The Oculus Rift

GhostWalker

Hello Polycounters,

Today I was talking with a few friends about the Oculus Rift. The topic came about because one of those friends ordered the dev kit for it, this made mme think about how to implement the device. I think the Oculus Rift is going to be lots of fun and will greatly improve immersions. However there is an issue. To me it seems to benefit only a specific type of game the type being first person perspective.

I honestly have no idea how they might implement the device with a game like Batman Arkham City for example. I see the Oculus Rift being awesome race games or games like Battlefield but I wonder how does the device translate to the third person perspective gameplay. I just thought I put that up for disscussion. It seems like an obvious flaw the maker of the device must have ideas for this but what do you guys think?

ZacD

A., there's already a oculus rift thread, just search for it.

B, third person games would be fine, but would need a bit of re designing. I could easily imagine a rts that uses rotation tracking to allow you to pan around the map, it's hard to say how natural rebinding a different use for a movement like that, but people already train their bodies to do weirder things. I've heard people say 3rd person games are their favorite games to play with their 3d monitor. It's definitely a different experience than an fps. With a 3rd person game, you aren't the character, you don't see the world through their eyes and these events are happening to your character, but not you. In a fps your more likely to associate things with 'I' but with a 3rd person game you have more chances to develop the characters more. It's why mass effect uses 3rd person for dialog instead of doing the entire game in first person like Skyrim. But back to the original topic yes its going to be weird and 90 percent of games for the first years will be fps. But 3d gives players a greater sense of depth and world immersion, it works with movies and 3rd person story telling and there might be some cool uses for using head rotation to control the camera in unnatural ways.

Pancakes

imagine playing starcraft 2 without scrolling at all, u just move ur head around like your looking down at a table top board game that would completely redic, same with league of legends just look wherever you want whenever u want.

3rd person games would work great, just think if no camera to manage, instead u just sort of softly tag alone anchored to the character but you can look around freely *drool*

GhostWalker

@ZacD: You make some excellent point. Personally I am a big fan of 3rd person games that is why I was thinking about it. I also agree that people can adept to weird things pretty quicky. But I guess the main thing is to wait and see what designer's come up with because I foresee a period of transition where it's going to be a bit weird at first but become better further down the line.

@ Pancakes: Oh yeah for the RTS I can imagine something like an imaginary cylinder that will end up being the screen. Then when you rotate your head you can imagine looking at a different part of the cylinder.