VR on the PlayStation 4 is happening.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/18/552405 … al-reality

Even before the rumors started swirling I had a strong suspicion this would be Sony's trump card against the Xbox One, what with Sony's AV presence (including a couple non-motion-tracking head-mounted displays already) and the Oculus Rift breaking ground on PCs ahead of them.

I've never tried any form of VR myself but it's always seemed like the next big step in gaming technology - the biggest since the jump from sprites to polygons really.  Anybody out there had any experience with Oculus Rift or other VR?  Any thoughts on the announced specs thus far?

Hey itz VIRTUAL BOY!

No really, I'm genuinely interested in this. I've lamented that there has always been something missing in 1st and 3rd person perspectives and maybe some additional form of "being in the game" might help the experience. Nothing more obnoxious than dying from something completely offscreen which you have no chance of seeing or reacting to (an excuse that you generally don't have in, say, 2D Contra or Megaman)

Whether they're actually going to do this right, however, remains another story. Hopefully it is done for more than your typical generic military shooter. Imagine being able to actually explore a 3D Castlevania or Megaman Legends setting.

So, can we expect this to be better than the NES 3D system? OK, I know it's not the same thing, but seriously, it's amazing that Nintendo (as well as Sega) had this back in 1987!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famicom_3D_System

I've seen too many gimmicky things come by in the video game industry in the past decade or so, so I'm not getting too excited about this. The Oculus Rift didn't really do anything for me and I can't see this winning me over anytime soon either.

I know this wasn't really the point of this post, but World Runner was made by the Final Fantasy team?

Yeah... that's kind of crazy huh?

I think VR is interesting for non-game uses like exploring a place you can't visit in real life, but I have doubts as to how well it will work for real games. I've been wanting to try the Oculus for some time now, but the lines for it a PAX are way too long. Maybe I'll get to try it at PAX East. I think the biggest challenge to VR is acceptance from other members of the household. Even if the tech is amazing, how are you going to tell your wife that you're completing shutting her and the kids out for hours at a time? With normal stuff, you can look up periodically and still engage other people, but VR totally shuts you out, and I could see that causing more friction than traditional gaming.

I  tried the Oculus Rift at PAX East, and have to say that it's pretty cool. The 3D is richer and deeper than anything I've seen before, and the  head tracking really makes you feel like you're part of the world (you view the world simply by moving your head and can view everything in any direction that you can look in real life). The unit itself was reasonably comfortable, but I only had it on for three minutes, so I can't say how it would feel to have it on for a long periods at a time. I will say that the screens need to be sharper before it's ready for retail as I could see the interlacing in this build of the hardware (DK2).

As for the software, the demo on display was something called Couch Knights that you play with a 360 controller. You play as a guy sitting on a couch controlling a remote control knight that must defeat another one controlled by a human player sitting on a nearby couch. As demos go, this was pretty weak and didn't do a great job showing off the tech, so I'm not sure why they chose it, but it at least let me get acclimated to how the Oculus works.