Two days ago I received my Oculus Rift developer kit. If you’re unfamiliar with the Rift, it’s an affordable Virtual Reality headset that had a successful kickstarter for developer kits last year.

My kit had a pretty long journey, going to Australia first. I used to think that people (particularly in the US) mixing up Austria and Australia was just a myth, but it seems like it actually happens:

Tracking Information for the UPS order

But hey, all is well that ends well. It’s a really nicely packaged kit, and includes adapters for anywhere on earth and 3 times as many video cables as you need:

You can find much better pictures of exactly what’s inside (and the great box!) elsewhere on the web.

Sadly, I don’t have much time to do development for the Rift or even much testing right now, but here are my first impressions:

• It works! When you first put it on and look around, it really feels like an entirely new experience. I had a few people at work try it today, and all were really impressed as well.
• The resolution is low, but not as bad as I expected. I think with the consumer version’s planned 1080p resolution and really nicely anti-aliased rendering, we’ll be fine for a while.
• The pixel switching time of the current display is too long. Ideally, I think it should use something like an OLED display, with instant response.
• The headtracking is really fast, I didn’t notice any perceptible delay.

I just tested using the “Oculus World Demo” included with the SDK, and I noticed that the reaction speed and even the blur with head movement seemed significantly better with the windowed fullscreen mode instead of the “real” fullscreen mode. I’m not sure why this is the case, it could be that in real fullscreen I had VSync on.

Anyway, I hope I get more time to play around with it this weekend.