Conquer virtual worlds in goggles

THE Rift headset will change the way VR is viewed.

IN an hour or so playing around with the Oculus Rift virtual ­reality headset I soared like a seagull above the Dutch coast, swooped through mountains like a hang glider pilot and ran around a creepy house like a crazed gamer.

Even using the less than perfect prototype of the Rift headset the sense of immersion is incredible. Wandering around a demo landscape with the Rift goggles on I looked over fields and trees gently stirring in the breeze. Point your head up, down, left and right and the view changes just like the real world except it’s a completely computer generated scene.

I walked over to a house, stepped inside and sidled up to the fire before climbing the stairs to check out the upstairs rooms. There were no nasties there.

The longer the goggles stayed on the more I got sucked in to the alternative reality. When this gadget, and others like it such as the Sony VR headset also in development, hit the street it won’t be long until stories emerge of gamers losing whole weekends to virtual worlds.

At the moment the Oculus Rift is a prototype for developers. I tried the first prototype version, which was available up until March this year, courtesy of Australia tech research outfit NICTA which is using the Oculus Rift to investigate VR applications.

It uses a seven inch screen and gives a 90 degree horizontal field of view and a resolution per eye of 640 by 800. Built-in head tracking hardware and software translates the position of your noggin to the application so the view matches where you point your head. Resolution was fairly pixelated and there was noticeable lag when I turned my head — the quicker I swivelled, the worse the lag.

The next developer version and the coming consumer version promise to be far more sophisticated. The latest version of the developer kit has much higher resolution per eye at 960 by 1080 pixels and far less lag. A consumer Oculus Rift is expected next year and the venture has plenty of money behind it, having being bought by social network giant Facebook.

After trying out the Rift, I have no doubt it will transform gaming, but it could also profoundly change everything from simulations to virtual tourism.

NICTA researchers have latched the Oculus Rift to a publicly available web application they have developed called Doarama (www.doarama.com) which lets you upload movement tracks generated by GPS devices and watch them play out in a 3D mapped diorama.

Ride a mountain bike or fly a paraglider across some terrain, upload the GPS track to Doarama and you can watch a replay in a web browser using 3D terrain generated in real time.

A new feature coming to Doarama this month allows you to annotate GPS journeys with pictures, notes and footage. I watched a demo where a mountain bike rider has helmet camera footage of his ride, synched to the GPS track of the journey on the terrain map.

Doarama has been a big hit with hang glider and paraglider pilots and I got to tag along on a couple of gliding trips and view the journey in VR using real time generated terrain maps.

I also got involved with a seagull’s perspective of the Dutch coast courtesy of some researchers in The Netherlands who fitted out a gull with a GPS tracker and uploaded the results of the bird’s flight.

In future we are likely to see all manner of VR experiences that use the Oculus Rift and other headsets in development such as VR guided tours for armchair tourists.