.....Even after weeks, Elite: Dangerous with the Rift DK2 makes me stop and say "holy crap" at least once per session. The game supports the latest Oculus SDK revision, which means that it can tell not just where your head is pointed, but it also fully understands where your head is. The positional tracking is executed with fluidity and grace. When using the Rift with first-person games (like Alien: Isolation, for example, which has experimental Rift support that can be enabled by flipping a single config file option), you can use this positional tracking to lean around corners or duck simply by moving your head, but that mobility only gets you so far when you have to return to your mouse and keyboard to actually move your avatar.
Elite: Dangerous neatly sidesteps this issue by simply having your player character remain seated. This solves the potential problem of reconciling the Rifts positional movement with your games character (like whether or not your in-game avatar should shuffle left or right if you move your head laterally). Youre strapped to your cockpit chair, and so theres no need to worry about what your avatar is doing or how to square "real" movement (i.e., where your head is) with WASD input and mouselook.
This also neatly blends with what the real you is probably doing when you play Eliteyoure almost certainly sitting in a chair. If you look down in the game, your view pans down to see a flightsuited body also seated in a chair, grasping the ships stick and throttle. If you also happen to have your left and right arms extended in front of you holding a HOTAS-type setup, your bodys proprioception matches nicely with what your eyes are seeing, and you experience an odd momentary blurring of selfproprioception is a weird thing, and its easy to allow yourself, just for a moment, to think that the body youre seeing is yours.
Enlarge / It's you! Bitchin' flight suit.
Its one thing to be able to look around the ships cockpit. Thats easy and probably the first thing anyone does. But once you realize you can move your head, a whole new way of interacting with your spaceship reveals itself. Cant quite read the text on a control panel? Lean forward. Need to check above and behind you while youre undocking to see if theres a ship about to crash into you? Lean forward and crane your neck or look back over your shoulder like youre checking the blind spot in a car. The increase in immersion is stunning, because automatic actions yield expected resultsyou really can see a bit more out of your Cobras side window if you crane your neck in that direction a bit, just like in a car.
:awe:
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