Now we get it. Now we know why the media is so excited by the next generation of virtual reality, and beguiled by Palmer Luckey's Oculus Rift head-mounted display in particular. Don a ready-calibrated unit, dive into a specially prepared demo and the next ten minutes of your life could well redefine your expectations of the next era of gaming.

The Rift isn't perfect - resolution in particular is a genuine issue - but at its best, it offers true immersion on a level you've never experienced before, and the sheer potential offered by the system is simply irresistible. After your first experience in the Rift, every first-person perspective game you play from then on will be couched in terms of how it would "feel" played in VR. By moving beyond the flat, 2D confines of current display technology, the Oculus headset does indeed go some way to living up to its billing, of allowing players to "step into the game". But beyond the media demos, does the experience actually hold up for extended play? Is VR truly a viable new way to experience gaming?

Thousands of gamers obviously hope so. Oculus Rift caught the imagination of Kickstarter backers like no other piece of hardware before, raising $2.4m from 9522 contributors, around 7000 of whom laid down over $300 in order to get their hands on pre-release development hardware - not bad when Rift creator Palmer Luckey was aiming for a mere $250,000 in crowd-funded investment. In the days before and after the Kickstarter appeal, Luckey surrounded himself with a high-profile team looking to bring the Rift to market, attracting a further $2.5m of investment funds. The results of that investment are finally starting to appear in the form of complete development kits, now in the process of shipping to all Kickstarter backers. A thousand Rifts were rushed to the UK via DHL last week (Oculus is now in the process of setting up a proper UK fulfilment centre), and Digital Foundry's unit was one of them.

What about PS4 and the next generation Xbox? The good news is that Oculus Rift uses standard interfaces - HDMI/DVI and USB - so there's no practical reason why developers can't graft in support for the hardware. The consoles are targeting 1080p resolution, so the prospective full HD target for PS4 and Durango is a good match for the expected resolution of the consumer version of the Rift. However, while HDMI is an open standard, USB is a different kettle of fish entirely in the console domain. In order to control third-party accessories, anything other than storage devices tends to be locked out, with officially supported hardware added to a "white-list" of acceptable kit. So bringing Rift support to the next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles isn't just a matter of developer backing - it's also going to require sign-off from the platform holders themselves.

Once freed from its carton, the Rift package itself is genuinely impressive - a world away from the gaffer-taped assemblage of components first seen in the now legendary John Carmack demos. The imposing, robust plastic travel case houses the head-mounted display itself, its break-out box, and a multi-voltage power supply with exchangeable plugs that should allow the Rift to operate almost anywhere in the world. USB, DVI and HDMI cables are included (there's even an HDMI to DVI adaptor), along with two additional sets of lenses, making for three in total. Everything has its place in the Rift carry-case, with separate compartments cut into the foam insert for all major components. The overall impression you take away from the package is that it could take some severe punishment without the precious equipment inside taking any damage.

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The Rift itself is made from durable plastic, with a heavy duty adjustable fabric headband that keeps the HMD securely in place, and a foam insert to protect your face from the harsh materials of the headset. Inside the visor we find two lenses designed to warp the LCD imagery around your eyeballs, convincingly simulating peripheral vision in supported games. Twisting these lenses loosens them from the sockets, allowing them to be easily replaced with alternatives for those with less than perfect vision. However, we'd recommend that wearers of glasses try to use them in concert with the standard lenses, or even switch to contacts. The optional lenses are OK, but Oculus can't be expected to provide optics to match everyone's individual prescriptions.

Once the HMD is in place, it's quite remarkable just how light and comfortable it is - especially if you've used the larger, more cumbersome Sony HMZ-T1 3D viewer in the past. Yes, remarkably, Palmer Luckey's start-up outfit has managed to create a more comfortable 3D viewer than Sony - on its first attempt.

Motion sensors are housed behind the screen in the Rift itself, with a single cable snaking out of the HMD, in turn leading to the Oculus break-out box. Here we see HDMI and DVI inputs, along with a 5v power socket and a standard USB connection to your PC. The Rift uses existing USB HID protocols, like those used for keyboards and mice, so you don't even need to install a driver to get it up and running. Ideally you should set up the PC to output the 1280x800 native resolution of the Rift itself, but you can feed it higher 16:10 resolutions, as the break-out box downscales nicely (but expect a little additional latency for doing so). It's also worth cloning the output of your GPU to a secondary monitor so you can keep track of what's going on when your PC isn't displaying a VR output. We'd recommend setting the Rift as the primary display though - GPUs tend to lock to the v-sync of the first screen, and as display refreshes rarely match, sometimes you're left with screen-tear on the other - far better to have that on your monitor than on the Rift output.

