Yet another old (2006) video. I'm uploading this because of the recent VR re-awakening in the gaming community, particularly due to the Oculus Rift and John Carmack's remarks. It shows the old Descent game, re-imagined as a first-person shooter, and run in a CAVE VR environment. It doesn't matter that it's a CAVE and not a head-mounted display; if both are done right, the visual experience and the interaction are exactly the same. So just imagine that I'm wearing a VR headset instead of standing in a cube. This is what a VR FPS should/would feel like. I'm talking about that in more detail on my blog:
http://doc-ok.org/?p=123
Please watch both parts of the video (first-person and third-person); it makes it a lot clearer what's going on. Both parts are shot with a hand-held tracked video camera. In the first part, I'm holding the camera myself and am looking over the hand-held input device I'm using as a virtual "gun." In the second part, a colleague is filming me from a vantage point a bit further back so you can see how I am immersed in the virtual game world. I wish we would have had a wider-angle lens back then.
Some technical info: to create an immersive experience like this, both the viewer and the input device(s) have to be tracked. In this case, the viewer is the camera. The input device is the little black hand-held thing. You can see that the (virtual) targeting reticle is drawn exactly where it should be, modulo some wobble. That's due to tracking. From the player's point of view, it looks as if the real device and the virtual reticle are one.
Oh, and apologies about the sound (or lack thereof). The game has the original "pew pew" sounds and explosions from Descent, but I fubared the audio when I initially uploaded this years ago, and now the original sound track is gone.
