How Oculus Rift will Change the World Beyond Gaming

From virtual tourism to Matrix-style virtual learning.

What's the best scene in The Matrix? The lobby shoot-out, the helicopter escape, the rooftop bullet-dodging scene? Sure, those had the 12-year-old me bouncing up and down on the couch (figuratively; I was a very sedentary child). But the parts that I remember really tweaking my developing nerd glands were the 'training programmes' - the virtual rooms outside of the Matrix proper, where you could pick out guns (and stylish PVC trench coats), practice jumping the gaps between skyscrapers and leap about learning Kung Fu. It was this use of film's technology that made me think that I wanted to live in the future, sentient machine apocalypse be damned.

The same is true of the Oculus Rift. All the YouTube videos of early Rift adopters first-person face-planting off buildings in Mirror's Edge, or bouncing around Aperture Science testing labs in Portal 2? Those are the Lobby Scene, big and loud and cool. But the non-gaming uses for the Oculus Rift, the potential for entirely new experiences that only virtual reality can bring, those are the things that make me go 'whoa'.

Take GarageGames' David Wyand, for example. His Rift project has no guns, chase sequences or puzzles at all. You can't even move. All Wyand's Aurora Borealis demo aims to do is give users the best experience of the Northern Lights possible, without all that bothersome going-outside business.

"I saw an article on io9.com about a time-lapse video of the aurora borealis in Sweden and I knew it would make a great project using the Oculus Rift," says Wyand of his project, which puts users at the centre of a virtual sky dome, letting them look up and around the sky as the aurora borealis - recreated from footage Wyand sourced from the Canadian Space Agency - shimmers above them.

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An architectural firm is working on software to let clients walk around their dream homes before the first brick is laid

"It was an experiment to see if a recorded, real life event could be experienced using the technology of the Oculus Rift and draw you in just enough that you feel you are at the event," he says. "I've been told by people who have never seen the aurora borealis in person that they now feel they have. And while I don’t expect this project in its current form and technology to actually replace what it would be like to experience an event like this first hand, it appears to be far enough along to elicit a similar emotional response."

Wyand's Aurora Borealis demo is one of dozens of projects being pitched by VR enthusiasts on Oculus' official developer forums. And while some are building their projects entirely from the ground up (an architectural firm is working on software to let clients walk around their dream homes before the first brick is laid, while another team is working to turn the Rift into a cheap and portable alternative to expensive, big-screen 3D TVs), plenty of other developers are tapping existing resources to realise their own VR projects.

One such developer is Luca Siciliano Viglieri. "I was always fascinated by the Google Earth/Maps project, in particular the possibility that Street View gives you to explore different places in first-person," says the formerly-professional VR developer. "But the problem is that a computer monitor is like looking at a framed picture. It doesn't give you the sense of being there."

Siciliano Viglieri's Rift-compatible version of Street View does exactly what you'd expect: it takes Google's massive, globe-spanning database of panoramic snapshots and puts the user in the middle, letting them 'walk' down the Champs Elysees, or stand outside their house, peering into their own drawing room. With the Rift headset, however, there's none of that cumbersome clicking and dragging - just warping to a location and having a look around.

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Perhaps this is is actually the first step toward proper, virtual tourism

As you'd expect with such nascent technology, Siciliano Viglieri's prototype for next-gen Street View isn't quite teleportation yet. Unavoidably, Street View still does that whoosh-ing from one point to another, built as each location is from a composition of still photographs. There are also teething issues with the controls, which he intends to fix by adding gamepad support ("Finding the mouse or the keyboard with the Oculus Rift on your face is not an easy task!" he says).

But Siciliano Viglieri fully expects Google to offer official support to the Rift in time, adding more detail and greater depth. And with Google ironing out the issues, who knows what's next? Perhaps that 'whoosh' is actually the first step toward proper virtual tourism. Have an hour-long lunch break to kill? Strap on a Rift and go for a paddle on the Great Barrier Reef. Nose around a Mayan temple. Turn up the air-con and zip over to Antarctica. It's your world, space ranger.

Pair the capabilities of the Rift with other cutting-edge technologies and it all goes even more Star Trek. Take Sixense Entertainment, the US hardware developer behind the Razer Hydra. Their next big project, MakeVR, will reportedly combine a virtual workspace viewed through the Rift with the Hydra's motion-tracking, ultra-precise controller to make a 3D design tool that lets you to build and design objects with your hands. Like a first-person Sackboy. Or Patrick Swayze in some terrible, money-spinning video game adaptation of Ghost.

"We're hoping to relieve people who want to make things from the process of learning these deep menu systems and arcane interfaces that stand in the way of the creative process," says MakeVR's head of development, Paul Mlyniec, in the project's pre-Kickstarter teaser video. "The mouse and keyboard is not a natural interface for working in 3D. What's made MakeVR much easier for people to use is that it gives you your hands back."

The demo shows users grabbing virtual objects in space with the Hydra controls, stretching them, copying them, cutting chunks out of them and eventually ending up with a professional-looking 3D model of a motorbike or a spaceship, without so much as breathing on a keyboard or mouse. And once you've finished sculpting that bust of your own face, you can send the design to your 3D printer and stick it on the mantelpiece. For the moment, it's a prototype. But it's a vision of a motion-controlled future makes Sony's Move controls and the Xbox One's swiping-to-change-channel look downright archaic.

When the Oculus Rift finally arrives in its sparkly, high-definition consumer version, the first thing I'll do is take a long, long walk through Skyrim again. But to pigeonhole the Rift as just an evolution of gaming is to do it a disservice. What we're really talking about with the Rift is the invention of The Matrix, the opening up of new possibilities for everything you can do with your eyes without leaving your seat. And no-one's even going to stick a metal spike into your brain.