The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset display is still
without a release date, but early versions have already blown us away with the
device’s ability to immerse wearers in virtual worlds.
But there’s still a big question facing the team at Oculus:
What is virtual reality input?
Right now, you can play games while wearing the Oculus
headset while seated in front of your keyboard and mouse, or while holding a
controller. But when your display gives you the ability to look up, down and
all around you with lifelike head tracking, will we want a more immersive,
realistic type of input as well?
Teddy Lipowitz, a developer from Australia, has put together
a demo of the sort of thing we might play in the near future. Lipowitz, 32,
posted a demo on the Oculus Rift forums of a cover-based first-person shooter
that uses motion controllers.
The simplistic demo pits a single player with a gun against
an battalion of alien soldiers. Physically ducking with your body lets you hide
behind crates to dodge their blasts, and Lipowitz’s setup allows for precise
control of the gun.
The demo is so realistic, he says, that some players get a
little too immersed.
“Please be careful when playing this demo,” Lipowitz wrote
on the forums. “Lots of people try to support themselves on the crates when
they try to stand up or when leaning up against a column, but find there is
nothing there!”
The motion controllers aren’t just for gun control;
Lipowitz’ demo uses them to track the movement of the player’s torso. The
Oculus Rift tracks your head, not your body.
The demo makes use of Razer’s Hydra motion controllers, two
Wii-style wands that are sold as a bundle.
By strapping one of the wands to his chest and using another
as a gun, Lipowitz tracks his head, torso and arm movements. He can look around
while walking in a straight line, and the Rift headset and Hydra communicate so
things don’t get out of sync.
“Once I had that part figured out,” Lipowitz told WIRED in
an email, “the rest was pretty easy. 3-D games are really built for this kind
of thing!”
Lipowitz says that he’s tweaked things at a software level
about as well as he ever could, and that new hardware will have to be developed
to properly fix some of the remaining issues, like the jittery gun controls.
“Cables are the biggest problem at the moment,” he says.
“You’re limited to a pretty small play space, and if you turn around too many
times you’ll get tangled. I’ve built my levels so you’re mostly facing towards
your desk, which makes the layout quite linear.”
Lipowitz’s demo is available for free download, and he has
no plans on selling his code, saying he’s just “very excited about the
reincarnation of Virtual Reality.”
While the consumer version of the Oculus Rift is not yet on
shelves, the development kit version is available for $300 from Oculus, with
new orders slated to ship in September
