Me, elsewhere wrote:
OK, so here's my first impressions of the Oculus Rift devkit after a couple of hours.
First the bad stuff:
* Screen-door effect due to low resolution/PPI screen.
This is more noticeable in some games/demo's than others, and is particularly evident on anything that has a fair amount of text on the screen.
The good news is that the newer prototype they were showing at E3 is already higher resolution with more than double the PPI and supposedly makes this barely noticeable now.
* Motion sickness.
A couple of things I tried did make me feel slightly nauseous after a while, especially Half-Life 2 (and to a lesser extent Minecraft).
I think the biggest problem was that I was playing on keyboard/mouse and so when you moved there was the jolt of going from stationary to full-speed and back again (going backwards especially).
With an analogue controller this may not be as much of a problem as you have more control over your speed of movement.
Other styles of games where your avatar is sitting still and looking around like in a cockpit I had no nausea at all. A good example of this is the Blue Marble demo.
I also think the fact we didn't spend much time calibrating things properly and ended up just handing the headset back and forth without bothering with reloading the profiles we set up may have contributed to this as well. It's pretty important to get your interpupillary distance (IPD) settings right, and it might have been a bad idea for us to run roughshod over those requirements in our eagerness to play.
Additionally, my colleague who's Rift it actually is said that he had far less motion sickness yesterday than on the first day he got it. So maybe it's something you get used to over time.
Now the good stuff:
* I had absolutely no problem wearing my glasses at the same time (this was a big concern of mine).
* The actual headset is about the weight of a pair of ski goggles. You know it's there, but it's not at all uncomfortable.
* Zero noticeable lag in the head-tracking. It's smooth and responsive and feels incredibly natural.
* Has some very cool possibilities for user interfaces. For example, the Blue Marble and Titans of Space demo's have 3D floating interfaces with buttons you activate just by looking at them which feels incredibly natural and easy.
* The actual level of immersion, even with the aforementioned screen door effect, is truly stunning.
The first time you launch the demo environment in the calibration tool and look over your shoulder and see the car behind you is just... wow. You just feel like you're actually there.
In Half-Life 2 the walk through the apartment building at the beginning I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the weird Combine Locks on some of the doors as they looked really interesting in 3D. I don't think I'd ever even noticed them before.
Then there are the NPCs. You actually feel like you're standing next to people and talking to them in-game rather than being an observer off in the distance. It's truly remarkable.
You also really get a sense of the scale of things, like seeing the Strider at the end of the road in the beginning. It looks and feels absolutely massive and terrifying.
The Titans of Space demo is even more extreme, you fly around the solar system visiting all the planets with the enormous Sun dominating everything, but then it zooms out and introduces Pollux, Rigel and then VY Canis Majoris into the picture and then does a close fly-by of the surface of VY Canis Majoris (complete with lovely looking multiple parallax layers). Truly stunning stuff, and shows how good an educational tool this could be as well.
Sadly I never had a chance to play any flight sims or driving games, which I think will work extremely well. Maybe next time.
In conclusion I wouldn't recommend people get the devkit unless they're really keen to experience it right now and/or want to do some development work with it. It's not quite ready for market just yet (well, it is a devkit). I would say though that with the improved screen (which is still not final, so may end up being improved further) it'll be a day-one purchase for me.
