VR headsets are here! Kind of. Oculus Rift pre-orders available soon
According to the Oculus Rift website, Virtual Reality headsets may soon be coming to a living room near you. That’s right, starting at 8 A.M. Pacific Time on January 6th, you can pre-order your own Oculus Rift complete with two free games. The free games in question are Lucky’s Tale, a colorful platforming action adventure game featuring a red fox named Lucky and “dozens locales and lush environments”, and EVE: Valkyrie, a first person space dogfighting (the kind with planes) multiplayer game that takes place in the EVE Online universe.
Every Oculus Rift headset will also come with an Xbox One controller, although you can purchase another set of motion controls dubbed the Oculus Touch (eventually). Unfortunately, there is no actual release date nor price attached to the VR headsets yet, but each bundle is likely to cost a couple hundred dollars and is slated to release within the first quarter of 2016.
Naturally, as is the case with any new gaming hardware, there has to be some library of games that work with said hardware. So far, there are over 200 games that have either released and added Oculus Rift support or will come out with Oculus Rift support. Some notable games that have VR support include Minecraft, Elite: Dangerous, Surgeon Simulator, and (eventually) Star Citizen.
As to whether or not this represents the first steps towards a revolution in the way we play games is yet to be seen though, as people are notoriously resistant to change, especially when it comes to their entertainment options (remember that whole 3D/motion controls craze from a couple of years ago?). Only time will tell if people will warm to the idea of strapping a giant box to their face, but one way or another, it is likely that Virtual and Augmented Reality sets like Oculus and Microsoft’s Hololens will become more commonplace as the technology becomes more refined (and thus cheaper).