SAN FRANCISCOAfter an interminable wait for the most popular attraction here at this week's Game Developer Conference, I finally got my three minutes of heads-up, mech-battling virtual realityan over-before-you-know-it plunge into the "future of gaming," as many tech scribes have described Oculus VR's Rift platform.

The Oculus Rift has clearly come a long way since the Kickstarter-funded venture was demoing a very early version of its virtual reality headset at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Back then, PCMag's Will Greenwald wrote of his Oculus experience: "I don't know if I've seen the future of virtual reality, but I do know I've seen its best chance in decades of amounting to anything."

Fast forward a few short months, and the Oculus Rift seems poised to amount to a whole lot of anything. At CES, Oculus VR demoed a snippet of the sword-and-sorcery game Infinity Blade for some folks on a taped-together headset which seemed almost preposterously boot-strapped, as well as an early-stage, molded plastic prototype which Greenwald was able to test.

Still as "hilariously bulky" as my colleague found that prototype development version of the headset, the Rift I had strapped to my head at GDC has been subtly improved since CES, according to Oculus VR.

The 7-inch, 720p LCD display is now slightly larger, offering up 1280-by-800 resolution, or 640-by-800 per eye in the binocular configuration. Head tracking is ultra-low latency with 6 degrees of freedom, which might help to explain why I didn't experience the "seams" in the demo Greenwald described at CES, where "the textures of things like the stone walls and wooden shutters appear completely flat without advanced bump making, pixel shading, and other effects."

A bigger reason for why the Rift experience is now smoother and more realistic, as Greenwald deduced after his demo, is that better integration with the Unreal Engine 3 game engine for DirectX 11 games was needed. Oculus VR and Adhesive Games, developer of the mech combat game Hawken which served as the demo piece for the Rift, appear to have accomplished this over the past few months.

It may also be that the sprawling mechanical cityscape of Hawken is simply an easier palette for tricking the eye into accepting than the medieval village environment of Infinity Blade.

At any rate, and accounting for the fact that a few short minutes is scarcely time to get acquainted with the controls let alone to go bug-hunting, I found Hawken on the Oculus Rift to be a thrilling experience with smooth visual transitions and a surprisingly quick gameplay learning curve.

With a really enormous field of view, 110 degrees diagonal and 90 degrees horizontal, the Rift provides truly immersive virtual reality. I did have some trouble with head trackingultra low latency might as well have been no latency at all, as I found myself exclusively relying on the handheld controller to orient my view in the Hawken environment. Attempts to actually tilt or rotate my head to change views had no perceptible effect. Others demoing the Rift before and after me seemed to have a similar experienceit became amusing to watch folks tilt their heads to exaggerated degrees to seemingly no avail.

Bring on the Mechs But once I became aware that the controller was key and my head was simply along for the ride, navigation became easy, fun, and almost immediately natural for anyone with experience playing a first-person shooter. I was able to move around corners and even shoot up some rival mechs, though targeting the weapons on either hand of my mech seemed oddly offset to what my eyes were telling me I was aiming at.

The most fun I had in the brief demo was when I boosted my mech up above the grungy fray in the streets, taking it soaring through the upper reaches of the futurist metropolis with plenty of room to maneuver between the spires and gangways, and even managed to catch a glimpse of the massive arcologies looming beyond the boundaries of gameplay when I ran up against a glittering electrified barrier to moving in their direction.

And then it was over and the Oculus VR rep, who'd been a muted, helpful voice outside my virtual reality for the demo, was telling me my time was up and helping to pull the headgear off my head.

My far too brief encounter with virtual reality had come to an end. The bright lights of the Moscone Center hit me like a dose of all-too real reality and I hastily gave up my spot to another Rift newbie waiting in the Oculus VR booth for a spin on the merry-go-round.

My takeaway? This is technology that appears to be very close to mainstream delivery, though right now, Oculus VR is only shooting for the shipment of dev kits and has set no date on mass production. The experience itself, which I feared might cause me nausea, was thankfully vomit-free and really, that fear quickly dwindled as I played Hawken. At 7 ounces, I also thought the headset might start to put a strain on my neck, but again, not the case.

There are a few easy tweaks to the system that would make it ready for prime time. Adding audio and a mic would seem to be simple enough, for example.

Other improvements might require more heavy lifting. Speaking with an experienced VR developer at the show, I gathered that the Rift's pixel density is currently on the low end for presenting legible text onscreen. The Hawken demo didn't feature any menus or scripts at all, so I had no chance to test his theory. Incorporating movement capture, the other big craze here at GDC, could be generations away.

Then there's the odd feeling of closed-off isolation one feels with the Rift strapped on. I imagined I would be more conscious of being blind to the outside world, but wound up being surprisedalmost unpleasantly, in retrospectat how little I cared about my physical helplessness vis-à-vis the real world while immersed in virtual reality.

There's a nagging sense that the Rift is the next stage in bringing an already too-jacked in generation ever further into total digital dependence, to a world where physical, human contact is permanently sidelined.

What scares me, after just three minutes in a clunky, goofy Oculus Rift headset, is how quickly I'd sign up for more.

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