Saturday, June 1st 2013 / Gaming

Day Twenty One With The Oculus Rift - Sharks

Today was more of a development day, having been in at work for most of the day I got home and was in the mood for some more coding so I loaded up the Elite Force Rift solution and got the ioSTVEF VM compiling, was pleasantly surprised that the patches worked even though the ioQuake3 source has changed somewhat since ioSTVEF was last updated.I also spent a little time getting Project Aedra compiling. It's an open source upgraded engine for Morrowind which is currently in development and the developer has recently added in Oculus Rift support. Unfortunately however I was short on time and when I compiled the solution it wasn't rendering for the Rift so I'll probably have to read up some more on how to enable support and compile it properly.Again, I thought I should probably try something new for the blog so I downloaded Ocean Rift . This is a small underwater environment demo made in Unity with pretty nice graphics and a bunch of marine life swimming about the place.When one of the sharks swims right over your head I think it best shows off the 3D effect as it literally does feel like it's just a foot away from you.The demo doesn't just feature sharks, there are some fish swimming about and a whale too which looks quite impressive:There is a 'surprise' in the deeper part of the ocean, which wasn't much of a surprise really. The developer posted up that the faint of heart should not venture down there and I think he's right. I've played this demo 3 times now and even on the third time I jumped when this thing started swimming towards me:No video this time as this demo does not run at anywhere near 60fps on my PC (I don't even think it's 30) but the movement is so slow that it won't really make you motion sick. I definitely recommend people check it out as the reef and sharks look quite nice in VR.