So we’re coming up on the close of my first week with the Oculus Rift DK2 and more and more people are receiving their units, hungry for stuff to play on the thing. Early adopters have had to be patient as developers adapt their application to DK2’s launch SDK, version 0.4.0 beta – the component which held back delivery of the DK2 recently.

senza preso virtual reality mini opera oculus riftLast week we asked you what you’d like to see us try on Oculus’ new VR headset. It’s fair to say that Elite: Dangerous featured pretty heavily in the responses, you can find my video playtest of that here. I also tried to answer as many questions as I could in this in-depth review. But there’s no doubt that Senza Peso featured pretty heavily in the requests we received. With that in mind, we got in touch with Kite & Lightning, Senza Peso’s developers – and they were kind enough to send us a very early version built with DK2 support, including positional tracking.

So what’s it like? Check out the video above for my thoughts in motion. In short it’s Senza Peso, but even better. The majority of the enhancements to this on-rails mini-epic are subtle but hugely important senza preso vr mini opera oculus riftoverall. Positional tracking is implemented, so motion cues made by your head are captured and  rendered almost completely transparently. And SP’s deft use of particle effects in particular sell the virtual world’s depth to your brain much more effectively. And I can honestly say I’ve never been so distracted by dust motes in my life. But it’s the overall upgrade in experience that makes you feel as if the artistry on show here is being done justice.

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As of now, DK2 support has not been released officially by Kite & Lightning, but the team say they’re planning a finalised version with DK2 support this month. If you’d like access to the new version, sign up here.

Also check out Ben’s original review of Senza Peso here.

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Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • spyro

    I wonder how the peformance will be. On my DK1 and a GeForce 760 it was stuttering at all ends.

    • Paul James

      This was played on a 3.6Ghz Core If (Sandybridge), 16G RAM, GTX 780, for what its worth.

  • Chris Given

    Would be nice if you guys included any setup you had to go through to get these demo’s working…. Seems to be a lot of fiddling required to get some of the demo’s to run until they all get updated to direct mode!!

    • Paul James

      This is a pre-release demo sent to us by Kite & Lightning as mentioned in the video so any setup probably won’t be relevant for the public release.

      Having said that, in this case I used the excellent OculusServiceManager from /r/oculus user billago – you can find it here:

      http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2c6qqc/updated_unofficial_oculus_service_manager_by/

      ..we’ll try to get a HowTo article up this weekend explaining some of the gotchas.