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Comment by brotchie | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine was an early Kickstarter backer and brought his Rift around to my place try out with a few friends. We tried out Half-Life 2 and as soon as I put the Visor + headphones on I was blown away. My brain's "location neurons" were 100% fooled into thinking I was in the HL2 world. Within a few seconds I had lost the "background" feeling of being in a small room, and accepted I was in a large, open-aired train station (HL2 intro). Unbelievable.

The early Oculus DevKit certainly has some issues: no translational tracking gives me strong motion sickness, high persistence display makes the scene blur as I move my head, low resolution produces screen door effect. Regardless of these downsides, after 10-15 seconds of use I accepted that VR will be the "next big thing."

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I was really skeptical about Oculus, but I had a chance to try out a demo by Amir Hirsh that combined an Oculus with simple Kinect-based limb tracking. I could look down and see my own hands and they really felt like my hands. I have no idea how this is going to work in practice (are we going to have to play games in large empty warehouses) but it is magical in a way that is hard to describe if you haven't had a chance to try it.

> are we going to have to play games in large empty warehouses

Large hamster ball on rollers. Infinite space to walk or run. Also, you don't need to track their motion or feet, you just feed in the data from the rollers, and you know how fast their character is walking or running, and in what direction.

Omni virtuix is a pretty good approach that doesn't require a hamster wheel. http://www.virtuix.com/

Yes! This stuff is incredibly exciting. With Omni + Kinect + OR, we're starting to get close to Otherland-style VR. It's going to be interesting.

I saw a large hamster ball with oculus VR at IndieCade in Los Angeles earlier this year.

The game was Sushi Warrior: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBx3MIAaXTA

A rar of the game is here, req kinect sdk installation + oculus rift. http://motionos.com/sw2.rar

I haven't tried it with that game, but I heard some very positive comments on people using it with Euro Truck Simulator 2 (already pretty realistic by itself on a screen).

Occulus Rift is going to be awesome for all these games where you are supposed to be sitting in a cockpit. For FPS, not so much (unless you have a giant hamster ball and tons of sensors as someone else mentioned).

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