Oculus Rift Review

The future is here.

Ever since the beginning of the modern technological age we have dreamed of machines that could transport us to lands beyond our imagination; virtual reality. While the closest thing to VR at the time were giant simulators used purely for such things as pilot training, the concept began to pick up steam in the 80's and in the 90's, fully fledged VR gaming platforms began to emerge but their popularity was short lived. The technology was expensive, not many existing platforms supported it, and most of them just weren't very good. There was a lot of snake oil involved with marketing VR in the 90's and a lot of it contributed to the sheer amount of disappointment that revolved around heavily marketed VR systems. The Virtual Boy for example was heavily marketed and proved to be a colossal turd, selling only around 350 thousand units out of it's projected 3 million. Between bad hardware and ones that were solid but either too big for home use or too expensive for the average consumer, VR failed in the 90's and died with the coming of the new millennium. The idea was still there, but nobody really wanted to dive back into something that already failed. The 2010's however saw a resurgence in the interest of VR and with the great advances in technology over the past decade, VR began to make a whole lot of noise once again. After nearly five years of development, one of the companies that helped fuel a renewed interest in VR finally released it's product. This is the Oculus Rift, virtual reality for the new generation.

The box is roughly the size of an Xbox One box.

So the real question is; does the Rift fulfill the promises that it's 90's predecessors failed to? Well let's find out. First of all the Rift had plunged me into one of the most unprepared launches I've witnessed, and my Rift that I ordered on launch day in March got delayed all the way back to August. Thankfully it arrived a month earlier than it's earliest projected arrival but I still find it inexcusable that a company who generated such a large amount of publicity would underestimate the scale of it's own product launch. One of the biggest changes from the DK2 to the CV1 is the refinement of the hardware to make it more attractive to consumers. The box itself is a piece of art on it's own except you don't really see what I'm talking about until you pull the sleeve off.

Now that's what I call inviting.

Flip open the heavy magnetic lid and you find all the hard ware meticulously organized into their own slots and compartments. I mentioned something like this about the old Wii's box in my Wii U review; it's a pretty insignificant detail to most but if you put a good deal of effort into making your product look presentable when the consumer opens the box, it goes a long way. Everything about my first look into this box just screams of quality, and that's a good thing. Inside you will find the Rift itself, the Constellation sensor, the remote, and underneath is your Xbox One controller.

Head straps are very adjustable and quite comfortable.

Let's look at the Rift itself first. It's rather lightweight; I mean it needs to be since it's sitting on your face most of the time but that doesn't mean it isn't fragile feeling. The Rift is solid, damn solid at that, and holding the thing is just plain nice on it's own. The body of the headset is actually tightly covered in this fabric material while the gaps between the lenses are filled with stretched fabric. The straps are velcro adjustable and it conforms to your head very well. The headphones are slide adjustable and you can position them however you like, or remove them with the included tool to use you own headphones. Surprisingly they sound quite good and provide a good degree of immersion, although a dedicated surround sound pair of headphones would do the Rift better justice. Overall it's very premium feeling, and it's got the build quality plus comfort to back it up. So far so good.

Lenses are not perfectly round or removable as they were on the DK2. This is intentional.

The non removable lenses took a major redesign from the DK2 as they are now what are known as Fresnel lenses. These do the same job as the DK2's traditional curved lenses but these have the advantage of being thinner, lighter, and reducing distortions that a regular lens can cause. They are slide adjustable and the Rift setup will guide you on perfectly adjusting the headset to your vision. Behind these lenses you get dual OLED displays with a pixel density of 456 PPI. The picture these produce is clear however I did get a slightly noticable screen door effect from the pixel density. I don't know if this was primarily to reduce costs but I'd imagine using 4K displays would help reduce or maybe even eliminate screen door, however considering the Rift cost's $600 bucks already, I'd hate to find out how much more one would cost with 4K implemented. Either way you don't tend to notice it much when you are in game.

Constellation provides head tracking.

The Constellation sensor is placed in front of the area where the Rift is going to be worn and is used to map a playable area: this can be seen in Oculus Home. You can actually get away with throwing it into the corner of the desk like I did and it will still track very well. It is not capable of the room scale functionality of the HTC Vive's sensors however the ability to use multiple Constellations to play room scale will be implemented in an update.

It's a remote. It does remote things.

