The legendary programmer does see a bright future with VR headsets though
Virtual reality, once thought of as a gimmicky, far-fetched idea, is becoming reality, and id Software's John Carmack is pushing hard to make VR headsets a part of every gamer's standard equipment. The Doom creator spent most of E3 showing off his own special VR headset in conjunction with the Doom 3 BFG Edition. For Carmack, prettier graphics are nice, but they won't fundamentally change the gameplay experience; VR, on the other hand, could have a dramatic impact.
As it turns out, a man by the name of Palmer Luckey had been working on something similar to what Carmack was tooling around with: an Oculus Rift head-mounted display.
"I was building these things myself but then I came across another guy with a huge personal collection of head mount displays and he's been working on these in his workshop. He's offering this as a kit for only $500, and he sent it to me. I added my sensors and software and stuff on there... When we decided to re-issue Doom 3, the thought was 'how do you interest people in an 8-year old title?' The idea was that we had serious stuff, Microsoft and Sony are pushing the 3D TV stuff, but I'm still not a huge backer of that. I think I did as good a job as possible with it. It's kind of neat, but it's a toss-up if you want to play it, especially on a console where you have to deal with frame-rate."
"[Luckey] is starting a Kickstarter to help fund the first batch at $100 a kit. The hope is to sell these at $500 a kit with sensor and a copy of Doom 3 it could be about $600. I may wind up subsidizing a set of this first batch as they are so incredibly cool. I'm hoping that we will have these available around August... to have a chance, to have an impact on how VR is going to go, as this is better than most high-end units."
Interestingly, while the demo we played was with an Xbox 360 controller, Microsoft hasn't shown much interest, while Sony has, Carmack noted. Not only that, but Carmack told us that he's "actually going to be talking with Valve next month." Carmack didn't say who this was, but we're guessing it's Valve's Michael Abrash, who's already spoken publicly of his interest in wearable computing.
"I got a friend up there who is working with augmented reality, so there is a lot of overlap. It will be fun sitting down to talk about that stuff. So yeah, it is one of those things that we feel we're on the cusp of something rolling. This is neat, but I know three ways we can make this much better with available things, it just takes more effort and work. This is all stuff that can be done, it is not expensive and certainly in a price point of something like this could be a radical experience," Carmack said.
The demo we tried was certainly impressive, and the goggles do track your head motions, mapped to the left analog aiming controls, pretty well. The downside is it's a somewhat isolating experience.
