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Innovation
Consumer Virtual Reality is Now Available!

Virtual Reality is now a reality. I've been waiting on this since I was a kid. The new Oculus Rift VR headset is now available. I had the Oculus Rift Developer Kit and while it was promising, there were still bugs to work out. Also my computer at the time was not the strongest to run the best 3D graphics. I think they actually upped the minimum specs maybe a week or two after I received it and I could see why. However now Oculus has come with a fully consumer ready version. I'm still debating whether I want the Oculus Rift or the Vive. Both look amazing but the Vive allows you to incorporate the entire room into your virtual reality experience. So the downside is that it requires more space. While the Oculus Rift is designed more for a seated experience. The Oculus Rift is also by far the less expensive of the two however the most expensive thing will be the PC. You need a high end gaming PC for either. I'm sure like anything, pricing for this technology will go down but I'm just glad it's here.

As excited as I am about virtual reality, one thing I wonder about is how it will effect the person outside of virtual reality. If you think about a gaming environment, there are a lot of intense things happening all the time and the more realistic the virtual reality environment is the more you have to untrain your natural fight or flight response to not react by running or jumping out of the way but instead to use your hands on the controller. That way you're not running and diving out of a window in your living room or something. As these games become more and more realistic I wonder if we will begin to see problems where people forget they are in actual reality and when for instance they really need to jump out of the way of an oncoming car, they revert to that familiar feeling of trying to move their hands or something instead of actually getting out of the way. Hopefully not. Regardless, I'm really excited to play the new games. I think Virtual Reality is making life better...Funner is better.

UPDATE:
The Oculus Rift is currently on backorder but if you want to get your hands on one right away you can get one here