Hasta La Gadget!

Sure, you can always play catch with the dog, but what kind of game can you play with a caged rodent? Well, “find the poster,” apparently. A team of researchers from Universities in Spain, Germany, Austria, England and the US have put together a virtual reality system designed to let humans interact with rats at the rodent’s scale, challenging human participants to find and lead the rodent to a unmarked goal. According to a paper published in PLoS One participants were “beamed” into the rat’s environment by linking a head-mounted display and joystick to a rat-sized telepresence robot. Human players were then treated to a proportionally accurate representation of the game arena. The rat was there too, tracked with an overhead camera and represented by a human avatar.

Participants were tasked with coaxing their opponent in front one of three posters in attempt to sleuth out which one represents the “winning” position. When both players are in front of the correct mystery poster, a bell sounds and the game ends. The game was primarily created to test a scaled immersive virtual reality teleoperator system, but researchers are optimistic the technology could be used to observe animal behavior from a new perspective. Check out the setup in action after the break, or read on through to the source link below for a detailed description of how mankind and some of nature’s smaller creatures can get along in a virtual space.

Continue reading Proportional VR experiment shrinks man down to rat size, lets us play games with rodents

Filed under: Misc, Robots

Proportional VR experiment shrinks man down to rat size, lets us play games with rodents originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Standing around in an awkward set of motion tracking video goggles while tethered a computer makes virtual reality feel anything but real. You need to be able to move around to really get the virtual experience, which this bizarre sliding platform lets you do—kind of. More »

Anyone who’s been wanting to make a game for the Oculus Rift headset, but hemmed and hawed during the Kickstarter run, now has a second chance. Oculus has kicked off its own pre-order campaign that offers the VR developer kit at the same $300 that it cost for the more proactive among us, or $345 for those beyond US borders. As an added incentive, the first 1,000 who pull the trigger still get a copy of Doom 3: BFG Edition to show what the Oculus Rift can do. Twiddling your thumbs will have cost at least a month — these new kits won’t ship until January — but the pre-order still means a head start over competing developers that haven’t yet seen the virtual light.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

Oculus Rift developer kits go up for regular pre-order, catch VR procrastinators originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“This is the latest prototype,” the Oculus guys tell us. That’s great, now strap us in. The team decided to make a sudden stop in Germany ahead of appearances back in the US over the next few weeks — and we’re glad, because it meant we got to call in on them and grab some time with the Oculus Rift. If you didn’t know, the Rift is a Kickstarter-funded VR gaming headset (stay with us) that’s caught the attention of several games developers — most notably John Carmack. He liked it so much, in fact, that he developed a special Rift-ready version of Doom 3 for the headset and Doom 4 will also be heading to the VR peripheral too. We got to play with the earlier game and while there’s a video after the break, we reckon you’ll really need to try this in person to fully grasp how the Oculus Rift plays. Check out our impressions after the break.

Continue reading Oculus Rift’s latest VR headset prototype gets a showing at Gamescom 2012 (hands-on)

Filed under: Displays, Gaming

Oculus Rift’s latest VR headset prototype gets a showing at Gamescom 2012 (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 10:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We knew that the Oculus Rift VR headset would be popular when it hit Kickstater, but now we have a better idea of just how popular it is. The Rift has already rocketed past its Kickstarter goal of $250,000, managing to do so just a few hours after the campaign went live. This isn’t the first time this happened, with OUYA accomplishing the same thing just a few weeks back.

The amount of money being pledged to the Oculus Rift project is still rising fast, sitting at $411,303 as of this writing. This first batch of headsets is intended for developers only, with a version aimed at consumers planned for release next year. Given the Kickstarter’s meteoric rise to success, that consumer version of the Oculus Rift seems like it has an excellent shot at becoming a reality.

Most of the lower tiers get you Oculus Rift posters and t-shirts (some of the signed by the Rift team), and it isn’t until pledging $275 that you get the actual unit. The headset for the $275 tier comes unassembled, tasking developers with putting it together themselves. Pledging $300 gets you a pre-assembled unit, and all tiers featuring the Oculus Rift as a reward also come with a copy of Doom 3: BFG, the first (of what we hope is many) Rift-optimized game. Of course, with this campaign aimed squarely at developers, all of the higher tiers come with access to the SDK, so developers can start plugging away as soon as they receive their Rift.

We have to say that doing a Kickstarter for Oculus Rift developers is a pretty good idea. Not only does it allow the Oculus team to receive early feedback from those who will be working with the product the most, but it also gives developers ample time to experiment before the consumer version becomes available next year. It looks like we’re not the only ones who think that, as people continue to throw money at this Kickstarter. With 30 days left to go, Team Oculus has the potential to raise massive amounts of money, so stay tuned.

Oculus Rift surpasses Kickstarter goal in matter of hours is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
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