It seems that with each passing day, the stuff of science fiction leaps from the pages of Asimov and into reality. Animal cloning? Check. Drones? Check. Flying cars? Check. The Rift, a forthcoming virtual reality headset from Oculus VR, aims to join the list of groundbreaking innovations with an incredibly realistic rendering of both everyday life and fantastic worlds. As it turns out, The Rift has been brought to our attention thanks to various other modern technology innovations.

Oculus started raising funds for the new project on kickstarter, a website that reflects the growing trend in crowdsourcing. The internet is one of the world's great democratizing forces, giving inventors a chance to connect with people all over the world, even if they haven't moved out of the garage yet.

Recent kickstarter success stories include Reading Rainbow's digitization program, which raised a million dollars in a single day during an effort to bring the famed resource to a new generation. Oculus is another example of a company capitalizing on the resource. After a successful campaign, Oculus kept growing, until, just a few months ago, they were purchased by Facebook with a deal valued at 2 billion-with a 'b'- dollars.

So what's all the fuss about? Virtual reality headsets have been around for a while, after all, and they haven't seen a great deal of success. However, we at Fueled think that The Rift is poised to be a serious game changer - and not we're not just talking about video games.

A number of technological leaps have allowed the headset to fool the brain into perceiving the virtual reality as actual reality. Descriptions of movement in the Rift world never fail to include the sort of knee-jerk reactions that would occur if the event viewed happened in the real world.  A whopping 1,000 readings a second from a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer, allow the headset to realistically map and react to motion, with no perceptible lag time.

And that's key, because one of the major improvements that Oculus has made to the world of virtual reality is the ability for the user to move around. Say you've put the headset on, and you see an office. Normal virtual reality devices only let you observe, but with the Rift, you can effectively move into the world, navigating around walls, in front of and behind objects, and more. It's a fact that gaming will never be the same.

Still, to many, the Rift may seem frivolous. Sure, it's nice to move through virtual worlds, but beyond entertainment, is there any point? As it turns out, the Rift has applications in a number of fields that reach far beyond games and into the world of life and death.

For example, say you're driving a tank. Imagine the view from inside a hunk of metal-even with cameras on all sides, drivers are at the mercy of blind spots. Enter the Rift. It's a headset that provides a 360-degree view of the world, eliminating blind spots. And military use is just one piece of an ever-growing puzzle.

Developers are working on programs for architecture, medicine, and more. In the not-too-distant future, Oculus' platform may be the foundation for augmented reality. With Facebook as a backer, there's no end in sight.

Author Bio
This article is written by Ilan Nass from Fueled, an award winning mobile app design and development house based in New York and London.