With any technological advancements, you begin to see these things slowly trickling into other walks of life, and whilst something may originally start in a working sector you’ll never see in your lives, you’ll find that a lot of the time these ideas will slowly trickle down into other platforms. You just have to look into the past to see such examples. Obvious examples include computers moving from super computers to PCs and telescopes changing from your huge hubble-like affairs to personal telescopes for enthusiasts.
These examples also apply to items we shall be looking at within this article, items that originally started in one walk of life and have slowly found an application in the gaming world. That’s the absolute joy of the PC gaming world various companies around the world are fully aware of our absolute soft spot for top of the range technology and take full advantage of this.
Advancement in gaming technology since, well… since forever. The possibilities within the virtual reality world are massive, and will benefit absolutely every gaming genre known to man. Once a figment of Science Fiction fanboys, the idea of Virtual Reality has been one that has floated around for eons. There is a huge amount of references to them within the Science Fiction world; things such as Star Trek’s Holodeck, TRON and various Anime shows over the years. But the idea of Virtual Reality actually becoming a reality was something that people never really thought would ever be a possibility.
Yet one individual decided to leave his mark on the computer market. What started as a garage project, founder/inventor Palmer Luckey is now one of the most talked about men in the computer industry. This project took the name ‘Oculus Rift’, and since its burst onto the market, the Oculus Rift has probably been the most talked about thing in the computer industry.
Oculus Rift is a project so prestigious that after its acquisition by Facebook which turned it into a multi-billion dollar operation, it coaxed some absolute veterans within the computer market to join the team. You’ve just got to look at names such as John Carmack and Michael Abrash two individuals who brought you the likes of Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, who were drawn away from their very comfortable roles at iD and Valve to join the Oculus legacy.
Now you’ve just got to look at the rise of the Oculus Rift to see how much of a success it has already been, and will be in the future. Currently in it’s last beta format, the DK2 is an exceptional piece of equipment, and lends itself absolutely brilliantly to sim racing.
Whilst I personally have yet to don the Oculus Rift for any form of racing, I did get the opportunity to play a leading horror game based on the award winning Alien franchise, and the amount of ambience it gives you is stunning. The Oculus Rift literally pulls you into your chosen game and keeps you trapped in that world until you choose to remove it. I can definitely say that I’ve never, ever had so much fun whilst playing a PC game after my experience with the Oculus Rift.
Race various sim racing games with the Oculus Rift, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t got someone within the team who hasn’t! Thankfully Dominic; our racing guru has had the opportunity to do so, and actually owns his own DK2, and he simply can’t get enough. With support for a number of sims such as - Live For Speed, RaceRoom Racing Experience, Project CARS, Assetto Corsa and iRacing, you can be sure that you’ll get a lot of use out of it.
And whilst we don’t want to ruin the in-depth review he has planned for the next issue, he has told us with the utmost confidence that the Oculus Rift has brought sim racing into a completely new era and we personally cannot wait for that era!
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