John Humphrys staggering around in a piece of ‘virtual reality’ headgear that looked like binoculars and made him feel sick was as attention-grabbing as radio can be. So I listened in last week as the intrepid Today presenter tried out infotech’s latest gimmick.
The Oculus Rift began life on a crowdfunding website, heralded as an exciting new tool in virtual reality: a tool that computer-games boffins had long been trying to crack. Facebook bought it, and Rift should hit the market this month.
I experienced a forerunner years ago when sampling for my newspaper a day in the life of a bus driver. At a driving school I sat behind the wheel of a virtual double-decker, and ‘drove’ the lurching behemoth, checking wing mirrors, hitting kerbs, narrowly missing a pedestrian in a storm — and feeling, like John, slightly sick.
But that needed a roomful of equipment. The computing, the all-round video projection, the computer-generated pictures for windscreen and wing mirrors, the synchronised sound effects and the jolt when we hit the kerb cost a bomb.
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