Oculus Rift Review

The Oculus Rift. Let's start by introducing the hardware. The rift is a head mounted display that consist of a single screen mounted on ski-goggle-like thingy that have two custom round lenses in it. It is rigged with orientation sensors that allow it to detect the angle of your head and send it to the software running on your PC. Those, together with an external camera that is used to track the position of your head (think Kinect) allows the device to track any head movements. Games technically need to write special code to support it but Oculus supplies this code for the major game engines (Unity, Unreal and another one i don't remember) so it should be simple to add support for games that run on those engine.

The setup isn't hard by boy it involves lots of wires. One HDMI cable from your video card for the screen to work. One USB cable to transfer the data. One optional(???) power cable. One cable to connect the headset to the camera and another USB cable from the camera to the PC. Those are a mess and prevent you from just leaving the rift on your table all the time like you'd do with a game controller or other accessory. Worse still they can, at times, limit your movement while you're using the rift. more on that latter. hopefully when it'll be released they'll make at least some of those into wireless. The HDMI is there to stay of course but...

Because the Oculues is essentially a ski-goggle my acquaintances reported having a real trouble using it with glasses. The Oculus comes with two sets of lenses "Normal" and "Near-sighted" but I don't know how good the experience with the second one are. You might or might not be able to use it with contact lenses.
At first i had a bit of a problem focusing my eyes - you ARE looking at a screen few inches away from your eyes and not into the wide open valley in your game - yet it went away after a use or two and never came back.

Now for the real thing. The head tracking is very very good. You can look around in your game in a very natural manner. Look at the sky, see the "3D-ness" of objects and generally feel like your head is in the game. The Internet mentioned people experiencing dizziness but I feel that me being a gamer made me immune to it. Few colleagues reported slight dizziness while my parents where screaming "take this thing off me!" after just a minute or two. As I said, except for one very steep slope in Team Fortress 2 I haven't felt even a hint of dizziness and so were the case for most people who tried it.

The screen on the rift suck. they claim it 1080p but I'm not sure if I believe them. It might be because of how close is the screen to your eyes but you can CLEARLY see individual pixels. it feels as if you're watching your game though a dense net. Additionally in order to work properly your head needs to be in very specific position compared to the lenses. Normally the head straps take care of it but if those shift for some reason, and they will, you'll HAVE to pause your game. Another unexpected problem is the weight. If you'll use if for periods longer than a hour you'll start to really feeling the strain on your neck.

I noticed the following behavior after using it for a while. Despite having the freedom to move your head and change your perspective at will you end up staring forward at the screen as you'd do with a monitor and only occasionally look around. It might be to one of a few reasons. First of all, think of it, how often you make large movements with your head in normal life? More often than not my head is relatively still and I just move my eyes. It sounds weird when described like this but just try taking notice of your head position while writing your replay to me.. or even while walking in the middle of the street. Another reason might be due to the fact that despite using the Oculus you still have access to your natural camera controlling interface a.k.a. the mouse or the right joystick. You have to keep those because you can't make 360 turns with the Oculus. Not because it doesn't support it but because you'll end up facing backwards to your PC. (And the keyboard. and the Oculus camera..). So you often just use it instead of swinging your head. Last reason i can think of is the numerous cables connected to your head I mentioned before. Those aren't fun.

Conclusion: It's a cool gadget. It has great potential, yet it's still very much a work in progress. Even when it'll be released it probably won't replace conventional monitors even for gamers. What it'll do is to enrich the experience for any first or even third person games you might play.