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Oculus VR's Oculus Rift could be the device virtual reality needs to finally break into the mainstream, instead of just being something for tech-frenzied neophiles (and mid-90's Hollywood, whose grasp on VR was breathtakingly stupid at best). The Oculus Rift is a $300 virtual reality headset that can display stereoscopic 3D and offer head tracking to let you look around inside virtual worlds.

After a successful Kickstarter campaign Oculus VR put together a development kit that's being slowly shipped out to customers, with sights on a consumer-friendly version in the future. In a few years, everyone might have their own Oculus Rift and use it to play video games and virtually tour other locations.

A test has been done at the PC Mag labs, and we're going to explain everything you need to know about this remarkable headset. You need to remember first and foremost that this is a development kit. It's not intended for consumers, as there's little finished software available. Instead, it's meant for developers who want to make their software Oculus Rift-compatible for when Oculus VR finally announced a consumer version of the Rift. That said, its price and relative simplicity make it extremely easy to consider if you want to tinker with VR, yourself.

The development kit comes with the Rift with an attached control box, three sets of lenses, a power adapter with North American and international plugs, an HDMI cable, an HDMI-to-DVI adapter, a lens cloth, and a USB cable, all in a handy plastic case. Oculus VR recommends not wearing glasses when using the Rift, and so the three lenses offer adjustable focal distances for users with good eyesight, moderate nearsightedness, and heavy nearsightedness. The lenses twist in and out of place on the headset, and can be adjusted to your eyesight with diopter adjustment discs on the sides of the head-mounted display (HMD).

Setting the Oculus Rift up was surprisingly easy. The small control box attached to the HMD by a long cable uses three connections to function: The power port plugs into the wall to power the Oculus Rift, the DVI port accepts the video feed from the computer through either DVI or HDMI (using the included adapter), and the USB port connects the motion sensors to allow head tracking. Once I hooked up those cables, the Oculus Rift worked with any compatible software I tried.

Instead of using two displays to offer two separate images for stereoscopic 3D, the Oculus Rift uses a single LCD screen built into the HMD. Any compatible software splits the picture into side-by-side 3D and renders it into a warped circular view to work with the Rift's lenses, producing the 3D effect. This is actually a brilliant way to handle the 3D effect, because it lets the Oculus Rift appear to the connected computer as a second monitor that can handle a normal video feed, and means neither the computer nor the HMD have to do complicated video processing to show 3D. In fact, if you mirror the display so it shows the output to the Oculus Rift on a monitor, it shows the un-lensed, un-separated image the Rift is receiving: two circular views of the same image, slightly adjusted to produce a 3D effect when separated and seen through lenses. Everything happens inside the software, away from the display adapter and HMD.

This leads to a small problem with usability, though. Since the Rift uses just one LCD screen in the HMD and relies on side-by-side 3D with adjustments for the lenses, a "regular" view of the computer screen will look like two warped halves of the screen and make basic, non-3D interaction almost impossible with the Rift. This is an HMD meant to be used as either a mirrored or extended display, with a regular monitor used for normal computer interaction.