A video of a 90-year-old grandmother test-driving an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and apparently having her mind good and blown was making the rounds Monday, offering a nice, free PR bump for the eagerly anticipated game system.
"Hey, man alive!" Rachel Mahassel exclaims in a YouTube video posted by her grandson (see it below). "It's so real! It's a picture in here, huh?"
Mahassel's grandson Paul Rivot, a 3D animator, said a friend recently received the Oculus Rift developer kit from Oculus VR. The Kickstarter-funded startup hasn't announced when its virtual reality rig will be released to the general public but the prototype version of the Rift has been generating considerable buzz this year at events like the Consumer Electronics Show and the Game Developer Conference.
Rivot told PCMag that when he filmed his grandmother's reaction to experiencing the "Tuscany" demo on the Rift—exclaiming "Holy mackerel! I'll remember this for all the rest of my life after this," as a wide grin spreads across her face—he knew he had to put it on YouTube.
"She thought she was actually in Tuscany, it was pretty amazing," he said.
Rivot, who operates Connecticut-based 3D animation and video marketing firm Imagimind Studios, said he and his grandmother would be conducting an "Ask Me Anything" or AMA session on Reddit on Monday evening, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, to discuss her experience with the Rift.
The Rift delivers a virtual reality gaming experience through a strap-on headset sporting a 7-inch, 720p LCD display offering up 1,280-by-800 resolution, or 640-by-800 per eye in the binocular configuration, with a 90-degree field-of-view plus ultra-low latency head tracking. The headset runs through a control box that connects to a PC. Players use a standard, hand-held game controller to play Oculus Rift games like Hawken, which use the Unreal Engine 3 game engine for DirectX 11.
For more, check out PCMag's recent Hands On With the Oculus Rift Developer Kit, as well as an an earlier hands-on with the system at CES in January, as well as iFixit's teardown of the system and the slideshow above.