To understand why Oculus Rift matters, it helps to know who John Carmack is. You already know his work, even if you don’t know his name: Carmack is the programmer who in the early 1990s cracked the problem of how to write a video game that takes place in three-dimensional space. He’s the reason that when you play a state-of-the-art game, you’re not leaping from platform to platform or wandering through a two-dimensional dungeon, you’re running and jumping around in proper space-time, all six axes in play, backward and forward, side to side, up and down. He’s responsible for Quake, the first true 3-D game, which begat Halo and Call of Duty and all the rest of it. Carmack did for computer games what Masaccio did for painting: he turned a plane into a space.
As such, he’s the principal architect of a medium that has generated literally billions of…
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