameplay is not my own.
The Rift does a fantastic job of making objects in the virtual world have both a realistic sense of scale and depth. Its these details that make you think that you’re beginning to inhabit this world. When you’re in a room and look up at the ceiling, you get a real sense of “height” that can’t be realized by a flat monitor screen. When you move up to a person in Half-Life 2, they’re no longer a short model individual on a monitor, but rather an entity that closely mimics the sense of a real life human being.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1EB1JSV.jpg)
The sense of scale was the most impressive part of any demo I tried. The ‘big-brother’ screen of Half-Life 2 like I’ve never experienced it before.
The future is here, and it’s slightly nauseating
I’d echo every sentiment that the future of virtual reality gaming will be made possible with the Oculus Rift. It does a lot of things right - the scale, the depth, the illusion of perception within the virtual world does what a 2D monitor can never do. Still, its not without its obstacles and challenges.
When putting on the Rift for the first time, it became very clear that the criticisms about low resolution were right. You can definitely see pixels and a ‘screen-door’ effect that makes the Oculus Rift screen nothing like what you see in the YouTube videos which have nice rendered graphics (which appear on your monitor). Some faces would be hard to make out in a distance, and jagged lines are apparent. Still, this is still a testament to how amazing the Rift does a great job of putting into the virtual world despite the dev kit’s graphical shortcomings. Putting someone in a virtual world is more than enveloping them in a 3D rendered environment, it’s also about capturing and manipulating the player’s very own perception.
Another current shortcoming I experienced was the issue of motion sickness. I was reading that some individuals were having trouble getting used to their “VR legs”, but I wrote some of it off as individuals who didn’t have experience with extended periods in front of monitors or games. Still, as a gamer myself who is no stranger to extended play sessions, my stomach became incredibly uncomfortable within the first hour of gaming with the Rift. My friend who has a similar background also experienced similar feelings of motion sickness within his 10 minutes with the Rift.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/TRmGsYw.jpg)
Not looking too well after doing the Space Walk game within the Rift. Pro-tip: doing VR somersaults in space is nauseating.
There are numerous reasons why we both, and many others, have experienced motion sickness. The low resolution of the current rift can make for some very unsettling renderings in certain demos or games that do not natively support VR (which is a lot of them at the moment). This will inevitably be fixed by the HD consumer version that is slated for release to the masses.
The other issue is also the sense of motion and being you’re in tension with when playing with the Rift. While you ‘know’ that you’re not really inhabiting this virtual world, its still immersive enough to trick your brain to expect certain things that adhere to reality. Any sudden movements that are unexpected by your brain can immediately attribute to a strong sense of motion sickness. For myself, anytime something ‘unexpected’ happened in terms of movement of the ingame world and my head, I would feel sick to my stomach.
Finally, I was also trying games that needed a third party program to support Rift play. These games are essentially hacked by the driver to render it in a way to support projection into the Rift. These games are not natively supported, which means the control scheme and other small elements are less than optimal. Even the smallest details can throw off your perception entirely and cause motion sickness.
For example, I played Skyrim which required said third party graphics drivers. The game first required quite a bit of calibration to make sure that the depth and scale of objects rendered correctly, and the two separate images for your eyes were properly aligned. Even then, it wasn't as optimal as something like Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2 which came with native support and calibration tools.
Another issue was that graphics on one eye would render differently than the other, which caused a lot of issues. Shadows missing from one screen while being rendered in another meant I was in a perpetual state of flashing shadows as I moved, on top of a less than optimal sense of depth and scale. Needless to say this was not a great experience.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/goRNedD.jpg)
Skyrim took a lot of tweaking to work with the Rift, and even then still caused a lot of motion sickness due to suboptimal controls.
Furthermore, the aiming scheme also proved to be too jittery for my brain to handle. While a game like Half-Life 2 allows you to configure the aim settings so your guns and arms to stay facing forward while you move your head camera around (like you would in the real world), Skyrim doesn’t come with this type of support and thus your entire “body” moves as you move your head in game. Like I said earlier, there is a new sense of actually ‘being’ in the world, and when your body doesn’t move like you expect it to, you get a huge sense of nausea. To make matters worth, the camera would still be controlled by my mouse as well as the head tracking, so I had to be very careful with how I moved and attacked less I risk a huge sudden jerk that may immediately make me puke.
