Has anybody tried an Oculus Rift?

[salm]

I guess a lot of you guys have watched the development of the Oculus Rift.

For those who don´t know what it is: It´s a VR Glasses headset with head tracking optimized for gaming in an affordable price range.

Now, when I first saw this thing i thought it would be a stupid gimmick that would go away pretty quickly again.
But then a friend of mine who is usually quite critical about things like this was able to test a developer kit and apparently was blown away. Developer kits go for 300$ a pice and can be ordered from the website and there are a couple of games and other programms that support it.

So, has anybody of you had the chance to test it? Is it any good?

[Purple]

So it's a virtual boy?

[salm]

Well, a bit. VR helmets have been around for ages but this Rift thing is supposed to be the first one to deliver reasonable quality (resolution, field of view, comfortable to wear) for a reasonable price.

John Carmack the former boss of ID-Software now has a leading technical role at Occulus Rift. So there seems to bo be a budget behind this, not just a couple of students kickstarting it.

[The Xeelee]

I got to try one out at a university open day. They are pretty cool.

[salm]

What kind of game/sofware did you try with it?

[Sharp-kun]

I presumably can't easily drink my pint while I'm wearing it?

My issue with things like this tends to be less the quality of it and more the fact that I tend to do other things while gaming, if I need to raise the visor to take a drink, check my phone or to glance at something the wife is trying to show me that's an issue for me.

[Nephtys]

I played Half Life 2 on the devkit version from about a year and some-odd back. It's pretty good, reasonably responsive on looking. It's lightweight enough not to strain your head when you're strapped in.

The SOLE issue was that the graphics quality was poorer than I had expected. I didn't anticipate a super high def screen, and it's certainly possible that commercial versions will be substantially superior.

I want to play a simulator with that thing on, and finally have situational awareness.

[Eleas]

I tried one of the early models (the DevKit?) with a few of the demos. The resolution was as low as claimed (and apparently it's the first thing they improved on). As bad was the lag, which though slight was enough to be noticeable. It's amazing how much the illusion of being there benefits from full-motion stereoscopic vision, but the limitations soon had an effect: most of us who tried became motion sick after a few minutes.

I'm excited to see where newer versions of the Rift will take us, though. The version I tried was neat enough, and it's bound to get better.

[The Xeelee]

What kind of game/sofware did you try with it?

Just some custom stuff written by the Computer Science department.

[Starglider]

Engine and rendering API developers have become frankly slovenly about input latency recently, only twitch FPS even have the pretense of being properly optimised for it. Work is underway to improve this though, AMD Mantle dumping a lot of legacy rendering pipeline crap is helpful and hopefully DirectX will follow (OpenGL will have to limp on with kludgy vendor extensions as usual). Nvidia GSync is also somewhat useful, should have been done years ago, let's hope it gets rolled into the next DisplayPort spec though as the current version is proprietary and excessively expensive.

[Broken]

One of my buddies has been drooling over this thing since the dev kit was available. Hasn't broken down and gotten one yet (the production model is rumored to be 1080p, so significant improvement over the dev) but he wants it for War Thunder and Star Citizen.

[Tolya]

At work we borrowed the devkit from the Witcher guys for a couple of days. It is a neat gizmo, I tried it with whatever I could get my hands on (mostly Unity demos). The stereoscopy was pretty well done, the kit was light and didn't cause any nausea at all.

But whatever you do, don't get the devkit, it's just isn't worth it. Wait for the production unit with 1080p display - currently the low resolution is just too noticeable.

[salm]

So a couple of days ago the second iteration of the Dev Kit came out. I had ordered it a couple of months ago and recieved it now.

I have to say, while it´s clearly noticable that it´s not a consumer product yet it is allready awesome.
I´ve so far tried a bunch of demos and mini games and this thing really gives you a sense of presence. Most of the demos come with rather mediocre or even really bad graphics but this doesn´t really matter because it seems quite real anyways. Actually bad graphics make the games more interesting in a bizzar way, exactly because they look so different from the real world but at the same time feel very real because of the presence factor. It´s really weird.

The Field of View is decent but doesn´t cover as much as your normal Field of View. It looks a bit like what you see when wearing skiing googless or a diving mask.

The 3D effect is very good. It beats any kind of 3D effect in cinemas or home televisions. I guess that´s because it´s not constrained to a monitor where you can see the surroundings. I watched a couple of 3D movies on Youtube and it works really well.

The resolution is at 1920X1080 and still a bit low but does it´s job. They need to pump that up in the Consumer Version.

The head tracking works pretty very good. The heads rotation is tracked by the device itself and the positional movement by an IR camera which you place on your monitor. Sadly, in this version there´s only one camera, meaning that if you rotate your head to the back the camera can´t see the goggles anymore and loses tracking.
I hope they work out that problem in the consumer version.

I haven´t had any bad cases of simulator sickness. But I can read in the back seat of cars without getting sick which I guess is the same mechanism that triggers sickness in the simulator. Other poeple experince pretty bad sickness and have to take the goggles off after seconds.

So, all in all I love it and would encourage anyone who is interested in this and is half ways tech savvy to get one. Just keep in mind that it´s a still a prototype. It can be a bit tricky to get some things to run propperly. There are also some unsolved problems, like the ones mentioned above.
Furthermore you need a pretty decent computer in order to run games at a sufficient framerate. Sufficient means 75 fps. Anything lower is likely to give you simulator sickness. I Have a GTX 670 on my desktop and so far everything ran fine. On my 3 year old laptop though, I dealt with 20 to 30 fps and allmost puked a couple of times.