Ok, so there's an Oculus Rift sitting on my desk now. Here's the quick rundown.

This thing doesn't have a video driver. The way it renders is that you plug it into a DVI or HDMI port on your video card, and have the OS treat it like any other display. When you're using some Rift-enabled thing, it renders the current scene twice--once for each eye--and pushes the final renderings through a shader that basically mushes it into the place each lens wants it to be, with a little distortion to account for the rounding of the lenses, etc.

This has two interesting side effects: one, you could theoretically have Linux or whatever support, even though there isn't (currently) any in the Rift SDK: just get your OpenGL game to render to the Rift display "fullscreen" and use the right shader on the final images. Second: you could theoretically have Rift-enabled YouTube videos...all you have to do is make sure you're on the right display and everything lines up. This doesn't line up, but it demonstrates what I mean:

    Oculus Rift 3D Media Player

...imagine if that was a prerendered 3D movie. No drivers required, running in your web browser.

The head tracking is sent from the headset to your machine through a USB cable, and it works pretty well. I tried their Unity "Tuscany" demo, and it was very responsive. The hard thing is remembering you can look around but not walk around (your physical room). I think this probably looks like a generic HID input device, and not a mouse directly, so while it probably doesn't work out of the box on Linux, it probably isn't hard to get it working, either.

I got motion sick pretty quickly trying to navigate the demo, but I enjoyed standing in one place and looking around (including turning around in a circle, which worked just fine). Obviously, it's pretty hard to find the keyboard when you can't see it, too.

So how does it look? Pixelated. You don't get much resolution to work with, and it's split in half and further compressed beyond that to accommodate the lenses. But it didn't seem to have too much trouble with blur or flicker. My eyes kept focusing on the grid of pixels, which made it hard to get into things until I could force myself to stare at the scene like a Magic Eye portrait.

While I'll probably play with adding Rift support to some titles, is this a way I'd like to play games? As of these KickStarter-first-edition-beta units, I'd say no.

But here's why it matters anyhow.

I had the opportunity to try on a high-end VR headset last year. The person who handed it to me said, "this thing costs 30,000 dollars, so don't drop it," at which point I made her put it on my head for me. Then I walked around the obligatory first person shooter for a few minutes, thanked the person for the demo, and that was that.

The Oculus Rift is not better than that headset. But truthfully, it's not really measurably worse, and only costs a few hundred dollars. In that sense, it's a total game changer, because whether Oculus or a competitor drives VR forward, they're doing it at consumer prices now.

In that way, it feels a lot like how it felt to put a Voodoo card in your machine in the late 90's. You immediately understood it was only a simple start to GPU tech--something good enough and cheap enough--but that a lot was going to happen really fast now.

--ryan.