![]() One demonstration piece put the user in a cinema to watch 3D previews, and while the seating area responded impressively to the different light intensities on screen, the seats were still empty. Oculus’s chief scientist, Michael Abrash, said the industry still needed “more of everything” – more moving parts, sharper definition, dramatically improved graphics. We’ve dreamed about VR.”Įven if this is the beginning of a new era, it is by common consent very early days. ![]() Iribe, channeling Steve Jobs, made a rock-star entrance from stage right, wearing an Oculus t-shirt, dark designer jeans and a black jacket, and proceeded to talk about the magic revolution he believed he had unleashed. To virtual reality freaks in the gaming world, this feels like a watershed moment – as attested by the wild enthusiasm and clamorous applause of the attendees, most of them game developers, who filled the ballroom of a Hollywood conference hotel to capacity. The Gear put me on the very top of Berlin’s television tower circa 2002, and the view to the ground was so vertigo-inducing I caught myself clutching the side of the device, to steady myself. ![]() The Gear, as it will be known, was less polished than Crescent Bay when I tested it – it overheated the first time and froze the second time – but it still achieved moments of “presence”, particularly with its 360-degree photographs and videos. Two weeks ago, Samsung seconded the company’s confidence and announced it was producing the first commercial virtual reality device – essentially, a mobile version of the previous Oculus prototype with aSamsung Galaxy smartphone slapped across the front to act as the screen. Motion sickness is an issue that many gaming enthusiasts have happily overlooked for the past year or two but one that Oculus understands it had to conquer if it is to have any hope of selling virtual reality to the general public – the company’s chief executive, Brendan Iribe, called it “the elephant in the room” before declaring the elephant well and truly slain. This model, named Crescent Bay, represents a major leap forward – not only because it captures that lightning in a bottle and achieves “presence”, but also because it no longer induces nausea in most users. Already it is on to a third-generation device that, like its predecessors, will be sold to game developers so they can let their imaginations run rampant and come up with content commensurate with the state of the art. It’s been barely two years since the company was just a pushy start-up relying on a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, with only the haziest notion of how quickly it could create virtual 3D worlds and make them convincing enough to be commercially viable. She is, after all, trapped in a tiny airless cubicle all day, doing one demonstration after another for the hundreds of people lining up to try a new prototype from Oculus, the pioneering virtual reality developer which has jumped out so far ahead of the competition that it was snapped up by Facebook six months ago for a cool $2bn.īut I am a little angry with myself for suspending disbelief, against my better judgment, and achieving what the virtual reality geeks refer to as “presence” – that is to say, forgetting that my senses and mind are being shamelessly toyed with and behaving, however momentarily, as though the dinosaur staring me in the face were all too real. “That one really got you, didn’t it,” she says. And then he lurches forward to crush me underfoot.īack in the real word, which is to say no more than two feet away, I can hear my minder – my guide, my virtual reality goggle-strapper – laughing helplessly as I flinch and weave to dodge T-Rex’s pile-driver legs and his lethally wagging tail. #IPULSE INC FULL#I am, inexplicably, rooted to the spot, not running at full pelt, while T-Rex roars his terrible roar and slobbers his terrible slobber. A few minutes in, I’m no longer sure whether I’m facing forwards, backwards, or simply crouching for dear life as a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomps down the cavernous, echoing hallway of an empty big-city museum – at night. ![]() Specifically, I have a cutting-edge virtual reality device, halfway between an old-fashioned Polaroid camera and a snorkel mask, strapped over my face. I have seen the future, and I’m worried it’s really going to mess me up. ![]()
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