<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" In a suite on the 36th floor of the Venetian Towers during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I&amp;#039;m surrounded by members of a little gaming company that seems poised to take off in a big way. They&amp;#039;ve been triple-booked all day long, but have squeezed me in for a demo in the early evening hours. That demo was of the Oculus Rift, a prototype head-mounted virtual reality display hacked into a pair of Scott ski goggles. I&amp;#039;m trying to digest what I&amp;#039;ve just experienced when the hotel phone rings, and it&amp;#039;s answered by Oculus&amp;#039; vice president of product, Nate Mitchell. He&amp;#039;s doing his best to be diplomatic, but the caller\u2014an Egyptian game developer who&amp;#039;s been trying to get in contact with them all day long\u2014is obviously desperate. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re seriously booked,&amp;quot; Mitchell says. &amp;quot;We could try to squeeze you in for a demo tomorrow. But I can&amp;#039;t guarantee\u2026&amp;quot; The developer is insistent, he must get his hands on a dev-kit device now. Mitchell lays it out for the guy. The devices won&amp;#039;t be available until March, but the company has already sold out with 10,000 preorders placed through Kickstarter: The developer is out of luck. I&amp;#039;d heard about Oculus Rift from friends of mine who game a lot more than I do, but I was unaware of just how rabid the hype was around this little company and its 20-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey (although nobody seems to use his last name). In the time I&amp;#039;ve been in the room, three other journalists from the gaming press have come in for demos, and the level of fawning admiration they express makes me realize that I&amp;#039;ve stumbled upon not just a cool product but a gaming industry celebrity in the making. Palmer&amp;#039;s backstory is so plucky and perfect that you can&amp;#039;t help but root for him. He calls himself a virtual-reality enthusiast who has been collecting and dissecting head-mounted displays since he was a boy. The Irvine, Calif., native tried almost every commercially available VR helmet and was uniformly disappointed, so he started to frequent government auctions and shop for used hospital equipment. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the only place you can find affordable, high-quality head-mounted displays,&amp;quot; he says. Over the years, he amassed 43 of them. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t confirm this,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;but I think I have the world&amp;#039;s largest private collection.&amp;quot; At a certain point, he began tinkering with his own hardware designs and software coding to make what he considers perfect VR. He was on his fifth major iteration, readily sharing his designs in gaming chatrooms, when he heard from John Carmack. Carmack, the legendary designer of Doom and Quake who pretty much invented the first-person-shooter gaming genre, was looking for virtual-reality hardware to use for an update of his 2004 game, Doom 3. He asked if Palmer could sell him a unit. Palmer explained that it was just a prototype but agreed to let Carmack borrow it. Carmack then took the device to the E3 gaming convention in June 2012 to show off how it worked with Doom 3. The gaming press was blown away\u2014everyone wanted to know the maker of the VR goggles. According to Palmer, at the time he had just launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell a build-your-own VR kit for DIYers, but he started to sense a bigger potential for his design as a consumer product. He decided to change the fundraising campaign and offer completed developer kits for $300. In almost no time he had raised $2.5 million.  Palmer Luckey Inside the Action  It only takes a few minutes with the Oculus Rift goggles on your head to realize what&amp;#039;s got people so excited. And it&amp;#039;s not just in the gaming industry\u2014Palmer and his staff have gotten considerable interest from the military and research communities. The experience is so immersive that it&amp;#039;s actually a bit disorienting. Because the device currently has no headphones, the user is dropped into a 360-degree visual world that does not match the ambient sound in the room. Joseph Chen, the company&amp;#039;s senior product manager, guided my demo. Chen strapped the device to my head and then stood behind me; while I remained seated in the &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; world, I moved through the virtual environment using an Xbox controller. With the goggles on my head, I was in a digital representation of a medieval village in the midst of a light snowfall. There were no rapid-fire guns or enemies to fight, just a highly detailed world to &amp;quot;walk&amp;quot; through. Chen encouraged me to look around and look up to see the snow falling down and the cathedral steeple rising up into the night sky. &amp;quot;Rotate your head and look behind you,&amp;quot; he said. I look in the direction of Chen&amp;#039;s voice and find nothing but a lonely street. A walk into the cloistered entryway of the cathedral felt claustrophobic, but a few steps more and the cathedral opened up to a sprawling interior with arched ceilings. After a few minutes of this, Chen asked me to stand up, and I was struck by how difficult this task suddenly seemed. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll put my hand on your shoulder to make sure you don&amp;#039;t bump into anything.&amp;quot; He had me turn around and I could feel myself being guided through two different worlds at the same time: The real world, where Chen was making sure I didn&amp;#039;t bump my shins into my chair, and the virtual world, where I was looking through the falling snow at a bridge in the distance. Finally he removed the device from my head. &amp;quot;Welcome back,&amp;quot; he said. The Oculus goggles are packed with an accelerometer, gyroscope, and even a digital compass to track the position of your head and sync the game&amp;#039;s visuals to the direction you are looking. That&amp;#039;s been the goal of VR since its first boom in the 1990s, but until recently sensors have made the experience a jerky, glitchy affair. The Oculus goggles sample positioning data at 1000 Hz, Chen says\u2014most current cellphone sensors run at a fraction of that speed. Most of the movements of the head map to familiar gaming controls\u2014look left, right, up, and down. But some don&amp;#039;t: The goggles allow you to tilt your head to one side or the other, a feature for which the team had to develop a new code, Chen said.  At first while wearing the Oculus I assumed there are two screens, one for each eye. But that&amp;#039;s not the case: Inside the device is a single 5.6-inch monitor viewed through large lenses, one for each eye. Chen shows me on a larger monitor what is being displayed on the screen inside the device. It&amp;#039;s then that I understand what makes the system work so well. The image from the game is predistorted into two side-by-side stereoscopic frames, and the large lenses grant you a wide field of vision. There&amp;#039;s no sense of warped perspective at the edges because the image on the screen corrects for the lenses&amp;#039; distortion.  Glenn Derene Waiting Game I talk with Palmer after the demo, sitting on a disheveled bed while he paces around guzzling a can of Dole pineapple juice and describing his vision. Palmer is barely out of his teens, and he carries himself with the electric excitability and cocky self-assuredness of a smart young kid talking about his favorite subject. But he&amp;#039;s also surprisingly grounded, insistent that members of the press like myself not let the hype about the Oculus Rift get out ahead of the product itself. He doesn&amp;#039;t want to let the excitement squeeze it into the marketplace before it&amp;#039;s ready. You get the sense that he&amp;#039;s been waiting all his life to make this one perfect object, and now the stars are aligning to let him do just that, so he&amp;#039;s not about to let anyone else compromise his vision. He&amp;#039;s taken no venture capital money, so he and his team are beholden to no one but the customers who placed the Kickstarter orders. &amp;quot;Right now our goal is to get the 10,000 orders out the door by March,&amp;quot; he says. But he&amp;#039;s cautious not to let people think what he&amp;#039;s currently selling is a consumer product. It is a developer kit, with hardware and software tools for those who want to tinker with, and build for, a new technology. I ask him the inevitable question that he&amp;#039;s heard all day long. When will there be a consumer product for gamers to buy? But he&amp;#039;s not biting. &amp;quot;It would be irresponsible for me to say when we&amp;#039;ll have consumer products,&amp;quot; he says. He has no idea what feedback he&amp;#039;ll get from developers, and if they say the device needs some new functionality, he&amp;#039;s not going to release a product until it has that functionality. His team is already working on integrating sound, but after 10 minutes of discussion about headphones I realize he is very opinionated on the subject, and not about to staple on substandard headphones. Palmer is also hoping for high-refresh-rate screens to enter the mobile space, since he&amp;#039;s disappointed by the motion blur of his own prototypes. He&amp;#039;s also excited by the prospect of higher-resolution screens entering the pipeline\u2014he wants to add that, too. Before I go, I ask if I can get a picture of myself with the headset on. Mitchell gladly agrees, but Palmer has put the device on himself and suddenly seems so peaceful and calm inside the world of his own creation that I haven&amp;#039;t the heart to interrupt him. Like the developer on the phone and like legions of excited gaming fans, I&amp;#039;ll have to wait. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a8617/eyeballs-on-with-the-oculus-rift-14977992/>