So I didn't mean the previous paragraphs to take up this first impressions post with a whole bunch of obstacles I've been facing. The positives will greatly outway the negatives as I get used to my VR legs. The Rift is indeed the future, it is a new sense of immersion, and i have no doubt the final product will be absolutely awesome. I've been reading up on how to combat motion sickness and it seems that many people experienced the same thing for the first few days. Again, a lot of it depends on the games themselves rather than the Rift experience, and as developers tailor their games to native Rift support, the final products will be nothing less of gaming changing for the industry.
Mind and body
“Does it feel like you’re actually there?”
The answer is “yes” and “no”. It’s immersive, but I know that I'm sitting in a room in front of my computer. It’s a strange and exciting immersive feeling. It’s going to take a while to really unpack what it feels like, but it’s definitely like nothing that has come before it.
There’s a tension within the experience. I know that I'm in my room, my brain knows I'm in my room, yet my body still ‘reacts’ to as if I were in the virtual world no matter how much I try to remove myself from it.
The strangeness of it all also comes from the fact that most games up to this point have been designed around using our mouse and keyboard to interact with the world. As someone who plays games frequently, I’ve been conditioned to move with my mouse and keyboard in a way that is not completely suited for virtual reality. Fast sudden movements do not go well with jerking your head in every which way direction, at least during the first few RIft sessions.
Imagine if the only way to move through your everyday life was through mouse and keyboard, yet you still had a sense of your body, your limbs, and your perception. It probably would not be as optimal as you picture it. The Rift has made me realize that the way I interact with games and virtual worlds has been so far removed from how we actually think about moving around in the real world. At the moment, I’m hypothesizing that those who don’t have previous hardcore gaming experience may have an easier time adjusting to these new ideas of movement.
Titans of Space was another demo that I tried that really opened my eyes to how I was perceiving the sense of my body within this virtual world. The demo is rather simple - you’re a person in a space pod and the demo takes you on a simple tour of Solar System and nearby stars (amazing demo for another blog post). However, one of the most impressive parts of this demo was when I looked down, I could see that my in game ‘legs’ and ‘torso’ were rendered. I look behind me and to the side, and I see ‘my shoulders’. By far that was the most game changing moment I’ve had with the rift - actually FEELING like my body was in this virtual world.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/W5ZJTFp.jpg)
It’s the little things that can add so much - the game renders your legs and torso while the Rift makes it seem like you’re really in that space suit.
I may use the word “strange” but overall the possibilities are exciting. It’s really a whole new frontier that will be explored and eventually pushed to its limits. At certain moments, I can honestly say it feels like inhabiting this entirely new world in a way that I never thought possible. While the development kit is far from the actual final consumer product, everything about it holds so much promise that people should begin bracing for the fact that it will change the way we experience games.
VoDs
I’ve been attempting to stream my Oculus Rift on a regular schedule. Streaming with VR isn’t as mapped out as streaming normal games, so there are some technical issues along the way. I’m open to feedback on how to improve my stream for exploring the future of VR!
Perhaps the most interesting parts of these videos is you can see the parts in which I get really motion sick and have to take really extended breaks. I’m taking the weekend to get used to the Rift so I can produce a higher quality stream and experience.
http://www.twitch.tv/shindigs/b/439579863 - first day with the rift
http://www.twitch.tv/shindigs/b/439867377 - second day with the rift
http://www.twitch.tv/shindigs/b/439891507 - second day, post sickness
http://www.twitch.tv/shindigs/b/439989827 - space walk aka vomit city
I’ll be keeping this TL blog updated with my future experiences with the Rift, and one day hope to even make a simple game with the Dev Kit! Feel free to leave any questions or suggestions on what you want to see in future posts or streams with the Oculus Rift.
I blew the device off at first as a gimmick, but it really seems quite amazing and/or legitimate based on everything I've heard. It's really where we could be headed. Still wonder how we might be able to reconcile the visual display versus our movements, though. One day there might be a way that truly links to our brain or something, that lets us believe we are experiencing certain sensory inputs.