I won't go into much detail about the remote because seriously, it's a remote. You stick a coin battery in, pair it up and that's that. You will probably find yourself using the packaged Xbox One controller more often than this thing, after all gaming is what the Rift is primarily built for. Oculus is working on releasing, hopefully without delays, a motion controller called Oculus Touch similar to the HTC Vive controller that can sink you into a VR even more.

Setup is very well guided.

The length of time it takes setting up the Rift pretty much depends on how cluttered your setup is and if your computer is even prepared to handle it. The Rift requires a computer packing a GTX 970 equivalent or greater, an i5-4590 equivalent or greater, and 8 GB of RAM or more; a pretty beefy spec computer. On top of that you need 2 USB 3.0 ports(Any will do for the Xbox One controller)and an HDMI port. I ended up having to get a USB 3.0 hub since my existing peripherals were taking up most of my ports. After that the Rift takes you to focus the lenses and from there on out you get whisked away in virtual reality, and it's legit.

For obvious reasons, you can't experience the Rift through this review but apart from the slight screen door effect that ends up being more unnoticeable as you focus on the game you are playing, the Rift is a absolutely amazing piece of kit. Looking through the Rift is like wearing goggles but I can actually perceive depth plus the head tracking is so precise that I can actually look around virtual corners and feel almost completely immersed. My library of games dedicated for the Rift is slim but Minecraft in VR is a completely new feeling having played the regular edition of the game for years and Dreadhalls is the scariest shit I've ever played, hands down. It's almost as if you can actually reach out and touch what you are seeing. I did mess around with VorpX, a special software that allows you to use VR in unsupported games and while it doesn't work as well as a dedicated VR game due to it being super finicky, I tried Portal 2 and Skyrim out after some fine tuning and VR breathed some major life into these old games. The gap where you nose fits into can let some light into the headset which can kill immersion a bit but you can just shut the lights off. I will also will note that in some cases, especially in Portal 2 I was feeling pretty motion sick and had to go lay down for a few hours. This is not news and is common among many people because your brain is having a hard time processing the visions of moving even though your body isn't. An underpowered computer with choppy framerates can cause it too. It get's better the more you use it and I was able to play Portal without wanting to vomit after a while.

That being said, the full Oculus experience is more akin to a game console rather than it just being a peripheral. It has it's own dedicated dashboard UI, store, and social features. I wasn't really able to test much of this mostly because I have no friends that own a Rift. It is still a peripheral however and does require the aforementioned high powered computer to utilize it although there are rumors of the next Xbox One revision supporting the Rift. Apart from the ever growing library of games, I found the Rift's other entertainment options to be rather sparse. If you don't intend on buying this for gaming, it's probably best left forgotten.

The Rift is a pretty incredible piece of hardware to say the least. I can say that it has provided one of the most unique and immersive gaming experiences I've ever used. It does have a few flaws in that of the screen door effect, the potential motion sickness although that varies between people, and that it cost's $600 bucks on top of a high end computer if you don't have one already. All in all though it's a solid piece of hardware that delivers on it's promises but it's far too expensive for the majority of people to get on board. Honestly speaking, the cost and the pretty sparse offerings apart from gaming almost make the Rift feel more like an expensive novelty than being the next big thing. So it begs the question; is VR the future? We sure thought so in the 80's and 90's and I have to say that the Rift, even with what hiccups it has is one of the strongest attempts to make VR relevant again. The hardware will probably be improved on over time and hopefully it becomes accessible to more people but so far I think VR has bright future provided there are more reasons to utilize it other than just gaming, otherwise it might just continue to sit in a niche market again like it did decades ago. For those that think the Rift is an absolute must have and can handle the price, it's an awesome experience, but for those who are still on the fence about costs it might be best to wait and see what the future holds for VR in general. Oculus or any of it's competitors may one day produce the next smartphone or personal computer; this is just step one. Perhaps one day everyone can whisked away to worlds beyond our imaginations right there in the living room; we're not quite there yet but as of now we're ever closer to making that a reality.

The Oculus Rift currently costs $599.99.

Is It Better Than?

HTC Vive- Depends, the Rift and the Vive are now becoming so similar that it's almost about user preference. The Vive costs $200 dollars more than the Rift but comes with full room scale tracking and motion controls. The Rift is getting these features soon so the playing field is almost leveled. Games on the Vive were originally only limited to SteamVR but it can now play Oculus exclusives too. As of right now the Vive is still the more powerful headset but when the Rift gets it's room scale feature and Touch controllers, all with costs of course, the decision between Vive and Rift is going to be a bit more difficult.