Paperboy has gone down in the history books as one of the best video games ever, and some may say that if you’ve never played it, then you’re not a true video gamer. Either way, the game is a classic, and a new Oculus Rift hack brings the 1984 title back into the 21st century
The only thing nerdier than keeping an old NES hooked up to your TV to play your favorite old games is recreating your favorite old games using virtual reality equipment. That’s exactly what this crew of programmers did recently with Paperboy.
Old Enough To Remember Paperboy For NES? Now You Can Live It With Oculus Rift
Posted in: Today's ChiliOld school gamers will remember Paperboy, an arcade game — later ported to home systems like the NES and Atari ST — that let you savour the pleasure of virtually breaking your neighbours’ windows by tossing a rolled up newspaper through their front room as you powered past on your bike. Because that’s what passed for entertainment in 1984. Well, time and technology has moved on but creative tech company Globacore, which builds these sort of gaming mash-up installations, has decided to do an updated version of the Paperboy concept, because, well, why not?
PaperDude VR — as it’s called its updated creation — has been hacked together using an actual bike, a Wahoo Fitness KickR indoor resistance bike trainer, an Oculus Rift virtual reality head-set, and Microsoft’s gesture-recognising Kinect peripheral as the key parts of the puzzle. This set up — combined with a LEGO-esque 3D game world built in Unity — lets the PaperDude VR gamer actually pedal and actually toss (or at least make a throwing gesture) as they play the game.
What’s the point of all this? Well it’s mostly for the fun of it — and for Globacore to showcase what they can do — and it sure looks like a neat way to gamify a bike ride. But with the proliferation of connected and increasingly specialised gizmos, fuelled by crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these sorts of reality simulations are only going to get easier and cheaper for people to hack together. Which is only a good thing for the creative future of gaming.
Archenemies for decades, video games and exercise are about to unite. Atlas is a cheap, new “walk-around” virtual reality system that uses markers you put on the ground to track your movements as you play with an Oculus Rift headset. Protagonist is Kickstarting Atlas to get real-space VR into the hands of developers, so they can build games that ditch joysticks and actually let you run-and-gun.
Here’s how startup Protagonist’s Atlas system works. First you find an open space. If you’ve got a huge living room it could work, but you’re better off in a garage, on a basketball court or in a warehouse. Then you lay out the location markers. You can print them at home, but Protagonist plans to give out vinyl ones that stick to the floor so they don’t get displaced. Then you strap on your Oculus Rift VR goggles, an optional Razer Hydra-equipped gun or sword, and the Atlas chest mount for your iPhone.
Fire up the Oculus and Atlas iPhone app, and step into the future. The patent-pending Atlas positioning system maps the markers and uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscopes to know where your are. Play with Atlas and when you walk forward your in-game avatar walks forward, too. Chasing aliens or exploring dungeons could become an alternative to going to the gym.
“I’ve wanted a Holodeck since I was a kid,” says Atlas inventor and Protagonist founder Aaron Rasmussen. He’s no stranger to making sci-fi dreams come true. Back in college, Rasmussen was the first person to make an optical-tracking sentry gun. He stitched together an automatic BB gun and a video camera with some home-made machine-vision software to make a weapon worthy of defending your fort. “The military came to my dorm room. I thought that only happened in movies,” he tells me. Since then he’s built and sold a robotic machine tool company called USMechatronics, created the Blood Energy potion drink sold in IV bags, and most recently sold a ghost detector that connects to your iPhone. (It’s detected zero ghosts to date.)
Real-space VR systems have been around for well over a decade but have been reserved for big research institutions. That’s because there weren’t wide-field-of-view head displays with low-latency, head-orientation tracking for under $50,000, and the positioning systems were clumsy and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lucky for Rasmussen, the Oculus Rift took care of the first problem, freeing him up to reimagine real-space positioning. Unlike the Virtuix Omni VR treadmill, Atlas not only lets you walk, but also run, jump, crouch and move around like you do in real life.
Right now Rasmussen is the only one working on Atlas full-time out of the four-person team, but that will change if it meets its $125,000 Kickstarter goal to manufacture the chest mounts and refine the software. The plan is to get the system and Unity integration assets to developers so they can start building first-person shooters, fantasy epics, and educational exploration games. “Someone should do Jurassic Park,” Rasmussen says.
I’m pretty excited about meatspace/virtual reality hybrid games and their potential to help us avert a Wall-E future where we just get fatter and fatter watching our screens. The technology will take some time to trickle down, but Atlas could eventually become a distinct industry parallel to console gaming.
“We’re really living in Year Zero of virtual reality,” Rasmussen giddily tells me. “We’re going to to see more wearable technology become consumer products. As developers work on games, we’ll work on a consumer version that kids can get under their Christmas tree. My vision for the system is something you and some friends bring to a racquetball court, play a high-intensity game for an hour, and get a workout.”
Kickstart Atlas if you want your games to make you sweat
The Oculus Rift will most likely lead to a new genre of first-person games, but it could also make drones a lot more fun to use. For his master’s thesis, Jonathan of Intuitive Aerial is working on Oculus FPV, a drone camera system that streams 3D video that can be viewed with the Rift.
The system uses a Black Armored Drone carrying a laptop and two cameras. The laptop compresses the feed from the two cameras and sends them to a second computer on the ground via Wi-Fi. It’s a crude setup, but it works. According to Intuitive Aerial the current rig has a range of about 160′ to 320′ when using Wi-Fi cards. The video latency is 120ms, good enough for the viewer to pilot the drone at the same time.
That shot of the pilot wearing the Rift reminds me of Ghost in the Shell. Intuitive Aerial said it will improve Oculus FPV if it receives enough interest from potential clients. They should incorporate the MYO armband to Oculus FPV make it more fun to use.
[via Intuitive Aerial via Walyou]
OK, so Oculus Rift
A fews days after discussing possible price points and business models for the Oculus Rift, the company is now thinking about what devices that the VR headset will integrate with besides PCs. CEO Brendan Iribe sees the Oculus Rift has working perfectly with smartphones, and he also noted that the headset would release at some point next year, most likely.
Speaking with Edge, Iribe said that consoles aren’t a huge focus for the company, and instead have a lot of interest in “next-gen cellphones.” He notes that it has mostly to do with innovation and the upgrade cycle of products, noting that smartphones advance much faster than consoles, and that could match up nicely with the Oculus Rift’s plans to innovate just as quickly.
Iribe notes that he loves consoles, but the company specifically is “a lot more excited about where mobile’s going to go, and being able to plug it right into a next-gen cellphone.” He points out that smartphone innovation is “almost doubling every year, compared to a console that’s just stuck it out for eight years.”
As for Oculus Rift competitors, Iribe says bring it on, as it’ll speed up development and innovation for virtual reality. He notes that Oculus Rift is just one year in, and there are a lot of problems that still need to be tackled. With other virtual reality developers out there, VR could see faster innovation, and Iribe wonders what we’ll see in eight to ten years.
As for the 2014 release window, Iribe says that the Oculus Rift definitely won’t launch this year, but 2014 seems more like a feasible deadline. Obviously, a specific release date isn’t set yet, but the company wants to get the headset right before they send it out the public, and a 2014 launch window would give them enough time to complete it.
SOURCE: Edge
Oculus Rift smartphone support may be on the way is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is currently supported by some PC games. It has yet to become a widely adopted peripheral that games are designed around, but with its virtual reality capabilities, we don’t deny that it would making […]
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