Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this week is the first stirring of a future stuffed with virtual reality headsets. The hope of its Californian engineers and their bitcoin backers is that we, the consumers, will soon use them to spend a whole lot of time outside of our lives. Strap the goggles to your face, position the headphones over your ears, press the on button, and — bzzzztp — you’re in a different world.
The question is, who will create these worlds? The first prototype of the Oculus Rift was built five years ago by an 18-year-old called Palmer Luckey, and he had an 18-year-old’s use for it: video games. Luckey was obsessed with video games to the point where he wanted to jump in and feel as though he were walking around them. Others had this yearning too. Big shots in the gaming industry tried out Luckey’s tech, and various light bulbs, cash registers and bugle calls went off in their heads. This, they thought, would be a playground for game designers and gamers.
Five years later, Luckey is many millions of dollars richer, and his creation is still marketed more as a gaming device than anything else. But other art forms are now being co-opted to the cause — including cinema. At last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Oculus didn’t just announce the birth of their Story Studio, they also showed baby’s first movie. This five-minute animated short, called Lost and directed by a former employee of Pixar, places its begoggled viewers in the middle of a forest. They look around. What’s that in the undergrowth? Oh, it’s a severed robotic hand. Can you hear that noise? It’s the robot coming to find it.
Lost has since been surpassed by another film from the Oculus Story Studio.
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