User Paul Rivot from YouTube posted this video of his 90 year old grandmother taking a virtual reality trip to tuscany thanks to the Oculus Rift. She seemed very impressed with the graphics and at 1:16 quite adorably asks, “originally were these taken in tuscany?” regarding the scene around her. To her credit, when I was very young I thought that some games were so realistic that they must have been made of individual frames of real life photography….
On reddit, Rivot remarked on the span of technology that his grandmother has seen:
It was great watching her use it. To think she lived through the roaring 20s, the depression, and was 19 when WW2 started, and got to live long enough to use an oculus rift is mind blowing.
It’s interesting to see how this sort of natural input makes gaming more accessible for non-gamers. If I tried to get my grandparents to play a videogame using a controller, I think they’d have a very hard time using a control stick to navigate their view. But with headtracking and the Oculus Rift, looking around the scene is literally as easy as doing it in real life.
This video also brings back to my mind a tear-jerking short story about virtual reality that I covered on this site a year ago this month.