Explore The Bridge Of Star Trek’s USS Voyager With Oculus Rift

Star Trek fans have become accustom to seeing various types of Trek technology come to life in one form or another. Long before iPads and other tablets became mainstream, Captain Jean-Luc Picard would review reports on small info tablets aboard the USS Enterprise-D in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Now it looks like a small part of the Star Trek universe is coming to life thanks to the ever-growing virtual reality technology of the Oculus Rift VR headset. Oculus Rift users can now wander around the bridge of Star Trek‘s USS Voyager and walk in the shoes of a Starfleet officer. The video above gives us a look at what it’s like to walk around Voyager, and Star Trek fans can tour the bridge and all its various consoles, and even watch space fly by.

PC Mag reports that users can download the demo of Star Trek: Voyager‘s bridge online at this link.

The Star Trek Voyager demo was created by Thomas Kadlec using the recently released Unreal Engine 4. As NBC reports, the Oculus Rift device isn’t available for sale to the general public just yet, but you can pick up a development kit, including the headset itself, for $350. Other developers have already used this kit to create awesome virtual places such as “The Wall” from Game of Thrones, and Jerry’s apartment from Seinfield.

No crew members appear in the Star Trek: Voyager bridge demo, but commands from Captain Janeway can be heard over the comm, and space explosions can be seen via the ship’s view screen as Voyager finds itself in a virtual space battle during the course of the users demo experience.

The Oculus Rift was founded via a successful Kickstarter campaign, and as The Inquisitr recently reported, was recently acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. We’ve also talked about the backlash from those who helped crowdfund the device to help get its development off the ground.

The use of the Unreal Engine 4 is crucial to creating the large amount of detail in the Star Trek: Voyager bridge tour, as the newly released game engine was created with support for the Rift device included, making it much easier to develop for the device, and allowing developers an ease and freedom they had not previously had for developing for the VR headset.

The Oculus Rift may be the first step in bringing yet another Star Trek technology to life; the holodeck.

I’m sure many Star Trek fans would love to see the bridge of either the original Enterprise, or the Enterprise-D next.