Chapter 1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

What made you feel like you were truly immersed in a game world for the first time? Was it graphics that looked impressively realistic, ambient noise that perfectly captured the environment and mood, or the way the game's mechanics just started to feel like a natural reflex? Game developers constantly strive to replicate scenarios that are as real and as emotionally impactful as possible, and they've never been as close as they are now with the advent of virtual reality (VR).

VR has been a niche market since the early 1950s, often failing to evoke a meaningful sense of presence that the concept hinges on---that is, until the first Oculus Rift prototype was designed in 2010 by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. The Oculus Rift proved that modern rendering and display technology was reaching a point that immersive VR could be achieved, and that's when the new era of VR development began.

Today, VR development is as accessible as ever, comprehensively supported in the most popular off-the-shelf game development engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity3D. In this book, you'll learn all of the essentials that go into a complete VR experience, and master the techniques that will enable you to bring any idea you have into VR.

This chapter will cover everything you need to know to get started with VR, including the following points:

• The concept of VR
• The importance of intent in VR design
• Common limitations of VR games
• Vergence-accommodation conflict
• The anatomy of a VR headset
• Constellation tracking
• The importance of input
• Meeting required frame rates
• Asynchronous Timewarp
• Installing the Oculus runtime
• Configuring your Oculus Rift
• Stepping into Oculus home