Putting gamers on the spot with virtual-reality goggles

December 6th, 2012 by Ian Hamilton in Technology / Hi Tech & Innovation


Palmer Luckey cobbled the headset together from spare smartphone parts. His partner Brendan Iribe is rallying the to build the games. The result is a relatively affordable, next-generation headset that eventually will allow players to disappear into virtual worlds.

experiences have been the stuff of dreams for decades, with movies such as "The Lawnmower Man," "The Matrix" and the on ": The Next Generation" popularizing the idea. So far, though, systems to take people to other worlds are expensive and built only for niche uses, such as .

Luckey and Iribe, the founders of Irvine, Calif.-based Oculus VR, have raised $2.4 million through online crowd funding to build a system that offers a virtual-reality experience to at-home gamers.


The task facing anyone working on a virtual-reality experience is two-fold - create a device inexpensive enough so people will buy it and improve upon the current state of gaming.

"If there's not something additive or functionally better, it's not going to catch on," said Jesse Divnich, vice president in charge of analysis at research firm EEDAR. "It has to do a better job than the market standard that existed before."

Luckey and Iribe are trying to tackle both problems and look to succeed where others have failed. Luckey is using low-cost smartphone components to make a headset - called the Rift - that costs hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.


Luckey is the 20-year-old co-founder of Oculus. A passionate gamer, he's also obsessed with virtual reality. His workspace is covered in disassembled gadget guts, and he's like a walking encyclopedia of all things virtual reality, or VR. He perused government auctions, hospital liquidations and university sales to add to his collection of headsets, which is now more than 40. He also worked for about a year under Mark Bolas, a leading researcher in head-mounted displays at the University of Southern California.



More than 5,600 people on the site, which is used by artists and entrepreneurs to bankroll projects, put up the minimum $300 to receive early developer versions of the headset. The Rift kits were slated to ship in December and January, but last week the company announced it would push back the ship date to March to provide more time to manufacture the gadget. They plan to ship 7,500 headsets.

Oculus leased office space in Irvine and started hiring in October.


The system eventually impressed executives at influential game companies Id Software, Valve Software, Unity and Epic Games. Luckey sent John Carmack, a father of modern 3-D gaming and co-founder of Id Software, one of his headsets and he showed off the system at E3, a gaming conference in Los Angeles. Carmack's endorsement this summer sent Luckey and his growing Oculus team off on a whirlwind tour to gaming conferences around the world.








What's missing is turning that screen into a 3-D experience that fills up everything the user sees - whether users turns their heads left, right, up or down - and doing it at an affordable price. Sony, for example, ships an $800 headset that delivers 3-D but doesn't deal with tracking. The Oculus Rift is designed to be the whole package.


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"Putting gamers on the spot with virtual-reality goggles." December 6th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-gamers-virtual-reality-goggles.html