Team Fortress 2: the VR experience While there's no Doom 3: BFG Edition support for the Rift after all, there's still one title out there with full Rift support: Valve's Team Fortress 2. Adding a "-vr" suffix to the launch command line kicks in the stereo output, and there's a wealth of developer console commands to work with, including a bespoke VR calibration mode that adjusts the 3D effect. There's also a selection of eight different control methods. This might sound like a big deal, but in reality they are all variations on the same theme; standard mouse-look is replaced with VR motion tracking, and the options are typically reserved for variations in how weapons are aimed, and to what extent they are "unlocked" from mouse-look/head-tracking. The default option is the best - the target reticule stays on-screen at all times (so effectively, the view weapon tracks towards where you are looking) but the mouse itself is used to point your gun wherever you want within your line of sight. Dragging the mouse beyond that overrides the tracking, so mouse-look still works in a conventional manner to a certain extent. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Team Fortress 2 on the Rift - with a twist. Virtuix's 'Omni' treadmill aims to turn VR gaming into a true Holodeck-style experience. It's easy to use, it's intuitive, but it's not going to make you a better player - it's simply a neat application of VR and more fully immerses you into the environment. It's compelling to use the head-tracking to look around, and even to look at your own character model more closely, but actual gameplay applications turn out to be rather limited. It's just... well, cool. What you do get is a decent workout for the technology itself though - environments now have genuine scale and field of view is immense enough that you have genuine peripheral vision. Perhaps the most impressive element is the implementation of stereoscopic 3D - everything just works and looks natural, with very little of the "diorama" effect we've previously seen on 3DTVs, where objects are arranged by depth but don't seem to have actual depth themselves. Particles in particular, from gunfire to ricochets to debris, simply look wonderful. But outside of Oculus's demos, the limitations of the system come sharply into focus - literally. The Rift utilises the same 7-inch 1280x800 screen found in the Google Nexus 7 tablet, but claims of 640x800 resolution per eye need to be put into context. That may well be what is being rendered internally, but once the image is warped and sent out to the Rift, effective resolution is being lowered already, and an additional degree of that detail level is used to render your peripheral vision - so the actual amount of real estate dedicated to your main gameplay view is very, very low. Here's a screenshot with a rough estimate of how much detail is actually being resolved in your main line of sight when peering through the visor. The effect is somewhat akin to playing games standing in front of a stadium Jumbotron - pixels are colossal, and resolution is low to the point where almost all of the text in Team Fortress 2 is completely unreadable. As a consequence, there is clear and obvious motion blur from the LCD too, though this was less of an issue than we thought it would be. What happened to Doom 3 BFG? Despite talking one-on-one with an Oculus staff member about the VR version of Doom 3 BFG Edition, we're still not really any the wiser about what really happened with Rift support for Carmack's pet project that wowed so many people at E3 last year. As we understand it, official support may happen in the future, but there are absolutely no guarantees. For whatever reason, Oculus lost its tentpole game after its Kickstarter finished, seeking to head off potential customer relations issues by offering $25 of store credit or $20 of Steam funds instead, along with the option of a full refund (apparently a few hundred people did indeed ask for their cash back). Oculus did its best to keep customers happy but the current Doom 3 no-show is definitely a shame. Luckily for the fledgling company - and indeed eager VR gamers - Valve stepped in with full-blooded Rift support for Team Fortress 2, meaning that the Kickstarter backers do get a really good game to play with their new piece of kit once it arrives - and it's already free, of course. Oculus is looking to implement a 1080p screen for the consumer unit (Oculus COO Laird Malamed told us that the 5-inch screen in the Samsung Galaxy S4 is well-liked by Palmer Luckey), and while this will clearly help a great deal, a 2x increase in resolution is still going to look nowhere near as detailed as standard HDTV image. Even with a higher resolution display, we're still going to be looking at comparatively huge pixels and perhaps something approaching a perceptual 480p image. On the left we see how 640x800 of resolution translates into what is actually sent to the Rift - already we see a significant reduction. On the right we highlight the Team Fortress 2 menu system confirming the 1280x800 res. This menu takes up most of the immediately viewable area, with the red outline an approximation of how much more resolution we actually see through the visor in general vision. We reckon it's something along the lines of 420x360 - the rest encompassing peripheral vision. This uses up a lot of 'real estate', but it's essential in maintaining the Rift's phenomenal levels of immersion. The cost of that is the sense that Rift gaming on the dev kit is of a very low detail level. The next challenge is entirely personal to each individual gamer. Even with careful display calibration, your first foray into the world of VR gaming is likely to end within 10-15 minutes by an increasing feeling of nausea, scaling up to the point where you really need to remove the HMD. You can't really call it motion sickness, because you're not moving, but the point is that you think you are, with the disconnect building to the point where users genuinely don't feel very well. Perhaps you'll be tempted to dismiss this as something that only happens to other people, but it's worth pointing out that this reporter has been gaming for 33 years with no ill effects - until Oculus Rift came along. The virtual reality effect is so profound and overwhelming that you'll need time to adjust; Oculus itself refers to it as a case of "finding your VR legs" and says that you acclimatise over time, but in the short-term, you should stick to 10-minute bouts of gaming followed by a break. Really.

