Oculus Rift: New Virtual Reality Gaming Headset

A virtual-reality headset presented by John Carmack, co-founder of id Software in June on the game's E3 exhibition is ready to become an industrial product.

In the opinion of many respected publications this product gives deep dive into the gameplay, unlike anything already existing - as the game takes place in the imagination. Despite what John Carmack said recently that Sony had interested in this invention and could bring it up to the market not earlier than in a year, Oculus had started commercializing this project under the name Rift, but so far only as a set for developers.

The prototype will weigh about 220g, and have a resolution of 1280x800 interlaced (640x800 for each eye). A distinctive feature of the device is a wide viewing angle, which is an impressive 110 ° vertically diagonally  (90 ° horizontal) and 6-axis motion sensor (gyroscope and accelerometer), through which all the head movements are synchronized with the game from the invisible to the human perception of delay. Among other there will be available a video input DVI (HDMI via adapter) and an USB port for charging.

The developers believe that Oculus Rift will bring the virtual games on a principally new level of video games giving amazing quality of virtual world unreachable previously. Any of existing solution nowadays is unable to provide similar quality of the game or have cost $20,000 or higher.

Oculus and many like-minded individuals are willing to change the existing state of things with the virtual-reality headset Rift that should represent turning point in gaming technologies.

The virtual-reality headset Rift were designed in tight cooperation with Zenimax, Epic Games, Unity, Valve, and other leaders of gaming industry. Valve, as you know, has been developing a wearable computer and both hardware and software parts for them. However, as follows from the latest interview with Gabe Newell, the cost of it is still at the level of $70,000.

As Epic Games, the manager of the design department, said   the company is very much impressed with outcome of integration of Unreal Engine and Oculus Rift.

The top manager of Unity says that the virtual-reality headset will become the most perfect way of diving to the game. The Unity engine will support this device.

Valve president Gabe Newell said that this product looks incredibly impressive and call everyone to support the project through Kickstarter that gives an opportunity to anybody to contribute into financing of developer' set for an industrial sample. Perhaps Valve games will be compatible with Rift, and perhaps the Source engine will have these features.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, said that they are going to release earliest version for developers that will be delivered to all project participants around the world within December of this year.

The product available for customers that will be released later with patches and bugs fixed. As developers say some features may be improved without cost increasing that means up to $300. Particularly, the relatively low resolution 1280x800 sufficient for a great effect, they are going to increase it before the product entering the market.

All test set recipients will get access to the Oculus Developer Center that provides SDK, technical support and developer platform for socializing. The PC, iOS, and Android operating systems are supported and Mac and Linux are going to be supported in future.

Developers need a little to optimize their games: use the motion sensor, and possibly introduce other changes, as the visibility frame is significantly wider than on a regular monitor, as well as append existing shaders that give needed optical distortion.