Hasta La Gadget!

The Oculus Rift isn’t even out yet, but there’s already an emulator made for it. Or perhaps it’s precisely because the virtual reality headset isn’t out yet that this emulator came about. The program’s name is vbjin-ovr, an offshoot of a Nintendo Virtual Boy emulator for Windows called vbjin. Nope, I didn’t know that existed either. But I’m sure some 90s kid out there is beside himself with joy.

Here’s a screencast of YouTuber Cymatic Bruce playing a Japanese horror game called Innsmouth Mansion.

I doubt that I’ll ever get past the Virtual Boy’s horrible red on black graphics, but overall the emulator’s existence alone merits documentation. Plus Cymatic seemed really into it. Are you among the lucky few who already own an Oculus Rift dev kit? Get the Virtual Boy emulator here.

[via Joystiq]

We’ve seen a couple of games being run on the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, with Valve’s Team Fortress 2 being one of the games to “officially” support the headset. In any case while the headset is said to offer up a pretty immersive experience, we guess there could always be room for improvement and that’s exactly what one company did when they put an Oculus Rift headset on a gamer and put him on a treadmill! Basically the video was used to show off the company’s Omni treadmill which is basically a circular treadmill, and together with a Kinect sensor, it allowed the game to capture the movements of the gamer and translate that into movement in the game.

They even hooked the gamer up with a gun-like controller which helped to make the experience a bit more “real”, and they also added a circular barrier around the treadmill to prevent him from falling off. Admittedly it looks pretty awesome and could prove to be a good workout too, especially if you play the game long enough and work up a sweat! At the same time it looks like it could be a little dizzying, at least from an outsider’s perspective, but it might be different in person. What do you guys think? Pretty cool, huh?

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Mirror’s Edge is a first person action game that allows the player to perform parkour in order to navigate their way around the game. If you’re the sort of person who suffers from motion sickness, then chances are Mirror’s Edge is not really for you. However for those who love the game and thought it’d be cool if they could actually perform the stunts themselves, you’re sort of in luck because it seems that the game has been modded in order to play nice with the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset, a device which at the moment supports a handful of games, Team Fortress 2 being one of them.

For those unfamiliar with Oculus Rift, this is a virtual reality headset that creates a more immersive gaming experience by making the player feel like they’re there. At the moment the Oculus Rift headset is not as widely available yet, so that means not many gamers will have a chance to experience what this is like, but you can go ahead and check it out in the video nonetheless to get a rough idea. Once again, for those who suffer from motion sickness easily or who are prone to headaches, this is a video you might want to pass on.

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More or less, this is all anyone ever wants from a piece of technology. Here’s a 90-year-old woman strapped into an Oculus Rift VR headset, and totally losing her mind over how amazing it is. More »

I always wanted but never got a Virtual Boy, but I’m glad I waited since the Oculus Rift looks like a much better goggle-based gaming platform. The gadget got the teardown treatment over at iFixit today, thanks to a developer edition secured by the site. The Rift was remarkably easy to pull apart, earning it a very high repairability score. Rare for an iFixit teardown, the Oculus Rift one also includes some hands-on gameplay before the team pops the case.

iFixit offers a great video of the view from inside the Rift, showing exactly how it manages the 3D effect by offsetting the image slightly for each eye, which are then combined by your brain and give the illusion of depth. The rest of the teardown shows the Rift’s core parts, like the 1280×800 resolution LCD that outputs the 640×800 image to each eye, supplied by Taiwan’s Chimei Innolux. iFixit dubs this “good news,” as Chimei Innolux is Taiwan’s largest LCD supplier.

Other key components include the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with a 72MHz CPU (most processing is handled by the host computer, of course), and there are a variety of motion, acceleration and gyroscope sensors on board to help the device follow and compensate for changes in head movement.

The Oculus Rift was already one of the coolest, geekiest gadgets on the horizon, but now that it’s been pulled apart in a remarkably easy function to reveal its relatively simple, but very functional internals, I’m even more excited to get my hands on one.