As I take in the sights and sounds of Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) 2014, and the occasional suspicious smell, which I overhear someone claim is that of hot dogs, a deep feeling of suspense starts stirring within me. A merciless coup is forming poised to strike with undaunted ferocity. The harbinger, a very specific new trend with the capability of completely disrupting everything we think we know about gaming. No, more than that. Reality itself.
Virtual and augmented reality is about to mount a full-scale invasion on your sense of “the real.” It is about to change the way you consume interactive and passive content. An assault, amassing so much power and such allies, before it even lands upon the shores of our consumer collective consciousness, it is doing everything in its power to win the war before a single shot is fired.
At every recent tech convention, the absolutely longest line, by far, to experience the latest and greatest in entertainment and gaming is not at any long-established heavyweight veteran’s booth. It is, instead, snaking along the perimeter of a brand new, fresh-faced, hyper-ambitious startup’s booth. The banner reads, “Oculus.” And this phenomenon is repeated at every other booth showcasing their wares via a “generation one Oculus developer’s kit.”
Having taken the Oculus experience for a spin at CES a few months ago, I will not be waiting in the hour-plus line to demo a couple minutes of the developer’s latest generation Rift, sporting 1080p displays, much wider field of vision, and low-latency buttery goodness. I will say, at CES, it lived up to every shred of hype I had heard prior, even exceeding my unfairly high expectations. But here at GDC, what I was more taken in by was the very fact that I was staring at a booth filled with dozens of people jacked into Rift headsets, lost in a world separate from this one, truly immersed and interacting inside in a virtual sphere.
Then… the trumpets sounded, the heralds cried, and Sony announced Project Morpheus. Their own version of a totally immersive, HD, virtual reality headset, complete with infrared head-tracking, stylish blue LED-glowing trim, and tailor-made to be a bold companion peripheral to their own Playstation. Continue reading “Your New Reality Is Ready – A look at the newest VR and Augmented Reality from GDC”