Forget your local Renaissance faire — the best way to live in a medieval world full of magic is by sitting at your computer and wearing a virtual-reality helmet.
Software developer Chris Gallizzi did the footwork to get Bethesda’s beloved first-person role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim working on the Oculus Rift headset, according to Joystiq. The Rift is a special helmet that creates a full 3D wrap-around display of in-game worlds. It provides a real sensation of walking through a digital setting — which is ideal for Skyrim.
“It’s amazing,” Gallizzi wrote on his YouTube page. “Skyrim is the perfect game for VR. No online connection required and a massive world to explore. You can stand up and do a full 360-degree turn-around or look in other directions.”
Gallizzi’s solution isn’t official, so it will require some work for others to get working. The developer used the Vireio Perception Driver, open source software that brings Rift support to multiple games, and he had to play around with Skyrim’s settings to improve the experience.
Also, Skyrim could cause a lot of disorientation, even over short play sessions, due to the in-game menus, text, and heads-up display that are not optimized for the Rift.
“It takes some adjusting depending on your sight,” Gallizzi wrote. “I’m nearsighted, so I had to adjust the field-of-view from 100 degrees to 110 degrees to make everything seem correct.”
Check out Skyrim on the Rift in the video below: