Overview
After spending many hours in another world, We think that the Oculus Rift is the beginning of a new age. If you want to experience the virtual reality in it’s purest form, then unfortunately it’s going to come with a price. It’s true that VR has a lot of improvement to do, but this next generation headset is a must have if you want to watch history being made.
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Oculus Rift
Summary
First launched as a Kickstarter project and then acquired by Facebook, Oculus Rift was the first advanced VR Headset that was available to the public. It launched back in March 2016, which was a little too early in our eyes. The controllers were not out yet, and the technology was still been finalised, so the Oculus Rift could only be used with an X-box controller and users were still finding bugs.
The Oculus Touch controller has now been launched and can be bought at a discount when buying the Oculus Rift headset. The Oculus touch acts as controls for your hands in virtual spaces to complete your virtual reality experience. Unfortunately if you were one of the first to buy the headset, the only option is to buy the Oculus Touch individually.
The Rift headset really is a game changer in the VR reality world. Be warned this whole experience can become rather confusing especially when you forget where you really are or you fool your brain into thinking you’re falling from a cliff when you’re actually sitting on the sofa. It has the power to replicate the sensation you get in your stomach when riding a rollercoaster, whilst sitting in your bedroom at home.
The headset design itself is light, weighing around 500g. That weight doesn’t includeweight of the 4m cord; used for both HDMI and USB connectors, and splits near the end so you can connect them both into your VR Ready PC. It comes loaded with sensors, offering a display for each eye and integrated headphones. It comes with a camera to add more movement detection data.
This headset does have it's disadvantages, one been that it requires a wired connection to a PC in order to have enough power to drive the high resolution images to each lens inside the headset. This isn't just any old PC either, Oculus Rift requires a high spec VR-ready gaming PC which can be rather expensive. The minimum PC specs Oculus Rift requires is an Intel i3-6100, and GPUs can now start from the Nvidia GTX 960. Originally these were even higher and required even more expensive PC's. You can get one of these PC's for around the £450-£500 Price Mark, but expect to see these get cheaper over the next few years!
Overall
With an expensive VR headset that has limited room tracking, the Oculus Rift as a whole is still a work in progress. The Rift headset is well designed and compact. A strong collection of software offers many apps to explore.
