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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

I intend to purchase one of these VR sets as soon as possible, but I'll take extreme care to which games play on them. Either real life habits come to games and mindless killing FPS becomes less popular, or game habits come to real life and you risk acquiring bad traits.

Interesting times ahead.

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Oh, I expect game habits will absolutely come to real life. After playing Half Life 2 for the first time, I had a powerful urge to duck into every service tunnel and lose access grate I saw. I can only imagine if I had played it in VR.

I'd love to see a martial arts training/game with full body feedback, but it's going to take a while longer for the latter part to develop. I've been wanting that since I saw an old VR movie as a kid, about people fighting in VR with characters and experiencing the feedback in real life.

If you're itching for VR, you can order an Oculus Rift dev kit right now (https://www.oculusvr.com/order/). The consumer version with significant improvements should be available in about a year.

I don't recommend purchasing the current dev kit unless you actually plan to do development. The quality isn't high enough for prolonged use; motion sickness is virtually certain. There aren't any AAA quality made-for-VR games released yet; only demos and ports exist so far.

On the other hand, if you do actually plan to do development then by all means get a dev kit right now; don't wait for the next release. You need to try it as soon as possible because it's going to take a lot of time and experience to figure out how to convert your ideas into usable VR games and interfaces. Any development done now will transfer directly to the final consumer product.

If I know a bit of C++ and a lot of Web Languages, where would be the best place to get more information about VR Programming? For these games they are developing what language are they written in? What kind of software are they using to create 3D models ? Are they all using Unity?

You can use whatever language you like. There's really not much special about VR from the programming point of view. The Oculus Rift is really just a display that gets recognized as an additional monitor plus a USB device for head tracking. Oculus provides a library that you can use that takes care of interfacing with the USB device and some other gimmicks.

The main difference to non-VR 3D programming work is that getting latency down is much more important, so your priorities shift a bit. The real difference is in thinking of whether you can do cool new user interface stuff.

So in that sense, your question is a bit misplaced. You need to know about 3D development in general. Once you know that, the delta of what you need on top of that is very small, and everything you need can be found on the Oculus developer site.

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