Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Valve’s secret augmented reality project, or at least one of them, has finally surfaced. At the weekend’s Maker Faire, ex-Valvesters Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, demonstrated CastAR, a pair of glasses with a mini-projector that ‘casts’ games onto a reflective surface. The game appears in 3D in front of the player, who can interact with the insubstantial environments. It was a project that died during Valve’s “great cleansing” at the start of the year, but it’s not a cloak-and-dagger tech theft: Gabe waved his magic wand and gave his ex-employees the rights to the new technology.
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My application to be an astronaut was turned down because it was written in crayon, and now that I read it back in the cold light of day I notice it appeared pretty threatening. Sorry, NASA! My aluminum hat must have slipped and enabled an alien to take control of my writing arm. If, like me, you’ve been rejected for astronauthood on petty and unfounded claims of bad penmanship and terrorist activity, then there’s another route. All you need is Spacewalk, and an Oculus Rift. And, frankly, the Rift’s optional.
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It only takes one game to make a piece of hardware sing. Remember the Wii? I didn’t really care about it until someone showed me Wii Bowling, and it all snapped into place. That might have happened for the Oculus Rift at the recent Exile Game Jam. A game called Disunion puts the player in a public execution. It’s a virtual guillotine sim, where the player is led to the chopping block (turned over chairs), made to lie down with their head exposed, and then the blade drops. The effect is enhanced by lightly tapping on their neck when the blade connects. You might say Disunion is the Oculus Rift’s…

[drumroll]

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I am increasingly anxious about of the pointlessness of videos of virtual reality. Nevertheless, you can sort of imagine what’s going on in this Oculus Rift plus Virtuix Omni (a multi-direction treadmill platform for moving about in VR) as a chap plays Team Fortress 2, below.

I am not sure if it would make me feel a bit giddy.
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In case you’re in need of a reminder, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is really, really cool. But that won’t be here until the fuuuuuuture, right? You will play it atop your hoverboard, which you will rebelliously ride inside your hoverhouse, which will drift above the hoverground, which will perpetually bob above a void of infinite nothingness. Which will also be hovering. Or so you think. In non-virtual reality, however, the VR wonder device is right around the corner, with backer dev kits shipping this very month. And now, Oculus and Valve have teamed up to announce the first officially supported game for the eyeball-teleporting tomorrow glasses: the ever-experimental Team Fortress 2. Naturally, there will also be a hat involved. I hope it hovers.

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OK, OK, I admit, I want an Oculus Rift and I will do unspeakable things to any human being of your choice in order to get one. (Er, better not hold me to that.) Stereoscopic 3D in games has left me either unmoved or with a headache to date, but these VR goggles are so much more than that. They mean videogames BEAMED DIRECTLY INTO MY BRAIN, or thereabouts and, as this video of an OR modification for Crysis demonstrates, they also allow the use of natural head movement to look around game environments.
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I preemptively think I’m gonna be sick. Don’t get me wrong: there are few things in this world I want more than Oculus Rift virtual reality for my mad dash through Mirror’s Edge‘s theme park of parkour, but now that it’s probably going to happen, I realize that I should probably bid farewell to any lunches I’ve had in the past couple months. And who will I have to thank for my sudden bouts of violent nausea? Interestingly, it won’t be EA. Instead, a third-party toolset called Vireio Perception is primed to add Rift support to Mirror’s Edge and other older titles.

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Halloween approaches and brings with it zombie DLC for almost every game, although nothing quite as macabre and horrific as last year’s best expansion pack. Along with the costumes and the carved squash, Dracula’s birthday is also a time for reflection, which is the dusty old Count’s least favourite form of thinking about things. More specifically, Halloween serves to remind me that there aren’t enough horror games in the world, which is why I’m so pleased that I stumbled across Montas while searching the dark corners of the internet. It’s out next year and looks like a sci-fi splicing of Penumbra and Silent Hill. Watch.

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Hawken is one of those things I get visibly excited about when I describe it to people. I flail and gesture wildly such that no glass of water or small, desk-adorning cactus within a 100 meter radius is safe. Somewhat coincidentally, that’s almost exactly what happens when I teleport my brain into Palmer Luckey’s mad virtual reality fantasy realm with Oculus Rift – only, you know, for entirely different yet equally devastating reasons. So I suppose it only makes sense that the two literal home-wreckers would end up walking down the aisle hand-in-hand.

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