A major shift in gaming is about to take place. Whether or not anyone is ready, or has pooled enough fund for the colossal pries coming our way, Virtual Reality gaming is on the edge of bursting into the market.
Previously announced by Microsoft, it appears that the Windows 10 version of Minecraft will be Occulus friendly. Meaning, if you can bankroll yourself into owning one, you will get to play the building fantasy phenomenon in Virtual Reality.
And this is no hype train. It’s already very real.
At a gaming event last week, Tuesday in San Francisco, Oculus and Microsoft showed off the fruits of their labors with an amazing demonstration. Those at the event were lucky enough to try the technology and game out for themselves. Chris Kohler, with WIRED magazine wrote on his experience playing on the Rift, saying:
Later, I rode a mine cart up a hill, experiencing the building sense of anticipation you might get climbing the first big hill in a roller coaster. I fired cannons from high atop the hill. I walked across a bridge made of glass and looked down at the dizzying drop below. I dropped down into a dungeon, where I lit torches to feel my way through the blindness. It’s everything you love about Minecraft, but now you’re living it.
When asked for a statement at the event, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey stated in an interview with VentureBeat:
You get a lot of stuff in Minecraft VR that you don’t get in the PC version like spatialized audio. Everyone’s voice comes from the right place, so you get a sense of where everyone is in the space. It’s running at 90 frames per second in stereo 3D.
Luckey continued, emphasising that the Rift’s gameplay was going to be very different from Microsoft’s other VR project, the HoloLens. He stressed that Minecraft’s gameplay on the Rift translates extremely well:
It makes it feel like you’re actually inside of the world of Minecraft, and not just the stock Minecraft world, but all of these servers that you can join where you hang out with people. It is in some ways the closest thing that we have to a Metaverse.
Luckey went on to point out that while most would imagine the majority of Minecraft’s player base as children, it tend to be players around their late 20s or early 30s. And this fact, coupled alongside maturity issues, is the driving reason why access to the Rift is being limited to those over the age of 13.