GDC: Oculus VR, Ouya Kickstart Up a Storm

SAN FRANCISCO—The "O's" have it here at the Game Developer Conference, where a pair of Kickstarter-funded ventures—Oculus VR and Ouya—wrestled the spotlight away from the game industry's biggest guns this week.

With nothing new emerging from the Microsoft and Sony camps regarding each company's highly anticipated next-gen console, a pair of upstart hardware platforms took center stage. Oculus VR's Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was the runaway star of GDC, demo-wise. Ouya didn't actually have a booth at the show but might have made the week's biggest news with Thursday's off-site unveiling of its $99, Android-based game console and the announcement that units will be available to the general public on June 4.

How popular has the Oculus booth been at GDC? The line to test drive the mech combat game Hawken on the Rift was at least a hundred strong for the entire show—two-hour wait times were not uncommon and I personally witnessed people literally running to the Oculus booth to get a head start on the line when the exhibition floor opened at 10 a.m. Pacific on Friday.

I finally managed to get a brief tilt at the Rift—you can check out my hands on with Oculus VR's developer kit, which appears to have been subtly improved in the several months since PCMag's Will Greenwald demoed an earlier prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

It was interesting to watch the buzz for the Rift grow over the course of the week. On Wednesday, when the exhibition floor opened at GDC, most folks I spoke with hadn't even heard of the virtual reality platform. By Friday, just about all of my informal chats with attendees included a mention of the Oculus Rift, with many lamenting that they simply didn't have the time to wait for a demo.

When I finally resolved to endure the long, snaking line outside the Oculus VR booth, the excitement was palpable. My linemates and I discussed the possibility of getting physically sick while strapped into the Rift—a persistent rumor that thankfully proved false.

The consensus was that this technology was mere months from going mainstream, or at least that it should be. We decided that once it did hit, it would only be a matter of time before the Rift or something like it became a plot device in a TV crime show, where some headgear-sporting VR gamer got killed by an assassin the victim never saw or heard enter his apartment.

The story of the Ouya at GDC, meanwhile, was very different. Curiously, most developers I spoke with about the console offered up a variation of "meh" with a bit of qualified interest. That might have been a function of Ouya's lack of a presence at the actual show, but the apathy I encountered made me wonder if Ouya's popularity with the tech press isn't being matched in the dev community.

Ouya, like Oculus VR, is finally shipping dev units to its Kickstarter investors. But while Oculus is now in the phase of broadening awareness of its platform by showcasing it at an event like GDC, Ouya seems to be playing to a more restricted audience as it gets ready for general release.

Ouya demos have been available at private events, and backers who've received dev kits and now units have obviously been putting the platform through its paces. But we haven't seen the console in a free-for-all environment like the one Oculus VR braved at GDC this week.

Different Strategies It's an interesting contrast in strategies, particularly since it's the Ouya, mostly because it is a simpler platform, which is far closer to volume production for a mass market.

In a blog post announcing the shipping of dev units, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman indicated that the company is banking on feedback from its early backers receiving dev units to help get the console as ready as possible for retail availability before taking a broader marketing approach.

"This is only the beginning. Today begins an exclusive preview period as we gear up to launch in June. We'll continue to add features, refine the user interface, and keep building the software as we head toward our retail launch—now announced for June 4," Uhrman wrote, adding that Ouya will use such feedback opportunities as a coming Reddit "Ask Me Anything," or "AMA," to help "prepare to launch to the masses."

Certainly, with more than 100 games already available on the Ouya, the availability of TV shows and movies on the console, and a named price and release date, this is a platform that's on the very brink of being in your or my living room. The Oculus Rift isn't there yet and it's tough to say when it will be—but judging by developer buzz, it's got game industry insiders as excited as they've been about something truly new since the debut of the Wii.