The Oculus Rift on Pre Order Soon, but No Price Yet.

Written by A.G Lee

Well It looks like the next big movement in gaming history is arriving sooner than we expected as humanity is now set to move into virtual reality gaming with the pre-orders of the Oculus Rift going live on January 6th. And with the pre orders set many would expect to atleast know a price by now, but lo none of us do and will not know until the 6th sadly enough. We’re sure alot of gaming fans have heard of the Oculus Rift or atleast seen small glimpses of the console-less device, as it is set to take hobbyists, fans, or even hardcore gamers on a 1st hand journey through the gaming world. No…? We got you covered!

What is it?

In case you don’t know the Oculus Rift is a set of virtual reality goggles that connect to your computer or mobile device where it will run software dependent of the specs of the OS. (Yes we mean games.). Oculus Rift was a product created by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe out of Irving, California and got the product up and going by gaining 2.5 million dollars of backing through kickstarter. The team at Irving then was purchased by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg in March 2014 for $2 billion dollars as the social media visionary looks to almost take the social media platform into the next level somehow and someway as he has the time and resources aka cash.

How Does it Work?

The goggles work by displaying a screen for each eye with the images side by side creating a stereoscopic 3d picture. There are sensors in the headset that very accurately tracks the movement of the users head giving you the real feel of looking around a 3d world. The controls are handheld and instead of a double handed controller each hand gets a controller that ergonomically fits around the fingers and mainly controlled by the thumb with intuitive finger gesture recognition. And while that may sound like exactly what we’d be expecting from the next revolution in gaming we can’t forget to say that until the settings are customized to user preferences there will be a good measure of motion sickness as the brain gets tricked into thinking the body is actually moving causing a frightening if not sickening experience for some.

With this the practical applications of virtual reality are almost boundless as filmmakers, hackers, and even open development teams are looking for ways to bring reality to virtual reality. Such as filmmakers looking for ways to allow Oculus Rift users to tour the set and see the actors/action in real time. Or normal everyday people showing people how to do things first hand. Sure people would like a tour of a city with the Oculus Rift, but there doesn’t seem to be a way for the device to go mobile yet as it does require external power.

Don’t expect for this awesome experience to hop onto devices anytime too soon as Sony has been developing their own virtual reality set so far called Project Morpheus and Microsoft looking for ways to improve their Kinect experience. But still a gaming revolution can be had by the device alone as we are set to finally get a price on possibly the next big thing as we start thinking of how awesome the next Call of Duty is going to look in virtual reality!