Who cares about about PCs and Games consoles when you can program games for something like this. How are they meant to do movement with this thing. I guess it comes with a controller or something?

It's not a games device, it's just a display. You plug it into your PC, which runs the games. You use a keyboard/mouse/gamepad as usual.

Shame Oculus Rift kickstarter ends before christmas. Who cares about about PCs and Games consoles when you can program games for something like this.
Would be even cooler if it tracked arm movements. I guess it wouldn't be to hard to build a metal sleeve that can give analog output based on bends of the arm. Just a bunch of variable resistors connected each connection of the bones.
How are they meant to do movement with this thing. I guess it comes with a controller or something?

They've done stuff with kinect, move, and wii-motes to track arms in correspondance with head mounted displays.

The reason this is cool is because it's cheap and assumingly good quality, not because it is new.

[quote name='CryoGenesis' timestamp='1344398384' post='4967239']
Who cares about about PCs and Games consoles when you can program games for something like this. How are they meant to do movement with this thing. I guess it comes with a controller or something?

It's not a games device, it's just a display. You plug it into your PC, which runs the games. You use a keyboard/mouse/gamepad as usual.
[/quote]

What about the head tracking?

[quote name='Hodgman' timestamp='1344399835' post='4967248']It's not a games device, it's just a display and a head-tracker. You plug it into your PC, which runs the games. You use a keyboard/mouse/gamepad as usual, and the head-tracker for added parallax.

What about the head tracking?[/quote]Sorry, fixed my quote.

[quote name='RivieraKid' timestamp='1344017948' post='4965902']I think they are encroaching on people who actually need funding.

I didn't realise that Kickstarter had a limited amount of space?
[/quote]
donations are a limited pool. That limited pool should be directed to those projects that need it the most. If carmack beleives in it, join the project, fund it himself and take a cut of the profits.

donations are a limited pool. That limited pool should be directed to those projects that need it the most. If carmack beleives in it, join the project, fund it himself and take a cut of the profits.

They are limited by the amount of money in the world, but that's an upper limit that will never be reached on kickstarter. Carmack has given them money as well iirc from his E3 interview.

Giving money to this wouldn't stop me from giving money to other projects; other projects being not worth my money would stop me from giving money to them.

It looks impressive. I just signed up for the Dev Kit. This should be very fun.

I have an interesting experience with virtual reality. I once did an experiment (I'm not sure if it was a psychology, or an engineering experiment) a few years ago while an undergrad where I was supposed to calculate distances while wearing a VR display. They had a spot on the ground, first I walked towards it and and then stopped when I thought I was on top of the spot without anything blocking my vision other then wearing something preventing me from looking down (easy), then I did it blindfolded (I stopped about 2/3rd of the distance), then I did it with a VR display (also not allowed to look down), and I stopped about 3/4th of the total distance. It turned out that I was pretty typical test case.

They were trying to find out why people stop early, and also why people got sick when wearing it for too long. The current theory was that the viewing angle was too small and that the latency was too high. I'm assuming things have gotten better since then.

I don't think I would rake out 300 and also rewrite the majority of the rendering functions in my programs just to accommodate a fancy pair of glasses that are somehow better than those things that popped up at arcades in the 90's. Not to be a pessimist, but they really do seem a long way off from having a chance at becoming remotely mainstream. But, it would be cool to use them, even if you had to use a mouse and couldn't control it with your head (which I am under the impression that you CAN control it with your head). I would hate to tackle the problems that would arise from different eye angles on different people, though.

I am under the impression that you CAN control it with your head

A head-tracker is just another input device (with 6 DOF, equiv to 2 thumbsticks, or a gyro+accelerometer, etc). It's up to each individual game how they make use of input devices, or which ones they support.
All of the games I've played so far that support head-trackers have used them to adjust your in-game head/neck's viewpoint naturally, around the default orientation of your body/vehicle as controlled by your mouse/thumb-stick.

donations are a limited pool. That limited pool should be directed to those projects that need it the most.

That's not really true. The project you linked to wants pledges from gamers that want an awesome sword fighting game (and it does look awesome), this project is aimed at developers who want to fund a first production-run dev-kit of a new HMD. That's two (mostly) different pools. I'm in both pools and have backed devices like this and the Ouya, as well as a lot of games... And I've never said to myself "I'd love to back that game, but I've already given out my kickstarter quota, I wish I didn't order a copy of that less deserving game!"
Also, the project you linked is also marketed with a bunch of expensive videos and backed by a very successful novelist, so it doesnt seem to coming from a very different place financially.

Thanks for sharing this Hodgman. It looks awesome.

I like to think now of how much adrenaline my brain would get "injected" while playing Left4Dead or Amnesia with this.
;)