I don't know about all of you, but the VR craze has got me hooked. I recently emailed VR frontiersman Oliver Kreylos of UC Davis. Here's a link to his latest project.

I asked him "What are your plans and hopes for the next year with the kinect 2 and oculus 2 together?"

he replied with "It's going to be another gold rush, I'm pretty sure. The knives are already coming out."

So, first off, since I'm working on a BS in Computer science for the plans of making it big in the VR industry....this is huge. I plan on staying in contact with him for awhile, but wIth all that set aside, I'd first like to say I'm really just a beginner in the large scale of things. What I'd like to know is, how many of you are currently experimenting in VR environments like this(Oculus+kinect) with game engines, and what success/failure stories do you have?

I'm doing my master's in CSE now, and last semester I had a course called Interactive Virtual Environments. We did not have access to an Oculus Rift or Kinects, but we did get access to a CAVE: a front, left, right and bottom wall, with projectors on each wall for stereoscopic view. It also had a motion and orientation detector attached to the glasses that were used for the stereoscopic view.

Groups were left free about what sort of world to create for this CAVE, but had to look into how "real" their worlds were perceived by the user. Our group, for example, built a big scary bridge, which users would have to walk over. The second walk, big bloody swinging axes would appear. Other walks, there would be holes in the bridge. Other walks were a combination of the two, or faster swinging axes, for example.

It was interesting to see how users would evade the axes and the holes, even though there was no perceivable penalty for going right through/over them. Since being hit by huge axes and falling through holes usually does not end well in the real world, made them immediately assume that it would be no different in our virtual world.

Even though a lot of users enjoyed the experience, they all said that they did not feel that the world was very real. Our programmer art skills might be to blame. But the use of a Wii-mote to move, instead of moving in the world by moving your own body, is what I think to be the biggest factor in this.

All in all, I really enjoyed working on this project. The video you showed looks really impressive. It's funny to see how the guy also tries to evade the table with his legs, kind of like how our users tried to evade the holes.

@Arjan: try tossing this into the cave:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1944625487/omni-move-naturally-in-your-favorite-game

that might up the reality factor with people.

I have this (unfortunate?) hobby of buying VR hardware, and then doing very little with it. I have an Oculus Rift (with a devkit 2 on pre-order), a Razor Hydra, a Leap Motion, and a Haptix on the way.

The grand plan is a sci-fi cockpit simulator, using the Rift for visualisation, and the Leap Motion to bring the player's off-hand into the virtualisation to manipulate control panels, etc. That said, I haven't found any time to work on it lately.

I have however seen some very cool games/demos lately, which convince me that this is the future of flight/cockpit sims. Even the slow-paced Lunar Flight is transformed by the Rift, and dogfighting with the Rift in Elite Dangerous has to be experienced to be believed - the feeling of visually tracking an enemy fighter as it passes over and behind your canopy, is both exhilarating and essential.

Thanks for the responses.

To Arjan B:

Am I to assume that you have experience with the Vrui Toolkit? Because I have so many questions. I just started reading the material and I'm about to install it on Fedora. Is there a large learning curve to it? What program did you use to build the level? and I have more, but I hope you can answer these ones first. thanks again.

To Swiftcoder

How many different games have you played on your Oculus? And how many of those were modded ones like n64 or gamecube game mods?

I'm sorry to say that we did not work with the Vrui Toolkit. The CAVE was at a neighbouring college, and I believe the libraries we used were developed in-house. It was called Cavelib3, if I remember correctly. Here's a link to some information about the CAVE: http://www.fontysvr.nl/facilities-and-systems-in-vrlab/virtual-reality-cave. If you go to the wiki, there should be some information about Cavelib3 too. I hope most of it is in English, the site did not seem to be very consistent with language.

That library made things very simple for us, since it handled pretty much like GLUT, but with extras. One of those extras was trigger volumes, which we used to detect whether someone hit an axe or a hole.

I think we made the models using a trial version of 3ds Max.

@slicer4ever That Omni thing looks awesome!

I don't know much about linux yet, so the Vrui toolkit will help me start. This is the link

http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/

it's free to use and the best part is " maintaining OpenGL rendering contexts that can display head-tracked stereoscopic images on monitors, fixed single- and multi-screen projections systems, movable monitors or screens, head-mounted displays, or any combinations thereof."

linux is used primarily at my university so I should be familiar with it by the time Oculus 2 and kinect 2 are available to develop with. So, in theory and with a few thousand dollars, any skilled programer will be developing a matrix or a holodeck sometime this year or next, hopefully.

I'm a very hopeful person. The price of the kinect 2 is still "unclear"
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2014/05/13/microsoft-dumps-the-kinect-in-first-series-xbox-one-price-cut/
but i doubt it will be more than $400. And the Oculus 2 is already $350
https://www.oculusvr.com/order/

The potential for VR is stacking up. Anyone else think this is the year for gaming?