Remember the Oculus Rift? It’s been in the works for years; a successful Kickstarter all the way back in 2012 put developer kits out there for… well, in theory, professional game designers. In reality, they mostly went to people who promptly started playing Five Nights at Freddy’s on them. In between, they got bought out by Facebook and introduced new and impressive upgrades. And next year, consumers will be able to buy them.
This will apparently be a huge roll-out; Oculus is promising quite a bit. For example:
The Rift delivers on the dream of consumer VR with compelling content, a full ecosystem, and a fully-integrated hardware/software tech stack designed specifically for virtual reality. It’s a system designed by a team of extremely passionate gamers, developers, and engineers to reimagine what gaming can be.
We will supposedly see a bunch of custom games created specifically for the Rift in the coming months, and presumably we’ll get even more details once E3 comes along and pre-orders open up. The big question, though, is whether those pre-orders will match the hype.
The history of virtual reality is littered with VR systems that just never caught on. In truth, I think Oculus has a harder push ahead of it than most of its boosters realize. The company itself has, to its credit, never pretended it was stumbling on something new; the Oculus team is well aware of how many minds they have to change.
Either way, though, the technology is undeniably impressive, and that it’s finally coming to market is a great thing. The questions now are, will developers bring their biggest franchises to the Oculus? And will more than just the most hardcore of gamers open their wallets?
(Source: Kickstarter)