Headset specs Headset weight 470 grams (~1 lbs) Display 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) OLED panels Refresh rate 90 Hz Field of view 110 degrees Lens spacing 58-72mm (adjustable) Controllers Xbox One gamepad and Oculus Remote (both included) Head Tracking 3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, and external "Constellation" IR camera tracking system Audio Integrated over-ear headphones with 3D directional audio support and built-in microphone PC connection 4m custom cable (integrates HDMI and USB connections) Included games Lucky's Tale (and Eve Valkyrie with pre-order) Price $600

Recommended PC specs GPU NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater CPU Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater RAM 8GB OS Windows 7 SP1 or newer Outputs 3 USB 3.0 ports (for headset, tracking camera, wireless controller dongle), one HDMI 1.3 port

It took me a few days with an Oculus Rift before I really felt comfortable swiveling my head around while playing a video game. Sure, I’d gotten somewhat used to the idea in years of trade show VR demos or while playing around with my own Oculus Rift development kits and Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR. But those experiences were fighting with decades of gaming experiences where my head generally stayed glued to one spot, pointed at the center of a TV or monitor, and tilted only occasionally to maybe get a better view of something in the corner.

It can be easy to fall back into the “look straight ahead” habit when you first start playing many Rift games. Even when the 3D display showed items flying past my shoulder or out of my peripheral vision, I’d often reach instinctively for the right analog stick or the shoulder buttons on my controller to try to turn the camera. It would take a split second before I realized, “Hey, wait, I can just turn and look for the thing I want to see.”

It might sound hyperbolic, but this is a change that requires looking at and thinking about gaming in an entirely new way. The final consumer version of the Rift now shipping to early adopters shows that Oculus has taken that rethinking seriously, putting years of development and billions of Facebook dollars of careful work toward the problem. But it also shows some early rough edges, especially on the platform software side, and these small blemishes highlight the fact that we’re still very much in the first generation of consumer-grade virtual reality.

Looking into the virtual world

On paper, the Oculus Rift is just a small, 2160x1200 OLED screen that gets strapped extremely close to your face. In practice, though, wearing a Rift feels like being surrounded by the biggest monitor you’ve ever used. By tracking your head’s position and angle and changing the image to reflect your new view 90 times per second, the Rift simulates an edge-free, spherical screen that surrounds you in 360 degrees up and down and side to side.

This isn’t just looking at the inside of a rounded globe, either. Because it sends separate, carefully aligned images to each eye, every pixel on the Rift seems to have an actual depth to it. This isn’t the “Oh, neat, I can kind of see into the monitor” depth you might be used to on 3D flat panels; it's a real, honest-to-goodness, navigable volume that extends from the tip of your nose to the horizon. You can actually lean down and look around any obstruction that’s in the way.

It’s very hard to convey with words, pictures, or videos just how different this experience is from looking at a standard 2D monitor. You’ll find yourself instinctively flinching away from objects as they fly at your face or doing a double-take when you see something surprising in the corner of your eye. The virtual reality illusion can give a real sense of vertigo when looking over a cliff or an overwhelming sense of awe looking across a vast vista. Going from a monitor to the Rift’s VR is like going from looking at nothing but moving paintings in a dark cave to looking at the real world in sunlight for the first time.

That said, there are some lingering issues with the Rift’s simulation of reality. Number one is focus. While it’s perfectly comfortable to look at objects in the apparent middle distance on the Rift, things get worse at the extremes. At far distances, objects can descend into a muddy, blurry mess much more quickly than on a high-res monitor. And at extremely short distances, your eyes sometimes have to cross extremely hard to align the images on the screen. As in the real world, you may want to close one eye in these situations to get a better focus on things like lettering up close.

















The other problem is resolution. The apparent “screen door effect” caused by black space between pixels on older headsets has largely disappeared on the latest Rift, unless you really go looking for it. But viewing those tightly packed pixels at such a short distance can sometimes cause a level of blurring and jagged edges that feels decidedly retro.

Just how apparent those problems are depends largely on the graphical resolution of the software itself and the detail settings that can be handled by the underlying PC hardware (I didn’t have any trouble running all the Rift launch games I tried at the highest settings on a test rig with a GTX 980). And even relatively low-res games can be impressive thanks to that sense of depth and scale I mentioned above.

When you take off the headset and look at the “raw” gameplay image that’s often shown on the monitor, you remember just how sharp games can look when the pixels aren’t forced a couple of inches from your face. If those old, 2D monitors offer a nearly photo-realistic moving painting, the Rift offers the fuller view of the real world through a slightly distorting polarizing lens.