For a few brief moments, I peeked into the future of gaming the other day. While I wore id Software Co-founder John Carmack's homemade prototype virtual-reality headset, there was no monitor -- my entire world was replaced by a blocky version of Doom 3 BFG Edition that reacted to my every head movement. It was an incredibly convincing experience, a very "Holy crap, I'm in the game" kind of feeling, and was much more immersive than, say, when I reviewed the Vuzix Wrap 1200VR. The headset is a mix of small LCDs and motion control parts held together by duct tape and glue, with a ski-goggle strap keeping the device firmly in place on my head. As slap-dash as it might look right now, Carmack believes this is the starting point for new gaming experiences. And he wants to help takes us there.

Research Cookie

"After we shipped Rage I gave myself a treat," explains Carmack. "I said, I'm going to go buy a head-mounted display and check in on the VR space that I haven't looked at seriously since the early 90s. And I thought to myself, I've seen some consumer devices coming out, and we've had such immense progress in so many ways, surely it's all working well right now. And when I bought a couple of the commercially available ones at the consumer level it was bitterly disappointing. They sucked really bad, and were not at all what I wanted to see on there. And I was at a point where I could do some engineering research."

IGN Executive Editor Charles Onyett is in another world.

Part of the problem, Carmack believes, is that the industry behind VR tech had been focused on the wrong thing: that the key to an immersive virtual-reality experience is screen resolution. While that does have an impact, obviously, Carmack puts it somewhere around number three or four on his list of priorities. The real problem is that the input delay needs to be reduced to somewhere around 20 milliseconds, which makes the time between when you move your head to the moment you see a response in a game nearly imperceptible. Carmack believes it's solvable right now with the right hardware and software.

And that's where Doom 3 BFG Edition entered the picture. id was already well into working on this updated version of Doom 3, which includes new missions as well as a slew of updates to its existing engine and getting it to run at 60 FPS on consoles. So Carmack combined his hobby with the current project and started to create a customized version of BFG Edition to work with this headset he had assembled. Using a gamepad to control the player, these subtle changes includes remapping the right analog stick to move the weapon independently of the head, as well as reducing the knockback effect when you're hit by an enemy to cut back on unwanted motion.

Enter Palmer Luckey

"I had a whole matrix testbed where I started with the Windows Kinect sensor, a TrackIR, a Razer Hyrdra, and a couple different inertial-tracking based units and started experimenting with the pros and cons," he said. With all of those parts, Carmack came up with five different head-mounted displays, and in the process became involved with a small VR homebrew community online. That's when he met Palmer Luckey.

The man, the myth, the legend.

"He had built four or five generations of his prototype, and it wound up being very much what I wish I had built. He had found the right display panels, the right drivers, the right optics, and kind of packaged it all together. And I contacted him and said I was going to be demoing some stuff at E3 and would you like me to take a look at your unit? He knew who I was and just mailed off his hand-made prototype the next day."

It's when Carmack had a chance to look at Luckey's unit is when he started to come up with his own ways to improve it. He did this by writing a new fragment shader and some other software that pretty much solved a fish-eye problem that Luckey was running into. But even Carmack admits there are some limits to what's really feasible right now, especially on the hardware front, in terms of getting companies on the same page to improve upon their existing hardware.

"What I need to do is convince the people making the cellphone-size displays. So I'm nudging Nvidia, trying to get them to convince Samsung to make their OLED displays run at 120hz on there, just so we could integrate it into a standalone Tegra processor for virtual reality or something. That would be an important element of what we need to do on there."

Getting Kickstarted

So with Carmack's support, Luckey put together a Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift. The goal of the Kickstarter is to raise enough funds for Luckey to package together the parts and SDKs, assemble it, and then ship it off to would-be game developers. The goal: provide some sort of industry standard for all games to follow, with Doom 3 BFG Edition spearheading the charge.

I tingle at the thought of being able to replay Half-Life 2 like this, but buying an Oculus Rift from the Kickstarter won't get me there -- not yet. "It's not a consumer device," Carmack is careful to make clear. "There is exactly one game that has support for it, and you're not buying this to play games right now. This is for developers to start building support for other games that will eventually make a consumer device for it. Yes, I'll be flattered if people really think it's worth spending $300 to play Doom 3 BFG Edition in the virtual-reality helmet. But you can't play 3D movies in it. There's no other application. All that will come, but it's not here right now."

The Next Experience

When I tried it out it was impressively responsive -- so much so that I could only play Doom 3 for a couple of minutes before I started to feel nausea demons rising in my stomach. I don't normally get queasy from first-person shooters, so I suspect this was mostly due to the fact that I was physically moving around so much as I played; I should have given myself more time to adjust to the virtual environment before getting carried away and spinning around and such. (The motion sickness isn't universal -- Dan tried it at E3 and felt no ill effects.) Maybe next time I'll take some dramamine before playing.

In addition, there were other limitations I noticed right off the bat. For example, because I had to take my glasses off to don the headgear, there was no way to totally focus the image. Also, the resolution that's currently available is incredibly low by today's gaming standards. It did do an excellent job of blocking out the real world along the sides because of the rubber goggles, but even Carmack admits that in this current design it gets kind of uncomfortable after about an hour of use, as your head starts to sweat.

But that's kind of the point of this Kickstarter -- to get this hardware in as many hands as possible and to get a wide array of feedback and find ways to improve it. "I want 100 different people saying, 'This wasn't quite comfortable enough, I want to take a stab at it,'" explains Carmack. But just finding ways to improve upon the existing design is only one of the biggest challenges, says Carmack.

The rest of the stuff is about getting the human factors right, integrating the audio better (currently I had to wear a separate headset), figuring out how to manage the cables the best way or try to make it wireless.

"I want 100 different people saying, 'This wasn't quite comfortable enough, I want to take a stab at it.'"
Other features that Carmack would like to include would be mounting some forward-facing cameras or sensors to let you know that your head's about to bang into something. Or even writing software to have a computer self-contained in the headset, like a head-mounted iPad of sorts. It isn't that far off from reality, according to Carmack.

"I'm excited to see what the next year brings in terms of what people experiment with on there, as you start putting the cameras on and figuring out what you do with gestural and skeletal recognition from the inside out, figuring out user interfaces, trying to do productivity applications or something in the virtual world. When you've got a good enough platform to build on, get it out there and let people work with it. That's going to be happening in the coming year and I'm very excited to be watching it."

So are we. It's an extremely promising new technology, and you can bet that if it takes off, it'll happen on the PC first.

Spy Guy says: It's about time someone replaced reality -- talk about overstaying your welcome! What existing game would you most like to play with a VR headset?