So, my brother called me over to play Goldeneye 64. I arrived at his house ready to kick his ass.
When I opened the door, I was forcefully told to sit on the couch with my eyes closed. My brother tells me to open my eyes and I see him handing me over a HP Photosmart inkjet printer box. I grab the box cutter and slowly open the box, which was amazingly wrapped professionally. Just remember, its not my birthday or a Ramadan gift. So I had no fucking clue what was going to be in the box. In my mind, I thought it was going to be some sort of trap after beating them in Goldeneye repeatedly.
I then proceed to open the box and pull out ANOTHER box. In that box, I cut the tape and open it up and find ANOTHER FUCKING BOX. I immediately thought they were fucking trolling me. However, upon looking at the side of the box, I noticed he bought a Oculus Fucking Rift.
You use those nunchucks to interact with objects in the game.
That's when I looked outside, at the clock and felt my body to make sure I was not dreaming. My brother signed up for the developer kit version of the Oculus Rift and received it in less than a month.
So I brought over my PC (I am currently using a Geforce 660) and we hooked up the Oculus Rift via HDMI. We fired up this application called RiftCoaster which is a roller coaster game. At first, my brother had an issue with it. He described seeing four images instead of one. I was confused, so I cloned the display to his TV and saw the issue. Apparently, due to it being a dev kit, we had to play around with nvidia settings and we had to do a calibration run and everything seem to work then.
I kicked him out of the seat and tested it. The game was really cool. You feel as if your really are in the game. If you look up, you see the clouds and birds and sun. If you look down, you see the maps floor or the depth. So like we were at the highest peak of the roller coaster, and I glanced over and it looked like I was literally 500 ft off the ground. Scary as shit.
The visuals are blurry, but viewable, I mean you can see the textures, but they are a little blurry and there is motion blur too. What you see on the desktop lcd is much more clear and less blur. I didn't mind too much, because this is a starting point. I can see a tremendous amount of uses for this thing.
I tried Half Life 2 (not Lost Coast, nor Deathmatch, just vanilla) and it was beautiful. You could see that camera robot flying around above you and it looked like I could grab that motherfucker and throw it. Then I tried Minecraft (nephews begging me to get it to work) and oh man, it was like you were literally in the game. If you looked down, you could see the sand or grass your standing on. If you stand next to the tree or a block, you felt like grabbing it or punching it. I also fired up Team Fortress 2 and the only major problem we had was, we could not read any text that was displayed in the HUD. Due to the resolution of the Oculus Rift.
As for lag/latency, we had very minor problems when running some games. I was running this off a AMD Phenom X2 555 with 660 GPU and 16GB of ram running Windows 7 64bit, so specs were good enough to enjoy the Oculus Rift experience.
Do I recommend buying the Dev Kit? That depends on whether the consumer version will be launched this year or 2014. If your eager to try it out, go for it. You could always sell the Dev Kit, since no more will be produced after the consumer version releases. Beware, the resolution is low, so you will not get the best VR experience.
After a while, you will get motion sickness. I strongly recommend to take 10-15min breaks. If you wear glasses, you might want to adjust the goggle forward. It has two adjusters on both the left and right side. That allows you to move the screen away or toward your face.
The Rift comes with three lenses: A, B, C.
A- People with good far sight vision
B- People with moderate sight vision
C- People with good nearsight vision
I used C, since it was comfortable and my brother and his kids also used it.
We were very impressed with this technology. I see it being used to tour around different countries. Imagine walking around Japan, China, or a in a building rather than flying to the place. Imagine using it in more games such as CS:GO, Doom 3, etc.
I mean, it has so much possibilities and we hope the devs can get a high res LCD screen in the Oculus Rift.
Any questions, let me know.
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Topic: Our impression of the Developer Kit Oculus Rift (Read 11102 times)