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Virtual reality headset for video gamers: A matter of perception

Virtual reality is one of many inventions that never seemed to make the leap from science fiction to mass-market product.

Using low-cost components developed for mobile devices, a start-up called Oculus VR hopes to put a high-quality virtual reality headset within reach of video gamers

Nick Wingfield

Virtual reality is one of many inventions that never seemed to make the leap from science fiction to mass-market product. Again and again, headsets that promised to immerse people in wondrous, three-dimensional worlds have bombed with the public?held back by high prices, ungainly designs and crude graphics.

But now the bonanza of cheap, high-quality components created for the mobile electronics market, coupled with some technology innovations by a Southern California start-up called Oculus VR, could bring within reach the fantasy of many a video gamer: a virtual reality headset that costs just a few hundred dollars and puts players inside games like no television set can.

Resembling an intimidating pair of ski goggles, the Oculus Rift, as the headset is called, envelopes the vision of people who wear it in vivid, three-dimensional images. The sensation is like watching an IMAX screen that never ends. A snap of the head to the left instantly shifts the perspective inside the game in the same direction.

That connection between a player?s point of view in the game and the real world makes the experience feel more natural when, say, the game character is surrounded by a group of armoured knights. The company?s design, which is about to be delivered to game developers, is already creating buzz among industry veterans and battle-scarred believers in virtual reality.

Cliff Bleszinski, a former game designer at Epic Games who led the creation of its Gears of War series, said that the first time he wore the Rift headset, ?I gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed back at me. The next big thing isn?t always a brand-new technology that you never heard of,? Bleszinski said. ?It?s this thing that existed 10 years ago and quietly got better.?

Despite its missteps in the consumer market, virtual reality has become commonplace for a number of industrial and military applications, where the high cost of headsets?from $1,000 to $50,000?has been less of an impediment. Hospitals use the headsets to train surgeons, while the United States Army has used virtual reality to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, in part by exposing soldiers to short simulations of combat.

The mass market has been far more elusive, in large part because the components in the headsets were too costly. Many of the crucial parts in the Oculus Rift are the same components found inside smartphones and tablets, including the headset?s 7-inch display and its sensors for detecting head movements.

Because those parts are already being pumped out in enormous volumes in factories in China, Oculus can create a product that is likely to end up costing consumers something between $200 to $300.

Elements of the Oculus headset are based on the virtual reality research by USC, which has freely released headset designs for others to use.

Still, most venture capitalists would rather finance a hot-dog stand than a high-risk virtual reality start-up. Oculus instead used the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to harness the enthusiasm of virtual reality fans and to take orders so it would not produce too many headsets. It raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter and received orders for 10,000 headsets.

The first ones, which Oculus says will begin shipping next month, are still rough around the edges and are primarily aimed at game developers.

Oculus is mum on when it will ship a version for consumers, hinting that its target is next year.

If the company is successful, it will have a lot to do with Palmer Luckey, the 20-year-old founder of the company, who seems to have wandered out of a casting call for unconventional, young technology entrepreneurs. He pads around his office in bare feet, munching on cookies. He refuses a chair during a meeting, preferring to sit cross-legged on the floor.

Luckey was a home-schooled teenager living with his parents in Long Beach, Calif., when he began collecting virtual reality headsets, a habit he financed by fixing broken iPhones and Nintendo DS?s in his garage and reselling them at a profit. Luckey estimates he spent $32,000 on headsets in one year alone, about 45 of which he now has in his own collection.

While he was passionate about virtual reality, Luckey realised that none of the headsets he bought offered the kind of immersive experience he wanted from the technology. He began tinkering with headset designs of his own.

?If there had been a perfect headset, I wouldn?t have gotten into virtual reality,? Luckey said.

People who put the headset on were amazed by how the game world surrounded them. It has a 110-degree field of view, far more expansive than the 40 degrees of many virtual reality headsets.

Michael Abrash, a programmer at the game developer Valve Corporation, who is working on virtual reality and other projects there, said Carmack?s endorsement gave Luckey?s headset ?instant credibility.?

The headset is currently designed to work with computer games, not with the popular consoles made by the likes of Sony and Microsoft. Oculus says existing computer games can be adapted for virtual reality without great expense. But some analysts are skeptical that consumers will be excited about buying a game headset, even if developers like it.

Virtual reality headsets can also cause motion sickness in people who wear them, though the effects vary by person. Oculus is doing everything it can to reduce the latency, or delay, in its headset between head movement by players and changes in on-screen perspective, which is one cause of motion sickness.

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First published on: 21-02-2013 at 00:23 IST
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