A little over a week ago, I went with a couple of buddies to enjoy some free beer at the Tin Roof Brewery and a demo of an admittedly older version of the nifty VR headset, Oculus Rift. And after my house being broken into, a lot of my stuff stolen, and all the insurance paperwork that comes with that, I needed the night out.
I had been to the Tin Roof Brewery’s Tap Room before for a beer dinner, so I was already familiar with their beers. The first beer I had was the Rougarou, named for the mythical shape-shifting, swamp monster that haunts South Louisiana. Despite being rated at 108 IBU’s, I didn’t find it nearly that bitter. After some party snacks, I followed the Rougarou with the Perfect Tin Amber Ale. I wanted something lighter on flavor and alcohol content with a bit of maltiness to it and this beer hit the spot.
If you’ve never visited the Tin Roof Tap Room or the brewery, it’s worth checking out at least once if you find yourself in Baton Rouge looking for something to do.
Beyond the beer, I got to try out the Oculus Rift as part of a tech demo organized by the Louisiana Technology Park. LSU Digital Media Arts & Engineering Director Marc Aubanel was on hand to give a little presentation about the technology and its applications for gaming and learning. Marc was a cool guy and an old fan of the Ultima series. You can learn more about him in this interview on YouTube here.
I admit I was a little disappointed with the demo, but only because my expectations were higher than they should have been. As an AMD fan and stockholder, I’ve been keeping up with the graphics card maker’s virtual reality efforts and had read about crazy custom PCs boasting a pair of Fury X graphics cards running Oculus Rift headsets with modern survival horror game demos at high resolutions and the necessary 120+ fps frame rates to prevent motion sickness. What I got instead was an older, simpler version of the headset running off an Intel mobile iGPU. Yeah, it was kind of a bummer, but I got free beer and food out of it.
I did put the headset on and I could clearly see the potential for gaming (and business and training applications galore!), despite the resolution of the little space flight simulator being akin to smashing my face against the screen of an old Pac-Man arcade machine. It sensed my head motion and could track where my eyes were focused to fire lasers at various targets. It was also relatively light and comfortable, but I couldn’t see myself wearing it for an extended period of time if not just to keep from sweating all over it. It was in full color and a little blurry at the edges of my vision/the googles. What really hurt it, however, was the lack of sound—any sound. With some decent headphones and a good sound card pumping out directional audio, it would be ideal for a turret-based shooter. Think a 21st century rendition of the old Atari classic, Missile Command.
But still, the Virtual Boy this was not, and I was glad someone thought it would be cool to set up such an event for a Tech Tuesday. I mean, you can’t go wrong spending an evening drinking free Tin Roof beer and demoing Oculus Rift.
