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Comment by bones6 | Hacker News Reader

Cue transhumanist/Ray Kurzweil checklist watchers. You can mark off 'fully immersive virtual reality available to the masses' at the end of this kickstarter.

Regardless of singularity thoughts, I really enjoy watching new tech become possible due to price drops in components. This would not have been possible just a few short years ago as the price(and size/weight) of LCDs and sensors have fallen significantly. I'd say the smartphone boom has been responsible for most of this advancement. This device is not much more than two phone-sized LCDs strapped to your head. Of course it's the code that makes the magic happen with low latency head tracking.

Commoditization of hardware components will continue to open new doors for developers. "No one would have bought a $10,000 iPod" - as the saying goes.

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is this really what kurzweil meant by "fully immersive virtual reality," though? only involves the senses of sight and hearing...

Too true. He did write about suits or other methods that appeal to the other senses. That seems much farther off. Though, once environments have been created for this headset, I would imagine quite a few people spending a large portion of time "plugged in".

I also think a controller gives a bit of touch sense to the experience. Using your hands and feet for full controls of a plane stick and rudder or car wheel and pedals lacks only the feedback from acceleration and weather. Looking down to see the pedals and "feeling" your vehicle react to your foot pressing could be more psychosomatic than we really know yet.

A large part of our FPS experience revolves around manipulating the player camera. Since the Rift would essentially put the function of the mouse on our heads, we could free the right hand with just a trigger or two triggers (one for alt-fire). The left hand can now comfortably use a WiiMote like remote, or a nun-chuck like controller. This setup would NOT break the previous control-model that the player is used to, since you can always switch back to disabling head tracking and using the mouse/keyboard combo. I'm pretty sure that this would increase immersion.

640x800 per eye is fist sized pixels. This is why they're being marketed as "dev kits", not final consumer products.

One of the reasons the Rift can get its enormous FOV into that (relatively) tiny package is that they're using these skinny little lenses that put massive view-space distortion on what you see. One of the consequences is that you need to correct for this in software - notice the "fisheye" effect in some parts of the Kickstarter video where it's shown on a regular screen.

One of the other consequences is that the pixel density in the centre of your field of view is higher than at the edges. If your eyes are pointing straight ahead, the biggest pixels (due to the lens distortion) are at the edge of the picture.

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