Siobhan Keogh: Virtual insanity

Children wearing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, experience virtual reality technology. Photo / AP

Opinion

Will the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift live up to the hype? Siobhan Keogh gives it a try.

At last year's Digital Nationz event, gamers - myself included - tested the original Oculus Rift development kit for the first time.

The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset - a big, chunky device that you strap to your head, with a 3D display. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a cool experience.

I was in control of a giant dragon, and as I moved my head around the dragon turned and whirled and glided around in front of me.

Oculus Rift has apparently undergone significant improvements since then, which we'll all get to see at this year's Digital Nationz at the end of the month. Oculus Rift has been getting hyped up for a couple of years now - but what makes it different from the many, many other virtual reality headsets that have been released (and failed) over the last 30 years or so?

To put it simply: it's inexpensive and it actually works.

Okay, so that's not very explanatory. What the Oculus Rift has that other headsets in its price range have never been able to claim is low-latency head tracking. That essentially means that when you move your head, there's no noticeable lag between that movement and the movement on-screen in front of you. Less lag means a lower chance of making the person wearing the device feel uncomfortable or ill.

See, virtual reality has always been a hard thing to do without making people vomit or fall down. In fact, people still do fall down or get queasy using Oculus Rift. It's just less common than it once was.

It also has a very wide field of view and blacks out the rest of the world, which makes using Oculus a highly immersive experience. It's so immersive, in fact, that CloudHead Games developer Denny Unger believes that someone may have a heart attack while playing a horror game on the device. I can definitely see that happening, and strangely I can see that encouraging horror fans to buy.

The Oculus Rift. Photo / YouTube

None of this means that Oculus Rift is definitely going to be successful. Virtual reality has long been in use, but it's always been a niche market. In the 80s and 90s an attempt was made to break into the mainstream, as people were promised that virtual reality was the next big thing in technology. The devices didn't live up to the expectations set for consumers by the hype machine.

This time seems different, though. The technology has come a long way, and the creators of Oculus Rift seem committed to improvement. The fact that we can now produce a lightweight, relatively small head-mounted display at all is quite incredible.

And Oculus (the company, not the device) have done the right thing by making the technology highly accessible to game developers of all kinds. The latest development kit costs US $350 (NZ$430), and includes the device and all the necessary tools for people to start working on projects for the device. With any luck, the retail version of the device will cost the same or less than that, although I don't have a huge problem with the price tag given that a couple of years ago headsets like this one - devices which were terrible in comparison - were selling for well over NZ$1000.

A scene from the game Portal 2. Photo / Valve

Before I'm totally confident, there's one more missing factor - games. Regardless of how good it is, the Oculus Rift will never be successful without the support of large game development studios and publishers worldwide. Valve, which makes Portal and Team Fortress 2, is already on board. So is Epic Games, of Gears of War fame.

The retail version of the headset is due to hit shelves in the middle of next year, so we should start hearing about games in development that support it fairly soon. I hope the big studios do get in on the action in a big way - who wouldn't want to play Skyrim in a virtual reality world?

- nzherald.co.nz