Oculus Rift DK2 – the future is almost here

GameCentral reports back on the all new virtual reality demos from E3, but finds there’s still a major problem with current VR headsets.

We were planning to do this round-up of virtual reality games today anyway, but as if to emphasise just how important VR is becoming Oculus has just announced they’ve bought the company that designed the original Xbox 360 controller. Which certainly says something about how serious they are about gaming, especially now they have the financial backing of Facebook.

But despite this the Oculus Rift headset and Sony’s Project Morpheus made only minor appearances at this year’s E3. Although you can rest assured that’s not going to last for long…



In comparing the two headsets though there’s surprisingly little difference in terms of technical specifications, with both running at the same resolution; and although Oculus has a slight wider field of vision (at 110 degrees to Morpheus’ 90 degrees) it’s not a prominent difference.


There were no latency or lag issues at all for us, on either headset, and we had no probems with nausea or dizziness. Although the caveat to that is that none of the demos lasted more than five minutes and being at E3 for three days already creates such a permanent sense of mild disorientation that it probably wasn’t the best place to test such things.

In terms of physical design Morpheus already feels much closer to being a finished product, even though most of the Oculus Rift headsets we used were the brand new DK2 versions. Despite this Oculus Rift is pretty uncomfortable to use if you already wear glasses. For a couple of demos we managed to get the swimming goggles-like apparatus to sit over our glasses relatively comfortably, but in one case it became so painful to wear we had to give up halfway through. By comparison Project Morpheus is much more ergonomically designed, and very easy to adjust if you’re already wearing glasses.

Project Morpheus – currently the more comfortable option

Neither headset is anywhere near the finished product though and both companies insist that the design and technical specifications may change significantly before release. When that will happen is unclear, but next Christmas seems like the earliest possible for either headset. At which point we’ll hopefully get a better idea for how much each will cost.

But there is a serious issue with both headsets, that we feel is being underplayed by those desperate not to speak a word of criticism about Oculus Rift and VR in general: the resolution just isn’t high enough. Put on either headset for the first time and your first impression is not of seamless immersion, but that you seem to be viewing the game through a gauze-like filter – like RoboCop’s low res view of the world from the original film.

Both Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus run at 1080p but that’s just not enough when the TV screens are only millimetres from your eyeballs. Considering how well everything else works we really hope that both headsets are delayed until the resolution can be improved, because as it stands now it still only feels like a work in progress – a preview of the future rather than the future itself.



Below are our impressions of the E3 demos, and after that we spoke to EVE Valkyrie designer Ian Shiels about some of the technical issues, including whether or not first person games shooters work in virtual reality…

Alien Isolation – virtual nightmare

Alien Isolation (Oculus Rift)

We’ve already named Alien Isolation as our favourite playable game at E3 2014, and that was in part due to its Oculus Rift demo. It was a very short excerpt from the full game but the second you put on the headset your view of reality is immediately replaced with that of Ridley Scott’s classic film. Not only was this the only traditional first person demo at the show but the ‘low-fi sci-fi’ of the Alien Isolation world makes the low resolution almost feel intentional.

But while Isolation is scary enough on a TV the VR version is literally paralysing. Caught in our self-inflicted nightmare we slowly inched around the spacestation, hoping our familiarity with the game would save us. Looking at our motion tracker though brings up a spindly looking virtual arm that seems to belong to someone else way off to our left. It’s a highly unconvincing effect but if it suggests that the demo was slapped together very quickly then it’s all the more impressive that everything else works so well.

Thanks to bad luck (or design, perhaps to keep the demo short) the alien is standing right in front of us as we turn a corner, and although we know it won’t help we have no option but to run. Suddenly though we can’t move and looking down, not by moving a joystick but glancing down with our head, we see the alien’s spear-like tail push through our virtual body. Then, most horribly, its bony hand reaches round and closes in our face, as the demo ends in darkness…

Lucky’s Tale – boring game, amazing tech demo

Lucky’s Tale (Oculus Rift)


The diametric opposite of Alien Isolation in every way, Lucky’s Tale was in many ways the most interesting demo at E3 because it was not at all what you’d expect of a VR game. It’s a third person platformer that’s clearly trying to channel Nintendo greats such as Super Mario 3D World. As a platformer it’s bland and uninventive, but looking down at a third person game using the Oculus Rift is just as awe-inspiring as a first person title.

Thanks to the new positional head-tracking of the DK2 headset you can peer over the game world like you’re looking at a model village, turning your head to see details that would otherwise be obscured by the scenery. It was a revelation to us that even with the third person view and slowly tracking camera the headset still made the experience feel so unique and interesting. The game itself is almost completely uninteresting but the implications for everything from MOBAs to beat ’em-ups is obvious.

Superhot (Oculus Rift)

Easily our least favourite game demo of the day, this was technically a first person shooter, but with the twist that time is paused by default and only moves forward as you do. The demo has three luminous bad guys shooting at you from one end of a corridor, and you have to dodge their bullets for long enough to reach a gun on the floor. It’s an unusual and original idea but it’s also a hugely frustrating one that we had no fun with whatsoever.