The Hawken demo Currently unavailable to Rift owners, we were fortunate enough to get some hands-on time with the GDC Hawken demo in a private Oculus demonstration earlier this week. The demo itself isn't particularly compelling in terms of the gameplay - it's a simple mech-based bot match and nothing more - but the VR experience is intriguing on a number of levels. First of all, there's the sensation of being inside the mech itself - motion tracking allows you to look around the interior of the cockpit, and get a closer look at your arm-mounted machine guns and rocket launchers just by turning your head and looking at them. What's curious here is that we're seeing a very proper approach to 3D to the point where you need to adjust your focus to concentrate on what's close to you, with the main view naturally blurring - an actual, natural depth-of-field effect, if you like. Also interesting is that you get a genuine sense of height to the mech cabin as you stomp around the cityscape, which you don't really "feel" to anything like the same degree in the normal 2D mode. What about surround sound? There's no audio support with Oculus Rift - though the makers are considering options. You'd perhaps think that the number one choice in the here and now would be a pair of surround sound headphones, but one thing to bear in mind is that there's no support right now for adjustments to the audio mix depending on the orientation of your head. That being the case, a standard surround sound speaker set-up may well prove the better bet... The vertical nature of Hawken's environments makes for a great showcase for the stunning immersive qualities of the Oculus Rift headset - the hardware does an excellent job of conveying the scale of the cityscapes and even manages to engender some degree of vertigo. Looking around the cabin of your mech is an interesting experience too, even though there's no real functionality to the instrumentation. Perhaps the most impressive sensation of all is the sheer height of the environments. The Oculus demo has debug mode enabled, allowing your mech to boost up into the sky with no limits. Hopping from rooftop to rooftop is interesting enough and plenty of fun, but there's an eerily convincing sense of vertigo as you look down on the ground far below, and a genuine mini-rush as you leap over the edge and plummet down to terra firma. Good stuff. On a more mundane technical level, another key takeaway from this demo is the need for high-end anti-aliasing. Here, it wasn't enabled to any great degree, giving an ultra-jaggy element to edges that wasn't particularly pleasing to the eye - a side-effect of the giant pixels. Team Fortress 2 supports up to 16x CSAA on Nvidia hardware and it made a big, big difference to the overall quality of the presentation.

Skyrim, Half-Life 2, Mirror's Edge and more - the third party hacks You've probably seen a bunch of "see Game X running on Oculus Rift" news stories floating about recently, where fan favourites have Rift functionality grafted on via the Vireio Perception open source 3D driver. In essence, it's a Direct3D override hack that performs the necessary 3D separation and perspective warping to introduce Rift functionality into existing games. Initial versions of the hack didn't support the Rift's internal motion sensor, but recent betas have addressed that, allowing for something approaching full functionality - albeit with some limitations. Take Half-Life 2 for example - head-tracking is tied entirely to mouse-look, so there's no separation of the weapon from where you're looking - it's at this point where you can begin to appreciate the amount of work that's gone into the various Team Fortress 2 control implementations. The support situation Oculus Rift support is already built into several major engines, including Unity and Unreal Engine, with the company telling us that it has also had discussions with DICE about integrating the technology into its Frostbite engine. Integration at the engine level should produce a wealth of new software, but there's already a range of planned and confirmed titles in development, including Mojang's 0x10c and Minecraft, Hawken, Doom 4, Project CARS and many others. Supporting the Rift isn't exactly onerous in terms of the display technology - it's effectively a variation of existing stereoscopic 3D. However, the trick is in implementing convincing control mechanisms and completely revamping user interfaces. Existing UIs that occupy a corner of the screen don't work particularly well, as that's where the Rift renders your peripheral vision. Because the Vireio driver is essentially hooking its way into DirectX, it isn't always as effective as you might hope; for example, Skyrim's shadows have no stereo effect meaning you need to turn them off in order to preserve the integrity of the 3D image. Field of view often needs to be adjusted via console commands or .ini hacks in order to get something approaching a decent image. Interfaces and HUDs are also a problem, and it's not just about text size either - standard form is to move these elements into the corners of the screen on a conventional 2D screen. On the Rift, this transplants them deep into your peripheral vision, making them impossible to use. On top of that there are still some frustrating calibration issues (an in-built tool is supplied, but we had mixed fortunes with it) and it requires some degree of work to get good results. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Oculus Rift enthusiasts have been eager to embrace the third-party hacks and to share their experiences on YouTube. Mirror's Edge is a game that seems tailor-made for the kind of experience the Rift supplies. Generally speaking, games using the Source engine (Left 4 Dead, Dear Esther, Half-Life 2) appear to work rather well, while almost every other game had issues that detracted from the experience to varying degrees. However, bearing in mind that we're just a few weeks away from launch, the amount of progress that the open source community has made here is frankly superb. The good news is that it all comes with the blessing of Oculus VR itself. Palmer Luckey's vision was always to get the hardware out there and then watch what the community does with it - similar to the way that Kinect was embraced so enthusiastically (albeit fleetingly) by legions of enthusiasts. Oculus calls this phenomenon "crowd-lifting" and the thinking behind it is remarkably straightforward: the more concepts and "hacks" that become available, the more exposure the Rift gets, and the more likely it is to become a genuine success story once it's released to retail.