Visualise’s Alaster is in Los Angeles for the biggest event of the gaming calendar. Every year the biggest movers and shakers from around the world congregate at the LA convention centre to announce what they’ve been working on. There’s often huge title releases and big hardware announcements from all the biggest companies including Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Activision, EA and a whole load more.

However this year isn’t just about games and the consoles, instead it’s a very heavy focus on VR and the games and content that will be supported ahead of it’s mass rollout end of this year- early next year.

The biggest and long awaited announcement came just ahead of E3 from Facebook invested Oculus at a private press event. Oculus announced that their cutting edge VR HMD (head mounted device) will ship Q1 2016. They also shared images of the headset which now includes headphones, a higher resolution display and a more comfortable viewing experience than what we’ve seen with the developer devices.

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Alaster was invited to be one of the first to try the Oculus CV1 and preview one of the release titles; Eve Valkyrie.

“The device was incredibly comfortable and easy to fit, having the headphones built into the headset just makes the experience of getting the headset on so much easier. Before we had to faff around with passing the headphones around not knowing if the right and left channels are the correct way around. The power button is in an interesting place underneath the headset which accidentally got pressed when the headset was fitted but that would just take a little getting used to. The material finish to the headset is a lot more robust than the hard plastic of the developer kits and the whole thing feels a lot lighter than before. The tracking was near on perfect and I really did test it throwing my head around (I think the brand ambassador thought I was a bit strange).”

It looks as if this was the headset we’ve all been waiting for, it’s comfortable and seems to be reliable, the games presented made the most of the hardware and the whole experience just worked. There hasn’t been an official date or price set for the hardware but interestingly it has been announced that Microsoft xBox will support the hardware and a number of large game studios have announced they are working on titles for the release of the platform.

Alaster will continue to keep you updated on news from #E3 throughout the week to stay up-to-date on the latest follow us on twitter @visualise360