Facebook shocked pretty much everyone and made headlines by buying Oculus, developer of the Rift and leader of the virtual reality pack, for a staggering $2 billion.
One of the strongest reactions came from Minecraft developer Markus "Notch" Persson, an early cheerleader of the Rift. In a post on his personal website, Persson said he'd been talking to Oculus about a VR version of Minecraft, but has cancelled those plans. "Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR," Persson said. "But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games."
This, of course, does not mean we'll never build blocktacular worlds in virtual reality. First, Oculus has competition from Sony, which unveiled Project Morpheus at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco just a week before the Facebook/Oculus deal was announced last week.
But what if you want to play Minecraft in VR right now? As always: Modders to the rescue.
The fan-made mod "Minecrift," personally endorsed by Persson, lets you play Minecraft on the Rift. Created by modders known as "mabrowning" and "StellaArtois," the mod supports Minecraft version 1.6.4, and is compatible with Minecraft Forge, a popular mod-loader that is useful and often required for running other mods for the game. The base mod tracks your head's rotation via the Oculus Rift headset. However, it can also be combined with Razer Hydra, a motion and orientation-detecting game controller similar to the PlayStation Move or Nintendo Wii Remote, to add positional tracking.
It takes a bit of jerry-rigging, but the result will track your head so that a movement such as crouching will lower your point of view, while moving right or left will produce the corresponding movement in the game.
