Bradley Austin Davis - Oculus Rift in Action

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For Leo and Kesten

B.D.

For Sam, Ted, and Max

K.B.

For Antonia

A.B.

Two amazing advances from the smartphone arms race have come together to create the head-mounted display (HMD): light, cheap, high-resolution displays, and a new generation of super accurate and fast-motion sensor chips. Rather than display information or graphics on the surface in front of you, these displays rest on your head and update quickly enough to convince you that what youre seeing is as real as the place you left behind. Although HMDs have existed for decades, theyve never worked well enough to be more than aspirational prototypes destined for science museums. But with the Oculus Rift, the sensation of having a stable 3D world surround you as you move your head is a game-changing shift from peering into a 3D space through a desktop screen or handheld device.

Within the next 10 years, improved devices like the Oculus Rift will replace many of the screens we surround ourselves with today as their resolution scales to eclipse our TVs and monitors. Ultimately, we will use them to replace as much or as little of the world around us as we choose, with digital content that is indistinguishable from reality. The impact of these first-generation devices on gaming and virtual worlds will be incredible.

But along this road there are many changes to UI, experience, and computing paradigms that youll need to understand, and the authors of Oculus Rift in Action take you on a comprehensive overview of them. As a developer getting started with the Rift, you get a complete walkthrough of connecting to and rendering to the device.

Beyond this, youll learn the important differences raised by such devices: How do you type without a keyboard? If Microsoft and the Mac revolutionized computing by putting things in windows, what will we do in an HMD? Why do we get sick using these devices, and how can we fix that? This book gives a complete and grounded overview of the specific technology and operation of the Oculus Rift, as well as the big picture topics that youll need to survive in a new world without monitors. Finally, it dives into the new and complex design factors around how to correctly control things, navigate, and build in the virtual world as an avatar given the capabilities and limitations of these new input devices for the head and body.

P HILIP R OSEDALE C REATOR OF S ECOND L IFE

No matter what people have, they always dream of something more: more power, more influence, more knowledge, but perhaps most importantly, more possibilities. This drive is part of the human condition and is responsible for our going from the Wright brothers to Apollo 11 in a single century.

If you want the future, you have to build it yourself. But the future I want, the one I think many of us want, isnt something we can each build on our own, if only for lack of time and resources.

Weve written this book to lend a hand to those who want to help build the future in virtual reality (VR) but perhaps dont know where to start.

B RAD D AVIS S EATTLE , WA

Virtual reality was not something Id expected to ever get involved in. As fun as it was to daydream about having my own holodeck to simulate an environment as if I were really there, the technology never seemed to be there, and so I pursued other work. My coauthor Brad, though, paid more attention and spotted the Oculus Rift on Kickstarter. As an early backer, he was very enthusiastic about its potential to create truly commercial VR. Brad made it sound interesting enough that I ordered my own DK1 development kit. While I waited the two months for it to ship, I researched what others were doing and watched YouTube videos. When it finally arrived, nothing Id seen or read could do justice to the actual experience.

Like many people, my first experience was the Oculus World (also known as Tuscany) demo. In it you can meander around an old Tuscan villa. The graphics arent spectacular, and the low resolution on the DK1 made it appear as though I was looking through a screen door, but those things didnt matter one little bit when I tilted my head to look up and the scene changed to match where I was looking. I was overcome by giggly delight, looking up at the wooden rafters of the house. When I moved my avatar outside, I looked up to see the sky. This was immersion as Id never felt before, and it was amazing.

That first experience sent my mind racing with thoughts about the potential of VR. I could see the Rift being used for gaming, virtual tourism, storytelling, and science. But to me, education was the most interesting, and its where I first saw the Rifts potential turned into reality. When my younger son came home from school telling me he was learning about Paris and the Eiffel Tower for multicultural day, I downloaded the Tower Eiffel demo by Didier Thery and let him see what its like to stand beneath the towers impressive metal arches.

When my boys and I watched the Nova television series with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I downloaded Titans of Space by DrashVR so that they could take their own trip through the solar system and feel how grand and vast the universe truly is. They, of course, now want to visit Paris and work for NASA, and Im truly excited to see what the future brings.

K AREN B RYLA T INTON F ALLS , NJ

A long time ago, I noticed that people are always looking around but they rarely look up. I guess its because theres not usually a lot of stuff overhead to see. I thought that if I could help people learn to look up as often as they look around, then we would go to space sooner, because people would look up at the stars and the moon and think, Hey, lets go check that out. And I want to go to the moon. Not just as a one-off thing where you leave your lander behind when you go homeI want humans to have real cities in space, with shops and streets and hot dog stands.