Two years ago, a legendary programmer occupied an unassuming booth at the world’s biggest gaming show. It was John Carmack from id Software telling anyone who’d listen that virtual reality was back and that the equally unassuming black box, an early prototype Oculus Rift, was the catalyst. As more and more journalists got wind of the duct tapped demo, news about Carmack’s ‘magic hat’ began to spread very fast indeed. By E3 2012’s close, the Oculus Rift was one of the biggest stories of the show.
Two Years is a Long Time in VR
Two years on, the rise of virtual reality has soared even faster than its supporters could have reasonably hoped. In the 24 months since that E3, a long dormant industry has been awakened, and with it, the desire to harness VR’s unique immersive qualities for games. Games, of course, is what E3 is all about, and this E3 we’re hoping to see big companies wake up to the potential of VR.
Several big games are in the works for the Oculus Rift, amid a sea of indie demos and early-release titles, but we haven’t yet seen direct commitments from the AAA developer tier. Fast approaching the expected launch for the consumer version of the Oculus Rift (also known as the CV1), and post-Facebook acquisition, we’re anticipating announcements from major developers professing support for the Oculus Rift. Some will announce that they’re beginning development, while others will likely be coming out of stealth after developing for virtual reality for some time.
This will be the first E3 since Sony, one of the biggest names in gaming, jumped into the virtual reality arena. Make no mistake, they’ll be pushing their Project Morpheus VR headset as a unique-selling point against Microsoft’s currently VR-less Xbox. With Sony’s array of renowned first-part studios, it’s very likely that we’ll be seeing some major announcements of support for Project Morpheus, if only to say that the developers will be ready for Morpheus when Sony heads to market.
Which leads us to another possibility… that Microsoft will have something to show for their supposed virtual reality R&D. So far we haven’t uncovered any concrete info on what Microsoft might have up its sleeve, but you can bet that they’ll need an equal offering to Sony and Oculus at some point—maybe next week’s E3 will mark the official beginning for Microsoft and Xbox virtual reality.
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Executive Editor Ben Lang and resident podcaster Reverend Kyle will be on the ground whilst yours truly will be working full time from the UK to make sure you have a front row seat to the most important virtual reality news to come out of the show.
If you’re working on something VR related and are heading to E3 this year please to get in touch with us at info@roadtovr.com or tweet us @rtovr.