What Is Oculus Rift? A Virtual Reality Headset Owned By Facebook

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What Is Oculus Rift? A Virtual Reality Headset Owned By Facebook

by TeachThought Staff

Oculus Rift (and its competitors including PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest, and Pico Neo 2) is a virtual reality headset that, while awkward and clumsy-looking on the outside, is quite incredible to use.

In short, it replaces your entire field of vision with digital reality. The technology has been pegged as a kind of video game nirvana, able to reduce the need for the player to suspend disbelief because everything you see is the game. But recently, the innovation has been experimented with in other fields, including social media (Facebook recently purchased the technology for 2 billion dollars? The irony? The tech was crowdfunded two years ago for a relatively paltry $2.4 million).

Kotaku recently shared a post that serves as a brilliant example of what technology is capable of when creatively born and thoughtfully applied.

“After attempting cancer treatments last year, Roberta Firstenberg was told she had a few months to live. And since she had trouble getting around and being mobile, one of her dying wishes was to go outside in her own yard—but her granddaughter, Priscilla, went even further and got an Oculus Rift headset so that her grandmother could virtually travel to places like Italy…Unfortunately, Roberta Firstenberg died about four weeks after trying the Oculus Rift—but at least she got another chance to travel.”

Note that other companies are now getting involved in the development of competing for virtual reality technology, including industry giant Sony. The potential of virtual reality in education is staggering if we can forget for a moment that deep into 2014 and we’re still arguing about using telephones for learning.

A less morose example–or beautiful, depending on your perspective–can be seen below.

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What Is Oculus Rift? This.