IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - 37

CloCkwise from top: oCulus Vr; eVan amos; nasa; mariane Heilig

revealing what they're
working on yet, Rift is
being publicly embraced
by independent developers.
Ryan Anderson, a recent
college graduate in
Goshen, N.Y., is creating a
first-person horror game,
Specter Seekers, for the Rift.
Anderson could be making
games for the large mobile
market, but he sees this
as a way of getting in on
the ground floor. "There's
not much market now,"
he acknowledges, but "in
a few years I think people
will be eating this up."
The novelty is also
a challenge, though,
especially when trying to
solve problems that are
unique to head-mounted
VR displays. For example,
"Trying to use head-tracking
to get your character to
move-that's not something
well documented yet,"
Anderson says. "That's more
figuring it out on your own."
For developers such
as Anton Yudinstev, chief
executive officer and
president of the Russiabased Gaijin Entertainment,
coding on the Rift means
keeping one eye on the
future while still making the
most of today's technology.
Graphic resolution and
precise tracking of the
wearer's movements
are among the critical
challenges, but the most
important issue is latency:
making the virtual view
respond to the players'
actions and movements
as smoothly as in the
real world. In a virtualreality environment, slow

noW anD then: the oculus rift [top] is the latest in a long line of attempts to make virtual reality commonplace, some of which include morton heilig's creation in 1962 of the electromechanical sensorama [bottom
left]; nasa's work in the 1980s on a system that allowed wearers to interact with scenes using data gloves
[bottom middle]; and nintendo's 1995 virtual boy [bottom right], which was a spectacular flop.

movement is disorienting-
even nauseating.
Problems such as
those give pause to Lewis
Ward, research director
for IDC. He notes how
earlier enthusiasm over
3-D gaming failed to pan
out on platforms such as
the PlayStation 3. Home
viewers resisted wearing
glasses to watch 3-D
movies at home, despite
the hopes of television
manufacturers. "Until those
sorts of technology become
mainstream, I'm really
skeptical that a much larger
and more expensive headset
will get here," Ward says.

But the smart money
is betting that Rift will
overcome the factors that
doomed those earlier
attempts, and that it will do
so in time for consumers
to play this year. The time
simply seems right, to some
observers. With the arrival
of Google Glass, there's
finally "an appetite" for this
kind of experience, says
analyst Scott Steinberg of
TechSavvy Global.
Luckey says the most
popular application
now available on the Rift
developer prototypes isn't a
game at all. It's VR Cinema,
which puts viewers inside a
SPectrUm.ieee.orG

sort of wraparound theater
and lets them watch movies
inside the goggles. And
if the declining cost of
components over the next
few years lets Oculus price
the headset under $100,
Luckey believes that VR
entertainment will become
ubiquitous. The next
step, he says, is reducing
the weight and size of the
displays. "In the next couple
years," he promises, "we'll
get to where it will be as light
and small as ski goggles."
- Dav iD K ushner
Post your comments at http://
spectrum.ieee.org/vr0114
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north american

jan 2014

http://http:// http://spectrum.ieee.org/vr0114 http://SPectrUm.ieee.orG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum January, 2014