With the upcoming release of Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s
Xbox One, video games and their consoles seem to be the hot topic of the
day. It’s a safe bet to say that gaming has never been as big or as
popular as it is today, and if the creative geniuses at
Oculus VR
have anything to say about it, it’s only going to get bigger and
better. For years, gamers all operated in much the same way – you hooked
a console up to your TV and then you used a controller to control what
happened on the screen. Unless you were using a handheld device like a
GameBoy, you always had to look up at a television screen, and after a
few hours, your neck and/or thumbs might have felt a little sore.
Whatever game or system you were playing, though, you weren’t actually
in the game. That could all be changing in the coming years, thanks to a device known as the
Oculus Rift.
The Oculus Rift
The Oculus Rift is the next generation’s leader in virtual reality
headsets. While certainly not the first virtual reality glasses, they
are purported to be the first of their kind to actually place you into
the game. Here’s just a few of the differences between the Oculus Rift
and some other VR glasses:
- Stereoscopic View: Images are presented in the manner in which your
eyes naturally view images, unlike viewing a television screen.
- No screen: When using the Oculus Rift, you don’t see the edges of a
screen…at all. The Oculus Rift gives you a viewing angle of 110 degrees
which is beyond the limits of our peripheral vision.
- Head Tracking: Gamers can look around the virtual world the same way they look around their own world.
While other virtual reality glasses cost an arm and a leg, the
designers at Oculus want to make these glasses available for the average
gamer. If their
Kickstarter
page is any indication, they won’t be wanting for customers. Oculus set
a goal to raise $250,000 in 2012, and today, they have collected just
over $2.4 million.
Oculus hopes to release the Oculus Rift to gamers everywhere
beginning in 2014, and it is being developed for PC, Linux, Mac, and
surprisingly, it will also be targeted for Android users.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the Oculus Rift will weigh approximately the same as a pair of ski goggles.
Business Insider got their hands on the device and tested on co-workers with amusing results: