Much ado is currently being made about the Oculus Rift, a virtual
reality headset currently under development and being fitted out for Second
Life®. Or rather, SL is currently being fitted out for it, with a Rift-enabled
version of the viewer scheduled for public release in late summer. There have
been significant steps forward in SL visuals in recent months, what with the
switchover to server-side avatar rendering promising to assign blurry avatars
to history, and the recent introduction of ‘New Materials’ (my ballpark reading
of which is ‘advanced bump-mapping’) enabling more realistic surface textures.
Factor in the buzz surrounding the Rift and there’s this faint feeling of stars
lining up for a possible second age of SL. I’m not entirely sure how SL will
work inside the Rift (I don’t know, for example, how typing will be done),
though it’s easy to see the attraction of this new layer to SL’s secret
ingredient: immersion.
