This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Engineer Palmer Luckey wanted a virtual-reality headset for gaming, but not one of the devices he collected fitted the bill. So he invented the Oculus Rift VR, put it on Kickstarter and raised nearly ten times its $250,000 (£152,000) target. But what's inside? Wired asked photographer Todd McLellan to tear down a developer kit, revealing the LCD screen, sensors and gyroscopes that compensate for head movement.
Luckey, 21, originally planned to make a small number of kits for enthusiasts using mobile components. But his project blew up when John Carmack, cofounder of id Software and lead programmer of Doom and Quake (and now Oculus VR's chief technical officer), heard about the Rift and requested a prototype. There are now around 40,000 Oculus headsets with developers worldwide, and they are finding creative uses for it.
Disunion is a game whose players experience a virtual death by guillotine; Digicortex is a neural-network simulator which now has an Oculus mode, letting players enter the world of brain simulation. Non-gaming uses include architectural visualisation and medical and military training, such as Bossa Studios' Surgeon Simulator.
Along the way, Oculus picked up $91 million (£55 million) in funding, and its Crystal Cove prototype won best of show at CES in January.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe promises that the retail version of the Rift (available "soon") will be a big step on from the developer models. "It will disrupt a lot of industries," he says. "VR, long-term, is going to have as much of an impact as computers had."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
