History of Computers - Oculus Rift

Introduction

Virtual Reality (VR) has been many gamer's dream for a long time, and the Oculus Rift is definitely one of the most supported attempts of VR. While not true or complete VR, the Oculus Rift is a progressive step in terms of consumer access to the project and support/publicity for it.

http://www1.pcmag.com/media/images/499775-oculus-rift.jpg?thumb=y&width=333&height=245

Overview

The Oculus Rift is a headset designed by Oculus which looks like a box strapped on over someone’s eyes. It features two screens, each which shows the image on the screen showing the wearer the image. Its specs are that it has an OLED display, 1080x1200 resolution per eye, a 90 Hz refresh rate and a 110 degree Field of view. [1] It also has rotational and positional tracking which works by using a sensor which is placed in one place. It then detects the movement of lights on the headset to detect when and to the extent which the user looks in a direction and moves the screen accordingly. When the Oculus Rift project created a Kickstarter campaign it, by the end, raised over 2.4 million dollars and, in early Oculus was bought by Facebook for over 2 billion dollars in cash and assets.^[1] [2][3]

Significance

The Oculus Rift is significant in the History of Computers mainly because of the huge attention and funding it received. Being one of the most crowd funded items ever, it received huge publicity which only snowballed that into more attention were now, as of 2016, we can see more and more companies such as Valve and Samsung venturing into similar versions of VR. It has inspired other companies to go down the path of virtual reality which most likely will result in large amounts of technical innovation in the field of VR.