“You can look left and look right, and your brain gets the feedback it expects.”īut VR isn’t just about games. “What gives you that next layer of amazingness in VR is that you’re the one in control,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman. You move, look and play just as in real life, except the world around you is computer-simulated. The Rift lets you watch these too, but also has the power to deliver a truer VR experience – essentially, putting you inside a video game. While companies like The New York Times have been producing and distributing what they call virtual reality, seen with inexpensive Google Cardboard viewers, their technology is more like VR-lite: 360-degree videos that keep you stuck in a fixed position as you crane around. To crank up the experience of climbing, the developers used photogrammetry – a scanning process through which they capture real surfaces (like the jagged cracks of a limestone perch) into a virtual space. The Oculus headset combines motion-sensing hardware, positional tracking and Pixar-level graphics to let you interact with and explore simulated worlds. VR makes the impossible possible by tricking your eyes, and brain, into thinking you’re someplace else. “Oculus’ mission,” Zuckerberg stated shortly after the purchase, “is to enable you to experience the impossible.” For Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Luckey and his crew are bringing the ultimate sci-fi fantasy to life. Palmer Luckey, the Rift’s 23-year-old visionary creator in flip-flops, is giving me an exclusive glimpse into the VR future at Facebook, which bought his startup in 2014 for $2 billion, landing Luckey on Forbes ‘ list of America’s richest entrepreneurs under 40. ![]() In each of these, you’re not just playing, you’re transported. But now, in Oculus’ dozens of “experiences,” as the company dubs them, you can live out your guitar-god dreams in Rock Band VR, float weightless in deep outer space in Adrift or hack through Tron -like computer nodes in Darknet. In the past, heavy headsets, chunky graphics and sluggish latency have hindered the suspension of disbelief in virtual reality. ![]() Finally, my brain has to interrupt: Dude, you’re not really here. The experience, which teleports me to a jagged cliff in a virtual world spanning 50 square miles, is so realistic that I can barely look down – when I do, my knees buckle and my palms sweat. On a recent spring morning, in a soundproof studio on the Menlo Park, California, campus of Facebook – just days before the $600 Rift’s release – I’m testing out the Oculus headset in a mountain-climbing simulation created by Crytek, a team of artists and coders that has spent the past year meticulously scanning and re-creating vistas from the Alps to Halong Bay, Vietnam. But on March 28th, Oculus Rift, a breakthrough VR system, debuted – finally heralding the arrival of a technology seemingly pulled from a sci-fi future. This story of mine about the now- notorious Palmer Luckey originally appeared as “Will Virtual Reality Change Your Life?” in Rolling Stone, May 23, 2016.įor decades, virtual reality has failed to deliver on its great promise.
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