After a few goes we worked out the zigzagging rhythm needed to get to the gun but by that point we were just glad it was all over. It doesn’t even do anything particularly interesting with the headset itself, and to be honest the 3D sound effects of the bullets passing by in slow motion were more interesting.

EVE Valkyrie (Oculus Rift and Morpheus)

This remains the most mature of all the VR games, with EVE Online maker CCP currently the most experienced developer around when it comes to using Oculus Rift. That said the E3 demo wasn’t too different to ones we’ve seen before, although the virtual cockpit in which you sit in is more detailed – as you look around the inside of your starfighter and out of its windows. That said it does all look more like you’re sitting in a cardboard set rather than a real vehicle.

The voiceover from Katee ‘Starbuck’ Sackhoff was new too, as we pilot around a giant capital ship shooting down other fighters. The reason space combat simulators are so popular for VR games is that you’re still sitting down despite all the movement, plus looking around the cockpit for your target is infinitely easer with a headset than it is trying to point your ship directly at who you want to shoot.

Whether Valkyrie will have anything like the depth or complexity of classics like X-Wing and Freespace we’ve no way of telling, but mechanically it works almost perfectly. Interestingly Valkyrie was present as a tech demo for both Oculus Rift and Morpheus, and in fact most developers we spoke to said they were keen to support both headsets.

Elite: Dangerous (Oculus Rift)

We’ve already described our meeting with Elite creator David Braben here, but although Dangerous was not made with VR in mind, as EVE Valkyrie was, it still works extremely well even with Elite’s more complicated controls. It also had features we didn’t see in any other games, such as holographic menus that automatically pop up when you look to the left or right and a moving virtual hand on the throttle (in Valkyrie your virtual self is frozen in place, which is a bit disconcerting).

The Assembly (Oculus Rift)

This demo, by British company nDreams, was running on the older DK1 headset, so there was no head-tracking. The graphics were rather basic too but it was interesting to see a first person game made specifically for VR (both Oculus Rift and Morpheus) that again emphasised slow movement over running and gunning.

The game is essentially a graphic adventure, except instead of pointing and clicking you get to poke around the game world as if you’re really there. The Portal-esque story involves unscrupulous experiments at an underground laboratory, with the demo puzzle locking us in a room slowly filling with gas. We have to admit we didn’t solve it before succumbing to the fumes, but we’re pretty sure it involved using a fork to short circuit the electrics in the room…

Street Luge (Morpheus)

Sony only mentioned Morpheus in passing during their pre-E3 press conference and there were only two new demos on the show floor (EVE Valkyrie was the other one), but despite the low key approach they were still hugely popular with the crowds. Thankfully we were able to get a go behind closed doors, which was particularly advantageous for the Street Luge demo, as you were encouraged to lie down on bean bags so that your physical body is at the same angle as your virtual one.

Rather than just being some on-the-rails roller coaster this was a proper game, as you lean left and right while barrelling down roads that are strangely still full of traffic. In fact one of the best bits was passing directly under cars, as you see their underside fly past.

The science of virtual reality

Again, we should emphasis that none of these demos were meant to last much more than three minutes, a fact we found very suspicious. Especially as the only exception was Lucky’s Tale, which also happened to be the only third person game. But speaking to EVE Valkyrie’s Ian Shiels afterwars he claimed to have conducted tests with people playing for up to 20 minutes at a time, with no ill effects.

As he explained to us there will always be a small majority that can’t use VR headsets but in most cases it only takes 90 seconds or so to get used to the sensation.

‘It’s not motion sickness, it’s simulation sickness, which is the opposite. Because there is no motion occurring with your body, but your brain thinks you’re moving, you get a disconnect, which is not good. But you can train yourself so the effect is lessened and there’s only a small number of people where it’s a real problem’.

Another thing we noticed at E3 is the surprising lack of first person shooters, which you would’ve thought would be the first kind of game anyone would try and get to work with VR. And again the fact that it’s not suggests to us that something fishy is going, especially as the few exceptions are slower paced games like Alien Isolation and Portal.

‘I don’t think any particular genre is impossible in VR because there’s been such little work so far by any dedicated teams,’ says Shiels. ‘I think if you consider the improvements in the hardware in just a year, I don’t think the focus has been on the software and a lot of the ports we’ve seen so far, in the genre, have been relatively low in terms of work intensity’.

That said a lot of Shiels comments seemed to suggest that playing Call Of Duty with a headset on for three hours at a time is not the future of VR; not just because of problems with fatigue and simulation sickness but because the controls underneath are quite complex and likely to be difficult for non-gamers to get to grips with.

In terms of our primary concern, about the resolution of the two headsets, Shiels is non-committal but optimistic.

‘We have to watch this space along with consumers’, he says. ‘We’d be confident that the next step up, which is probably 1440 vertical pixels, that that would be fantastic looking; just sublime. But I couldn’t say when that would happen and if it’d be for the first consumer versions’.

Clearly the resolution will improve over time, the only question is what it’ll be for the two headsets when they officially launch in the year or so to come.

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