Oculus Rift Experiments

A few experiments (more soon) with Oculus Rift:

EXPERIMENT 1:

An afternoon and evening faffing around with the Oculus Rift DK1 and Unity 3D, getting a first very rough sketch of my ‘Mawson’s Huts Antarcica VR experience’ working – a test-bed for future work in virtual heritage visualisation.

The technology/software is currently a bit flaky (lots of crashes when I was making this), but thank goodness it exists at all – a myriad very interesting possibilities for the future. In 5 years it’ll be pretty great, in 10 years it will be extraordinary and consumer-standard. In 20, cheap as chips, ultra–super-dooper-high resolution. And the thing that will make the difference is the content and the stories and the places and phenomenology, and the interfaces for building and social interaction, as the technological novelty moves into the background. Hopefully not all owned by giant multinational corporations, but opensource and encrypted. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, this demo is very rough, but it works remarkably well – no polish here, straight off the stove & unrehearsed. I suppose I should make a more polished presentation at some point, without my amazingly creaky chair!