It’s now obvious that immersive virtual reality is finally back in the consumer market — with a vengeance.

Especially with the recent advent of FOV2GO, a free DIY portable fold-out iPhone and Android viewer that turns the smartphone screen into a 3-D VR system.

You can create one with foamboard and 2 cheap plastic lenses, and downloadable software lets you create your own virtual worlds or environments to display.

(There’s also an iPad3 version.)

What made this possible: high-resolution screens and built-in gyroscopes. The retina display on the iPhone 4, for instance, provides 960×640 DVGA high resolution on a compact screen.

That means we can now construct ultra-lightweight VR head-mounted displays. The gyroscope lets the device track your head movement so you can look around in real time.

FOV2Go is actually a hardware and software kit for the creation of immersive virtual reality experiences using smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. More info here.

At the Maker Faire showcase of FOV2GO in May, we showed off a few apps such as Tales from the Minus Lab and Shayd Mobile, both running in the Unity3D game engine with custom C# scripts to create the side-by-side in-game camera.

Harness the power to freely shrink and grow as you explore the uncharted worlds and solve environmental physics puzzles… (credit: USC Games)

I created a Mobile version of the Shayd Virtual Reality installation. While the full installation of Shayd encompasses an entire motion capture stage and wide-FOV head-mounted display, Shayd Mobile is much simpler, utilizing the FOV2GO stereoscopic Unity package developed by Perry Hoberman.

The game could also play on an iPad 3 with very large stereoscopic lenses, allowing for a tasty field-of-view approaching 130 degrees.

Considering that the human eye sees at about 180 degrees, this was pretty realistic! You start out walking around with a flashlight in a dark office, looking for a light switch. Using other inputs on the iPad, you can click on letters on the desk and read them by lantern, or use your flashlight. Eventually you can pull out your gun and fire bullets!

The epicenter for FOV2GO (and other cool projects, including motion capture with the Kinect) is the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR), part of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (USC).

But there’s something coming that’s even cooler. Much cooler.

People have always been dreaming about virtual reality since Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and in the late 90’s it really captured the public imagination. VR companies were popping up left and right, but the technology wasn’t quite there yet, and the industry crashed and burned around the same time as the dotcom bubble.

Now that it’s experiencing a resurgence fifteen years later, a ton of pseudo-VR devices are coming out that don’t really make any sense.

There’s been a ton of tinkering with controllers, motion devices, stereoscopy, and the like to make gaming a bit more interesting. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have all developed devices that encourage players to get off the couch and into the action. Like the Kinect, the Playstation Move, the Wiimote, the Razer Hydra for PC, and most recently, the Wii U.

Nice try, no cigar (credit: Sony)

Sony, Vuzix, Senics, and NVIZ are all trying to push towards the consumer market, but their HMDs (head-mounted displays) — like the Sony HMZ-T1 and the Vuzix WRAP 920 — are either too expensive or too low-quality, and they have a narrow field-of-view, so you have no sense of peripheral vision.

There’s also no built-in gyroscope or head-tracking, so even if you did play a game with it, you couldn’t move your head around in the virtual environment.

These consumer HMDs feel like a floating television that you are looking at from 5 feet away. So it’s not sparking any real innovation in the games industry, or first-person shooters.  Besides, if it looks just like a TV, why not just watch a TV? 

Immersive virtual reality hardware

But I found something at the recent E3 Expo 2012 that I’ve been evangelizing since I was a kid. That I know in my heart of hearts is the future — the immediate future — of gaming.

Immersive virtual reality hardware — with real HMDs — has finally arrived. And it’s about to make a huge splash in the first-person shooter hardcore gaming niche.

At the recent E3 2012 show, I saw the future of virtual reality and gaming.

It’s a robust stereoscopic head-mounted display (HMD) called the Oculus RIFT from hardware pioneer Palmer Luckey, shown off by legendary computer graphics guru John Carmack, technical director of Id Software.

Using aspheric lenses and side-by-side stereoscopy, the Oculus RIFT boasts a wide field-of-view of 90 degrees horizontal and 110 degrees vertical, with a target price of $500, according to Palmer, which totally kills anything on the market today in the consumer price range. It also uses a gyroscope for orientation data, so you can actually look around inside the game environment quite naturally.

As evidence of its importance, Carmack is integrating support for the Oculus Rift into Bethesda Softworks’ DOOM 3: BFG Edition, slated for release in North America in October. (If you want to learn more about the Oculus hardware, you can check out detailed specs here.

This is the beginning. 

The RIFT isn’t yet ready to be a neat consumer package; it’s still a DIY device for enthusiasts and hackers, modders, and homebrewers, but “one of the big players will take this as one of the next steps in display [and] interaction technology,” as Carmack notes in the video.

It’s the spark of a revolution in the first-person shooter gaming niche.

Skyrim (credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Many DIYers on the Meant To Be Seen forums (Palmer’s DIY community, where he posts about his projects) are already working on open-source software projects to make the Oculus RIFT compatible with other first-person shooters besides Doom 3, such as Skyrim and Mirror’s Edge, as well as many Valve games, such as Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2.

I’ve had the chance to collaborate with Palmer over the past year or so on other VR projects, such as Shayd and Project Holodeck (a work in progress), and I’ve have worked with a number of his prototypes, like the PR4 and others.

Pre-warping

The lenses that are built into the HMD tend to stretch the image output so that it wraps around a 90-degree field-of-view, thus giving the player a wide FOV that feels much like peripheral vision.  To compensate for this wide FOV optical distortion, John Carmack coded the Doom 3: BFG Edition demo to pre-warp the image coming out of the screen.

Pre-warped stereo image in Doom 3: BFG Edition (credit: id Software)

This same warping effect can be utilized in all FPS games to make them compatible with the RIFT. One MTBS  community member, Joshua Lieberman, AKA Emerson, is working on his open source project Biclops to achieve this “barrel” pre-warping with Skyrim and Mirror’s Edge

Other amazing VR games coming

Valve is also diving into wearable computing, and it is highly likely that they are already working with the Oculus RIFT to integrate it with their Source Engine (this link explains exactly how to integrate a gyroscope properly in the Source Engine for use with an HMD, and I’ve been playing a lot with that C++ code recently).

Portal 2 (credit: Valve Software)

Thus existing games like Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 could be experienced with enhanced visual immersion, and even orientational tracking of the head provided through a gyroscope input.

Due to the diverse and dynamic community based around the Source Engine, if the RIFT is made easily compatible, numerous mods would begin springing up that are built specifically for a head-mounted display.

Much like how the Razer Hydra was sold with Portal 2, the first truly immersive VR games built for VR hardware could start being sold on Valve’s Steam online gaming platform for developers.

Of course, other engines can be just as easily made compatible, particularly the new Unity Pro 4 Engine, which has already been used as the basis for numerous VR experiences at the MxR Lab and the USC Interactive Media Division. The current game I’m producing, Wild Skies, will be using Unity Pro 4 with the Oculus RIFT as well as a positional tracking for a full 360-degree virtual play space.

Consumer version coming

In his latest update, Palmer revealed he is talking with Valve, Bethesda, Epic, Crytek, and Unity about a consumer version of the headset to be developed in 2013. This new version will have built-in support for the most popular game engines, a higher-resolution screen, and wider field-of-view optics.

Now, since teaming up with Carmack a few months ago, Palmer can finally launch the final iteration of his RIFT, and dole out some harsh VR justice to the universe. A Kickstarter for of the first round of development of the RIFT head-mounted display is starting around July 19, according to the latest update from Palmer, to coincide with Carmack’s involvement at QuakeCon and Gamescom.

“Imagine an HMD with a massive field of view and more pixels than 1080p per eye, wireless PC link, built-in absolute head and hand/weapon/wand positioning, and native integration with some (if not all) of the major game engines, all for less than $1,000 USD,” Palmer says. “That can happen in 2013!”

There’s going to be a lot of innovation with this kind of hardware in the next ten years during the following console cycle — if you even want to call it a console cycle anymore. All I know is it’s going to be a hell of a decade.

By the time 2013 comes to a close, the returning VR industry will be back in full swing — this time as part of the multi-billion dollar games industry.