The Oculus Summer Sale finally gave me the courage to pick up a VR system. In Canada, where the Oculus, with touch and two sensors (something that their website doesn’t highlight very well), is currently $550 CDN and the Vive is $1100 to $1200 CDN, it feels like the former dropped into impulse buy territory, especially as a game development tool. More on that in the coming days or weeks (I hope).

I played around with it over the weekend, mostly Robo Recall, Lucky’s Tale, and Valve’s The Lab. I was a bit surprised at how virtual objects (like GLaDOS and the Robo Recall robots) getting into your personal space feels slightly intimidating. More accurately, I am a bit surprised how effective the “layer of glass” effect that a traditional computer game, on a computer monitor, isolates you from what’s going on. I know this was a hot topic a couple years ago, but I didn’t experience it at the time. Now I did. It could be very useful for expressing ideas…

From a technical side, it’s a bit annoying setting up the sensors. They were a bit picky until I figured out what they were trying to do, and I would probably want a third sensor at some point for when I turn around. Setting up the back end of the play area perimeter is annoying when you’re trying to move your body around to not block the sensor.

Also, the extra USB devices pushes my system to about the limit, showing me a few notifications of my USB hard drive dropping and reconnecting at times. I’ve heard that many people install add-in cards for extra USB ports (if they don’t have a high-end processor platform). That could be useful.