David Attenborough To Use Oculus Rift For New 3d Doc

How sci fi was that headline? Our brains are reeling just trying to unpack what the hell it means. OK, here goes  – David Attenborough, everyone's favourite fantasy Grandpa, is rumoured to be embracing the cutting edge Oculus Rift technology for his next documentary.

Whilst Oculus Rift may sound like the name of a crap Transformers villain, it is, in fact, a 3D headset technology that Facebook just bought for a cool 2 Billion bucks. Orignally the tech was developed for a fully immersive 3D gaming experiece – apparently it fools the eyes, and thereby fools the brain, into believing the body is in a complete 3D environment. This has been tried before – in the early 90s gargantuan Virtual Reality headsets had a brief period in the limelight. The world you'd see in Virtual Reality was totally convincing – if you were a wild acid casuality with a polygon fetish.

Unsurprisingly VR wasn't big news for long. Now, however, we live in the future.The world constructed by Oculus Rift has a fair chance of offering users a genuinely immersive 3D experience – a kind of Truman Show for the masses. As documentary film website Real Screen reports, David Attenborough is reportedly onboard to make his next work, Conquest of the Skies fully compatable with OR technology. Commissioned by Sky 3D, the big budget nature doc is being shot with 8 cameras simultaneously to give a 360 degree effect. “In terms of the creative challenge," said Atenborough's director, John Morris,  "we look at this as being comparable to the beginning of the film industry,”

Here are some spods talking about Oculus Rift. Try not to think too much about The Matrix while you watch em.