Ocular Reality - Welcome to Oculus

Welcome to the first of Ocular Reality, a series where every week I'm going to look at an Oculus Rift game or tech demo and see how it works in terms of gameplay and how well it makes use of the Oculus Rifts interesting features. For the first week I plan to look at the very first application I used when I finally recieved my DK2 of the Oculus Rift, it's aptly titled "Welcome to Oculus" and is created by Treytech.

Welcome to Oculus is the perfect start to the world of VR and an amazing way of showing off to your friends the beginning of what the Oculus Rift is capable of so you don't have to do the talking. This is the type of tech demo where you sit back, put on the Oculus and enjoy the ride as you move from location to location watching the world around you.

Welcome to Oculus begins with a disembodied voice, our narrator, explaining the origin of Virtual Reality and you then appear in a hallway as screens are illuminated on either side of you showing different forms of media like a scene from Lord of the Rings or video games as the narrator continues to talk about the progression of VR technology, complete with a nod to the Virtual Boy.

From the hallway you end up in a room where the narrator points out features such as depth perception and the ability to tell "how far away the wall or roof is" and explain that even though you know all that is happening is false you will still want to avoid things that are coming towards you. After one standard oculus trick of objects flying at you then you get the experience the other big feature, a large drop.

Next to show how oculus could be implemented in other games you are suddenly in the world of slender, which now even has VR support via SteamVR, and you get to feel the tension rising as you walk through the dark field shining your flashlight on the world around you.

From there you get to see what watching a movie, tv or playing video games on a digital television would be like, which is quite meta in itself, and the narrator continues to explain all of the possibilities that Oculus Rift could achieve and what kinds of things we can look forward to in the future.

All in all this is what you want in a first experience as you get a taste of all of the different things that the Oculus Rift is capable of, though after a taste you're going to want more. Some features didn't work as well, such as the drop being a bit too slow to really have an effect, but all of the other aspects of this tech demo really give the user a sense of what the Oculus Rift is capable of.

If you want to check out this demo for yourself then you can head over to treytech's official website to download the latest version which is DK2 compatible.