Of all the praise heaped upon Oculus, the virtual-reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion earlier this year, perhaps the most significant has been this: non-nauseating. I can testify to that after my visit last month to the groovy downtown Manhattan offices of Relevent, a marketing agency that has created a virtual-reality demo for HBO to help promote its hit series “Game of Thrones.” Without much small talk, Ian Cleary, Relevent’s vice president of “innovation and ideation,” escorted me into a steampunk cage the size of a phone booth, made of iron and wood. He fitted me with headphones and the Oculus Rift, as the company’s flagship product is called, a blocky set of black maxigoggles with an internal screen positioned inches from the eyes. I promptly lost awareness of the screen, and after a few seconds, a bass speaker under the floorboards began to boom. All I knew next was that I was shooting up, as in an outdoor elevator, to a windy summit and then trudging through lightly packed snow — crunch, crunch, crunch — onto a vertiginous ledge of ice.
Image: The Oculus Rift, virtual-reality goggles. Credit Jens Mortensen for The New York Times
