Virtual Reality Is The Future

As a little child, some of the most popular stories about ‘the white man’ I heard are those of his cool accessories and gadgets. Although the only items my ancestors had to marvel at were common mirrors and manual long range rifles, television sets that could only be operated from the knob on the ‘box’ of a tv. Well, grandpas and grandmas, we are past that era. We have delved into the world of virtual reality and boy are we seeing things!

Virtual reality is set to take over the world and Oculus VR is it’s flag bearer. Oculus VR is an American virtual reality technology company founded by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe. Oculus VR was founded in Irvine, California, United States in 2012. Her first product, The Rift was proposed in a Kickstarter campaign, during which Oculus VR (at the time an independent company) raised US$2.5million for the development of the product. In March 2014, Facebook agreed to acquire Oculus VR for US$2 billion in cash and Facebook stock. It’s been a long run since then and right now Oculus’ Rift is staged to invade the market.

Oculus VR has been into many ventures, the Oculus Ready for one is a new program that offers officially licensed, Oculus-branded PCs from Alienware, Dell and Asus. These rigs will be ready to run the consumer Oculus Rift when it launches in Q1 2016, with at least the minimum specs of 8GB RAM, an Intel i5 processor and NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290. All of the manufacturers will offer Oculus Ready PCs for less than $1,000, Oculus announced during its second annual Connect conference. The second day of this year’s Oculus Connect conference for virtual reality developers kicked off with an announcement-rich keynote presentation. While the event was short on new game announcements, one big one got the crowd’s attention: Minecraft.

A brief video confirmed that the hit game’s Windows 10 edition will launch on the Oculus Rift in 2016 and it will allow players to navigate their blocky worlds in VR with the Xbox One controller. Oculus also showed off some of the games coming to the Rift, including Gang Beasts, Adr1ft, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Battlezone. For developers, version 1.0 of the Oculus Rift software development kit launches in December. A second SDK, this one specific to Oculus’ Touch motion controls, will be available to developers before the Rift launches in 2016. Oculus Touch will launch with Oculus Medium, a 3D sculpting tool.

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe confirmed that the Oculus Touch handheld controller system will launch in the “second quarter next year,” which is a firmer confirmation than a previous “first half of 2016” estimate. After showing off that system’s impressive “toybox” demo, Iribe confirmed that the Touch controllers will require a second motion sensor “for improved sensing,” so be ready to make room in your home’s potential VR room should you want to try the tech out.

Oculus has seen so many collaborations and the latest which is riveting consumers is the Samsung Gear VR. At half the price of its last mobile VR headset, the new $99 Oculus-made Samsung Gear VR is cheap enough to unlock virtual reality for the mainstream. Revealed today at the Oculus Connect conference, it works with the whole 2015 line of Samsung Smartphones including the Note 5, S6, S6 Edge, and S6 Edge+. It will ship in November in time for Black Friday. Compared to the $199 previous Gear VRs that only worked with fewer phones, this headset will be a lot more accessible.

The new Gear VR is 22% lighter, making it more comfortable to wear. The trackpad on the temple of the headset also now has a tactile directional pad on it so your finger will know where it’s touching. The previous Gear VRs had a smooth trackpad and sometimes it was too tough to know if you were touching it or just the unsensitive shell of the headset when you couldn’t see for yourself.

There’s also a new Gear VR Gamepad which all the Oculus Connect conference attendees will get for free. It features an Xbox-style dual-stick design.

The big news though is that when Gear VR 2015 ships in November (pre-Black Friday, says Peter Koo) it’ll be compatible with all of Samsung’s flagship 2015 phones—the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and Note 5. Also, Samsung’s knocked the price down to $100, or half of what the previous versions cost.

And there’s finally content! Gear VR is embracing its media side and bringing Netflix and Twitch streaming to the device, with more content providers (Hulu, et cetera) coming in the near future. Also, we saw a brief demo of Oculus Arcade—literally a 1980s-style arcade with Pac-Man and other cabinets inside.

Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at an Oculus event September 24, and raved about the future of Virtual reality. He has admitted to looking into the possibility of engaging social media with virtual reality. The business guru whose mantra (the one I gave him) is “If you can’t beat them, buy them” stated on a Facebook post announcing the acquisition of Oculus VR that it is Facebook’s mission to make the world more open and connected and Oculus fits into that mission because they build virtual reality technology like the Oculus Rift headset.

Oculus’ mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences. Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans there.

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