The Oculus Rift-powered EVR is like a secret project developed by a team of super heroes. By day, the small, mild mannered team that assembled the multiplayer space-dogfighting game works in a variety of roles in the EVE Online and Dust 514 realms, but by night these superdevs assembled one of the most impressive showcases yet for Palmer Luckey’s VR headset…
I have seen the future, and it was through the eyes of another. In the time since id Software’s John Carmack first started showing off an early version of Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift VR headset back in 2011, creative thinkers in the interactive space have been mulling over their next steps. The recent post-Kickstarter release of the Rift developer kit creates an opportunity for those ideas to take shape, and we’ve seen everything from pure tech demos to headset-friendly unofficial patches to existing games like Mirror’s Edge and Team Fortress 2. EVR is the next logical step in the hardware’s progression…
CCP is not a developer renowned for its speediness; they are stern proponents of the “when it’s done, it’s done” philosophy. So for them to debut a working version of (potential) new game at their annual fan gathering, FanFest, was a huge surprise. EVR is just a demo for now, made in seven weeks by a small gang of CCP’s developers in their spare time, but it deserves to be more. This is a game that anyone who ever played Wing Commander, Rogue Squadron or Crimson Skies has dreamed of: a virtual-reality space dog-fighting game that puts you in the cockpit of a fighter craft…
Good things happen when developers give their artists time to work on original projects. There has long been a group of VR enthusiasts at CCP, the developer behind EVE Online and the DUST 514, and they bugged the folks at Oculus for development kits to play with…
Palmer Luckey built his first virtual-reality (VR) headset for a simple reason: Every attempt he’d seen, including his own collection of 46 pairs of goggles, failed in one way or another—too heavy, too slow, too limited a field of view. So he set out to invent the perfect pair himself. Three years after the first mockup, the company Luckey founded, Oculus, is launching a developer version of the Rift, the first consumer VR system to create a truly immersive experience…
The ability to place yourself into a game is incredible. I moved my gaming PC and the Rift into our dining room and invited my kids to play with it, and the results were as good as I’d expected. My daughter shrieked and laughed as she flew through the roller coaster. My son enjoyed shooting at enemy robots and feeling like he was a futuristic soldier…But even now, with the early work being done, the experience of the Oculus Rift is unlike anything else. I had the wonderful moment of standing next to my daughter, watching her fly around an medieval village. It felt wonderful. It felt like the future…
UnderCurrent is an Unreal-powered deep sea exploration game designed for Oculus Rift from a group of university students over in the UK. The group became fascinated with VR technology and has already put together three different levels, though the collective notes that some of the core mechanics of UnderCurrent are still undetermined…
Technology company Oculus has been gradually shipping out final developer kits for its Kickstarter-funded Rift head-mounted display to more than 9,000 backers. While we haven’t been able to do extensive in-home testing yet, we did manage to get some hands-on time with the final developer unit at a recent event…
Some technologies are ageless. We’ve been dreaming of virtual-reality worlds for a long time. With gadgets like the Oculus Rift headset, many people are getting their first shot at engaging with a virtual-reality environment. Paul Rivot’s grandmother is one of those people…
The Game Developers Conference is the kind of place where controllers for the PlayStation 4, Sony’s forthcoming console, sit under glass like the Hope Diamond, and where designers and other industry professionals line up for hours to try the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, which has begun shipping as prototypes to those who paid $300 for a development kit…
