Palmer Luckey, a young upstart software enthusiast who started out working out of his parent’s garage is launching a Virtual Reality head mount called the “Oculus Rift”; a mind boggling virtual reality head mount that has sent the gaming industry buzzing. When Palmer recently posted the project on the funding platform “Kickstarter,” he quickly broke his initial goal of collecting $250,000 in funding, raising over $1 million in less than four hours.

Michael Abrash, developer at Valve software, a giant in the industry responsible for games such as Half Life 1 and 2, said in a recent interview that he tried out the Oculus Rift and concluded that it “could be the beginning of a whole new industry.”

The project has even drawn the attention of software wiz and iconic game developer John Carmack, the brains behind classic game series such as Doom and Quake. Carmack has recently developed an impressive head tracking device for the Oculus and made the game Doom III available on the VR device. Carmack concluded in a recent demonstration that the Oculus Rift is the best VR device “the world has ever seen.”

Palmer himself explained: “The problem was, there was nothing that gave me the experience that I wanted — The Matrix — where I could plug in and actually be in the game. I set out to change that with the Oculus Rift.”

What sets the Oculus Rift apart from other head mounts, such as Sony’s HMZ-T1 headset, is the technical aspects such as the higher resolution and most notably the extended field of vision. The field of view has previously been the main issue for most consumer level head mounts, with a tiny, 30 – 45 degree field of view as the maximum. John Carmack explains: “that’s like looking at the world through toilet paper tubes; it’s really not good for the immersion.”

The Rift has been able to achieve a 90 degree horizontal field of view and a 110 degree vertical: you are no longer watching a screen. The Oculus Rift has achieved complete immersion. The result: a VR device that, for the first time, puts you “in” the virtual world, removing the sense of separation via the extended field of vision and the head tracking device adjusting the in-game camera after your head movements.

The Oculus has reawakened the old hype and promise of Virtual Reality. An early prototype is projected to begin shipping in December for around 275 $. The product is still crude and under development, but the early demos have been described as “mind blowing.”  For now it’s only compatible with computer games, but will be integrated with other consoles such as Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, in the near future.

The article Rethinking the Matrix: Virtual Reality and the Oculus Rift appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

With the mass popularity of smartphone devices, nowadays, there is an ever increasing amount of the population with near-constant access to a very powerful, highly refined piece of technology. It’s not as if the basic idea behind the communication aspect of cell-phones is evolving much. People are simply finding more and more that having a powerful device with them at all times can be quite convenient.

Especially, it turns out, for the sake of mobile gaming, a relatively recent statistic published at Flurry.com (a mobile application marketing and analytics company) has revealed.

Revealed in the same blog entry is the fact that there are an estimated 250 million iOS and Android devices around the world, compared “to the 180 million Wiis, Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s currently on the market.” Given this sort of information, what does this say about who “gamer” is now personified by? To have access to a seemingly endless number of games, one no longer needs to purchase a dedicated gaming machine (e.g. Xbox 360, Wii, Playstation 3, etc.).

Gaming is now a secondary function to a device that many individuals in the Western world clarify as a necessity. Yet, as Flurry.com’s study has shown, people are using their smartphones more and more frequently to game, with as many as 37% of the apps launched by smartphone users being games.

John Carmack, a long-time veteran of game development, recently stated that he believes smartphone devices will soon be “more powerful than the current-gen consoles.” At that point, when games like the ones we now play on consoles can be played on a phone, how will one distinguish “gamer” as a hobby? You may have heard some disambiguation with terms like “hardcore gamer” and “casual gamer” being thrown around, with the latter having a greater inclination toward mobile gaming. But these are also misleading.

What isn’t “casual” about only spending three or four hours a week playing games on an Xbox 360, and what isn’t “hardcore” about those who check up on their iPhones every ten minutes to play a few minutes of a game they’re currently invested in?

Perhaps the next few years will manage to distinguish these two very different types of enthusiasts, as differences in hardware become reduced on the respective gaming platforms, and the decision of gaming software becomes the clarifying criteria.

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