Virtual Reality is Always almost here By Adi Robertson | Photography by James Bareham

For a long time, the hopes and dreams of many virtual reality fans could be summed up with two words: Oculus Rift. Helped by the rise of cheap smartphone displays, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey took a technology that most people considered a retro curiosity and convinced them that it could change the world. The Rift let you skydive without a parachute. It helped artists show the world through another person’s eyes. It simulated beheading. It put you in fictional settings that ranged from kaiju-fighting robots to Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment.

And then, slowly, the Rift got company — from competition like the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, as well as totally new VR categories like Google Cardboard and Oculus’ own mobile Gear VR headset. Consumer virtual reality went from a gaming peripheral to an all-purpose entertainment device, and then to the next great evolution in computing. While "Oculus Rift" was no longer a synonym for "virtual reality," Oculus remained a central player, especially after Facebook purchased it for an estimated $2 billion. There was just one problem: nobody knew what the Rift would look like, or when it would come out. Luckey and the rest of Oculus’ leadership were adamant about not making promises they couldn’t keep, or delivering an undercooked product — two things that doomed consumer virtual reality decades ago. But after nearly four years, the finished Oculus Rift has shipped to its very first group of customers, and it’s time to see whether the headset that started it all is still pushing the cutting edge of virtual reality.

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

Oculus rarely brags about its industrial design, but one of the best things it’s done is make something so stereotypically geeky look (relatively) natural. The $599 consumer Rift is full of clever and thoughtful touches, starting with the delightfully soft rubberized carrying case it ships in, which makes the whole thing feel like a cyberpunk hacker’s console. The all-black headset is downright understated by gaming hardware standards, with a front of smooth rubber, sides coated in coarse cloth, and lenses surrounded by a web of lycra. It’s tethered to a PC by a single wire, which runs out your left temple and along one of the adjustable side straps. William Gibson’s best-known foray into virtual reality might be Neuromancer, but the Rift feels more like something from his design-obsessed novel Pattern Recognition — it’s the kind of minimalist product that its brand-allergic, coolhunting protagonist Cayce Pollard might approve of. The screen’s clarity depends on precisely how it’s angled toward your eyes Getting the Rift to fit right can prove elusive at first. While there’s a small focus knob at the bottom, a lot of the screen’s clarity depends on precisely how it’s angled toward your eyes, and it’s easy to give yourself a headache by strapping it as tightly as possible to keep the best fit. But once you get used to wearing it, the headset feels lighter and more comfortable than most of its competition, sealing against your face with a firm but pliable ring of foam. Since I have yet to break a sweat in the Rift, I can’t say how easy it is to clean, but the ring is removable and replaceable — although there’s no spare included. I also don’t have to deal with wearing glasses, but my Verge colleagues who do have had a positive response — they could either fit the headset over moderately-sized frames or, depending on their prescription, get the screen in focus without them. Along with a cylindrical black tracking camera on a slender 8-inch stand, the Rift comes with two accessories: an Xbox One gamepad and a small, simple device called the Oculus Remote. Unlike Sony and HTC, Oculus isn’t launching the Rift with a full controller of its own, since its Oculus Touch hardware will arrive in the second half of this year. For now, the chunky and colorful Xbox gamepad seems slightly out of place alongside the sleek Rift design. The oval-shaped black remote, by contrast, fits right in, although its construction doesn’t feel as solid as the rest of the system. The Rift is something I’d be happy to have in my living room, and compared to the developer-focused Oculus devices of years past, it’s a breeze to set up. The 4-meter headset tether ends with one USB and one HDMI port, and the tracking camera is plugged in with its own USB cable — there’s no external power cable or controller box for either piece. You’ll just download Oculus’ Windows app and run through a short, though descriptive, setup checklist before getting into VR. Granted, getting to this point requires having a powerful gaming desktop, which can produce plenty of glitches on its own. And since most PCs have only one HDMI port, you’ll need to use a different connection for your monitor, an extra and not totally intuitive step for many people. For the most part, though, it’s as easy as I can imagine installing a totally new kind of computer hardware to be.

None of this matters if the view from inside the Rift is no good — and fortunately, it holds up. The headset contains a pair of lenses, a gyroscope and accelerometer, a pair of decent-quality removable earphones, and two 1200 x 1080 screens. The image they produce is bright and relatively clear (although it still has a bit of the graininess that almost all VR headsets struggle with), and the overall resolution is about the same as the single-screened Gear VR. Any bright lights in the center of the virtual world sometimes reflect what looks like a lens flare around the edges of your vision, but it’s minimally distracting. The Rift’s field of view doesn’t seem better than previous versions, but it’s wide enough to give you a decent amount of peripheral vision. There’s almost no visible latency; as long as you stay within sight of the camera, it mirrors your head movement precisely, even when you turn completely around. The Rift’s single-tracking camera doesn’t give you as much space to move around in as the "room-scale" HTC Vive or a two-camera Oculus Touch setup, but it supports a few steps in any direction; I measured a functional square of space around six and a half feet wide and four and a half deep. The biggest problem is that it’s impossible to tell where that space ends until you step outside it, causing a sickening jerk as the world stops responding to your motion. Right now, it’s not particularly noticeable, because almost none of the Rift launch titles ask you to move. A few make sense standing up, like the diorama-like tower defense game Defense Grid 2, but the vast majority seem intended to play in a stationary chair, looking straight forward with occasional turns of the head.

The result is a lot of games where VR feels like an addition, not a transformation. Most of the first-person experiences could translate to flat screens without much trouble, and some — like space exploration game Adrift — are already coming to both VR and flatscreen platforms like PC and PlayStation 4. The plethora of third-person action games like Lucky’s Tale might need to be redesigned slightly for players who can’t lean over the environments, but they’re still close adaptations of established formats. The titles that feel most clearly designed for virtual reality were early experiments that came to Gear VR before the consumer Rift. That includes Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which takes advantage of a headset’s isolating effects, and Darknet, whose sprawling puzzle maps would look painfully cramped on a smaller screen. The result is a lot of games where VR feels like an addition, not a transformation In some cases, VR still fills genuine gaps in a familiar experience. CCP’s EVE: Valkyrie could certainly have been developed as a standard space-fighting game, a genre whose controls usually confound me. But somehow, being able to see the cockpit all around me makes it easier to understand how my ship should move, and using the Rift’s head tracking to fire missiles feels much better than pointing a joystick. Racing or flying simulations aren’t things that could only be done in VR, but it’s arguably the best place for them. Conversely, VR-friendly design occasionally hampers a game. Chronos, a beautiful fantasy game that’s become one of my favorite Rift launch titles, uses the same combat mechanics as Dark Souls. Unlike Dark Souls, the camera moves between fixed angles for each area instead of directly following the player. This gives you a perfect view of its beautiful environments, and it cuts the risk of motion sickness to almost zero. But it also means that large enemies can block your view of the protagonist, and the camera will disorientingly pop to a completely different location if you move too far during a battle.