The Oculus Rift is still in development kit mode, with no timetable for an official retail release on the horizon. When the Rift’s tech demos work, they work well, but they’re very simple and often don’t allow the user to do much. NASA got ahold of a Rift and an Omni — an omnidirectional treadmill — and created a tech demo in which you can walk around on Mars.
The Rift has been given quite a bit of press since it was released. We live in an age where the tech world is experiencing new devices trying to be revolutionary on a regular basis more than ever before. Out of all of these devices that have launched within the past handful of months — the Ouya, the Nvidia Shield, the Leap Motion, and the Razer Edge — only the Oculus Rift seems poised to change the industry. It does, however, have a set of drawbacks. Using it with a mouse has so far been unintuitive, and you have to use a keyboard to move around, which means you can’t spin around in place and look behind you without either a mouse or halting your movement.
When paired with the Oculus Rift, the multidirectional treadmill, the Omni, alleviates the issue of a paired movement device because you can not only walk in place to move within the virtual space, but spin around in any direction. Cost and the technical know-how to combine the Rift and Omni aside, the biggest issue currently facing the Rift is that it’s a dev kit, and there isn’t anything inspiring on it to play with. Team Fortress 2 is easy enough to set up, but it’s a chore to control. The other (working) demos are either completely automated and on rails, or allow you to move around a small, simple environment.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, however, has found a much more inspiring use of the Rift. By combining it with the Omni and a stereoscopic 360-degree panorama of Mars, they created a walking-on-Mars simulator.
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