Nearly ten years ago, I got my first taste of consumer-grade virtual reality hardware when I had the opportunity to put an Oculus Rift DK2 (Development Kit 2) on my head. Up until that point, I had only science fiction stories like Star Trek's Holodeck and reading about professional/industrial installations that were priced well beyond my reach. I knew Oculus launched their hardware development as a Kickstarter campaign, but I was too skeptical to put in my own money. I was still very interested in the technology, though, so it would come up in conversation with other tech-oriented friends. I learned one of my friends did pitch in the Kickstarter campaign and was slated to receive a DK2. Unfortunately, my friend's computer did not meet DK2 GPU hardware requirements and in the absence of data they were reluctant to throw more money at it. I saw an opportunity: my gaming PC had a Radeon HD 7950 GPU which met DK2 minimums. (The minimums would be raised for release, excluding my HD 7950, but that came later.) We decided to meet up and plug their DK2 into my PC so we can both see firsthand what it's all about.

I have vague memories of software installation struggles mostly with batch files and only a few graphical installer applications. I had to give administrator privileges to many unknown binaries and that made me squirm, and there were error messages to address. All of these unpolished edges were normal and expected of a development kit.

I don't remember any hardware connectivity issues: I think everything plugged in together just fine. When the picture actually came up, the first impression was rather underwhelming. DK2 display panel resolution was relatively low, resulting in a blurry picture as if my eyeglass prescriptions are out of date. Plus, there was a distracting "screen door effect" caused by visible black lines between pixels. But of course, if we just wanted a static viewpoint, we could have just stared at a computer monitor. Things got more interesting once we started moving our heads to look around, leveraging key elements of virtual reality technology.

The demo applications (all under development) were mixed. It was definitely early days for the technology, with lots of people trying ideas to see what works. There were many standalone test apps and a few VR modes grafted onto existing titles. My friend and I quickly reached agreement we didn't care for the titles that simulated motion independent of our seating position. The worst of those were roller-coaster simulations, one of them caused my friend to loudly proclaim "NOPE!" and yanked the headset off their head. We both got motion-sick from such experiments and had to take a break.

We were starting to think the whole thing might be a waste of time and money when we fired up Elite: Dangerous and its then-experimental VR mode. After our experience with VR roller-coaster and the like, we were not optimistic about flying around in a spaceship. But hey, we've come this far, might as well take a look. I remember it took some effort to get the game to switch from computer monitor over to the DK2 headset. My friend fiddling at the keyboard and the DK2 on my head. "Do you see the cockpit yet?" "Nope" "How about now?" "Still nope" Then it came up. "Hey I see something!"

The ship was still unpowered, so the only movement were of my own head. Even then I could look around at the controls and it felt like I was at the controls of a spaceship. A virtual representation of a reality that's out of my reach: I could go on real rollercoasters; I couldn't fly real spaceships. This was all very promising, but there was a problem. Elite Dangerous ship cockpits were designed to be shown on high resolution monitors. Sitting in the middle of the cockpit wearing the low resolution DK2 headset, all control labels were blurry and illegible. I suppose if I were already familiar with the game I could go from memory, but I was not familiar with it and didn't know how to start up my ship.

My friend and I put our brains together, drawing from our collective computer gaming experiences. Maybe pressing "Z" will zoom in? How about the mouse scroll wheel? PgUp/PgDn? Arrow keys? The answer was none of those, because this was something new. I forgot which of us had the insight to lean closer to the panel, but I leaned closer to the labels and found I could read them. Such a simple thing we would do in the real world without thinking, but somehow it took several minutes for us to think of doing it in the VR world.

That was my VR "A-ha" moment. I no longer remember anything from that day after that moment. Did we manage to get our ship into space? Did we get motion sickness from flying around? It didn't matter. The mundane act of leaning closer to read labels was the moment it clicked in my mind, and I was hooked on the concept of virtual reality. Sadly, I was too cheap to commit to good VR with 6DOF tracking and wasted a lot of money on cheaper 3DOF headsets like Google Cardboard and friends.