Oculus VR's Oculus Rift could be the device virtual reality needs to finally break into the mainstream, instead of just being something for tech-frenzied neophiles (and mid-90's Hollywood, whose grasp on VR was breathtakingly stupid at best). The Oculus Rift is a $300 virtual reality headset that can display stereoscopic 3D and offer head tracking to let you look around inside virtual worlds.

After a successful Kickstarter campaign Oculus VR put together a development kit that's being slowly shipped out to customers, with sights on a consumer-friendly version in the future. In a few years, everyone might have their own Oculus Rift and use it to play video games and virtually tour other locations.

We got our own Oculus Rift development kit at the PCMag labs, and we're going to explain everything you need to know about this remarkable headset. You need to remember first and foremost that this is a development kit. It's not intended for consumers, as there's little finished software available. Instead, it's meant for developers who want to make their software Oculus Rift-compatible for when Oculus VR finally announces a consumer version of the Rift. That said, its price and relative simplicity make it extremely easy to consider if you want to tinker with VR, yourself.

Setup

The development kit comes with the Rift with an attached control box, three sets of lenses, a power adapter with North American and international plugs, an HDMI cable, an HDMI-to-DVI adapter, a lens cloth, and a USB cable, all in a handy plastic case. Oculus VR recommends not wearing glasses when using the Rift, and so the three lenses offer adjustable focal distances for users with good eyesight, moderate nearsightedness, and heavy nearsightedness. The lenses twist in and out of place on the headset, and can be adjusted to your eyesight with diopter adjustment discs on the sides of the head-mounted display (HMD).

Setting the Oculus Rift up was surprisingly easy. The small control box attached to the HMD by a long cable uses three connections to function: The power port plugs into the wall to power the Oculus Rift, the DVI port accepts the video feed from the computer through either DVI or HDMI (using the included adapter), and the USB port connects the motion sensors to allow head tracking. Once I hooked up those cables, the Oculus Rift worked with any compatible software I tried.

Instead of using two displays to offer two separate images for stereoscopic 3D, the Oculus Rift uses a single LCD screen built into the HMD. Any compatible software splits the picture into side-by-side 3D and renders it into a warped circular view to work with the Rift's lenses, producing the 3D effect. This is actually a brilliant way to handle the 3D effect, because it lets the Oculus Rift appear to the connected computer as a second monitor that can handle a normal video feed, and means neither the computer nor the HMD have to do complicated video processing to show 3D. In fact, if you mirror the display so it shows the output to the Oculus Rift on a monitor, it shows the un-lensed, un-separated image the Rift is receiving: two circular views of the same image, slightly adjusted to produce a 3D effect when separated and seen through lenses. Everything happens inside the software, away from the display adapter and HMD.

This leads to a small problem with usability, though. Since the Rift uses just one LCD screen in the HMD and relies on side-by-side 3D with adjustments for the lenses, a "regular" view of the computer screen will look like two warped halves of the screen and make basic, non-3D interaction almost impossible with the Rift. This is an HMD meant to be used as either a mirrored or extended display, with a regular monitor used for normal computer interaction.

games

Games

If you want to play video games on the Oculus Rift, your choices are severely limited. Currently, only a small handful of games have native Oculus Rift support currently running. Valve's Team Fortress 2 supports the Oculus Rift out of the box, but if you want to play any other game, you'll need to tinker.

I found the Vireio Perception tool, a 3D driver that works with the Rift to expand the list of Rift-compatible games. It takes the 3D graphics of the supported game and turns it into an adjusted side-by-side 3D picture the Rift can use. It adds Rift support to Half-Life 2, Dear Esther, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and even Mirror's Edge, but each game has its own quirks to get the most out of the driver, and the effectiveness of it varies between games. Source engine games like Half-Life 2 and Dear Esther might need to adjust their field-of-vision settings with console commands, and have their shadow details change to prevent them from casting unnaturally between the images.

While Perception has Oculus Rift presets for both the display and the head tracker, you will almost certainly have to make adjustments using the built-in Schneider-Hicks Optical Calibration tool. Pressing Ctrl+I brings up several prompts and overlays that, when combined with hotkeys to adjust picture separation and convergence, can adjust specific games' 3D effects with Perception to work best with the Oculus Rift and your eyes. I found these adjustments easier said than done, because when testing Half-Life 2 the picture's boundaries were so skewed I couldn't easily read the prompts or the game's menu options with the Oculus Rift. Dear Esther worked surprisingly well with no calibration, but I had to tweak the shadows.

Because it has native, developer-added Oculus Rift support, Team Fortress 2 works slightly better than games loaded with Perception. It still requires a small tweak to work, though: you need to load the game with the vr modifier to put it into Oculus Rift mode.

The 3D effect and head tracking can range from very good to excellent in both games with native support and games that work with Perception, but there are several quirks that show up. Using both the head tracking and the mouse can be very disorienting, especially when you're playing a first-person shooter and aiming at something.

In Team Fortress 2, the aiming reticule moves with the mouse within an invisible box in the center of the screen, and the entire view moves with the head tracker or by moving the cursor to the edge of the box with the mouse to spin faster. It's an effective compromise in most cases, but between your head and the mouse it's very easy to lose track of where you're aiming, and the rendered weapons in the game offer no help by getting in the way of the camera (which produces a great 3D effect but makes it difficult to shoot). The sniper was effectively unplayable, because when looking through the scope it appeared like a small circle I had to find with my head while moving with the mouse, making it extremely disorienting. Directly linking the head tracking to the mouse movement and keeping the reticule in the middle of the screen works well for games that use Perception instead of native support, but then you have to deal with every head twitch throwing off your careful aim. Hopefully developers will find a better compromise between the two input methods by the time the Oculus Rift is ready for commercial release.

Menu navigation is the other problem, because the Oculus Rift (and its round, lens-warped field of vision) isn't meant for reading text or navigating user interfaces. The Rift's design is great for creating a realistic 3D effect and a field of vision similar to your eyes, but the effective area where text is readable is extremely limited. This made finding servers in Team Fortress 2 slightly awkward, but passable. Perception made menu navigation in Half-Life 2 and Dear Esther nearly impossible, though, because their menu items appear on the far edge of the screen and are either warped or invisible based on my field of vision. This is an issue that can be solved with developers making their GUIs with the Oculus Rift in mind as well, but it's something to watch out for.

Tech Demos

Tech Demos

While the game scene for the Oculus Rift isn't too promising yet, you can still show off what the HMD can do. Oculus VR released its own "Tuscany" demo made with the Unity engine, and many more demos are being made by developers exploring the Rift's potential. RiftEnabled offers a huge list of current and upcoming software titles that support the Rift, including over 20 free, readily available tech demos.

Most of these tech demos are made in Unity, with the occasional Unreal Engine-based demo thrown in. They range from the mundane, like touring a house, to the fantastic, like piloting a tank or riding a roller coaster. They're a far cry from full games and few demos will distract you for more than five minutes, but they're a great way to show just what the Oculus Rift can be used for.

The most directly fun (and popular in the lab) demo was RiftCoaster, an Unreal Engine-based roller coaster simulation by MTBS3D's message board's boone188. The simulation takes you on a ride through a fantasy wooden roller coaster that winds through a castle. The head tracker lets you look around while the wooden cart moves on the track, and the 3D effect can produce genuine vertigo at the first vertical drop. It's a great experience that can really give you a version of the experience of riding a roller coaster, if you're in the right mood. For a proof of concept by a message board user who wanted to try out the Unreal Development Kit, it's surprisingly effective and a must-download for Oculus Rift users.

Another demo, vrTanks by Kel Elkins, is the most fully game-like I've seen so far, and one of the most enjoyable. It's a simplified version of the arcade game Battlezone, where you sit in the cockpit of a tank and drive around shooting other tanks. The head tracking controls your view and the tank's gun (which unfortunately isn't rendered or has a reticle), while the keyboard controls the tank itself. The enemy tanks and the backgrounds don't offer much of a 3D effect, but looking around the tank cockpit against the black, Tron-like background of the game is immersive. While it's game-like, it still isn't a game; there are no objectives or scores, so shooting tanks and avoiding tanks' shots is meaningless.

Arch Virtual's Architectural Visualization demo is one of the more interesting tech demos because it shows what the Oculus Rift could do in a commercial setting. It's a proof of concept of using the Oculus Rift, Unity, and Autodesk Revit to make a virtual house you can talk around in and look around. The demo, like several other Oculus Rift demos, is a walk through a small area with a single structure, in this case a modern house. The 3D and head-tracking make it feel much more like exploring a house than looking at the same program through a computer monitor, and shows that the Oculus Rift could be used to let potential homeowners walk through their dream house before the design is finalized.

Should You Get It?

Since it's a development kit, I can't fairly evaluate the Oculus Rift as a product or give it a score. I can, however, tentatively recommend it to gadget fanatics who want to try out virtual reality. It's $300, which is dirt-cheap for a future-tech dev kit, and there are enough tech demos to offer you and your friends a fascinating, immersive experience.

For a dev kit, the Oculus Rift is surprisingly easy to get working with no programming knowledge whatsoever. It's nearly plug-and-play, and if you can follow simple instructions you can get it running with Team Fortress 2 and a few other games, and play with plenty of tech demos. I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn't have to tweak drivers or use an SDK and a programming environment to try out VR, and I wouldn't be surprised to finds the setup for any consumer Oculus Rift to be similar to this one's process.

Oculus VR is staying quiet on the prospect of a consumer Oculus Rift, and while dozens of developers are promising future native Oculus Rift support for previously released games we've heard very little on the progress for that support on basically every game besides Team Fortress 2. More importantly, it's clear that even with native graphical and tracking support, games need redesigned user interface that better work with the Oculus Rift, based on the drastically different field of vision the Rift offers.

Oculus VR is trying to catch up to its slew of orders for the dev kit, and consumer adoption is a long way off, but if you're a tinkerer or extreme early adopter the Oculus Rift could be a great project for you. Besides ongoing testing with Oculus Rift-supported software, I plan to experiment with some lenses to see if I can open up our Rift to conventional side-by-side 3D, without the skewed (but more human eye-like) field of vision. For the price, it could be one of the most frustrating and rewarding tech toys you'll pick up this year.

Further Reading

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