Oculus Rift & Pacific Rim Band Together For First-Person Jaeger Piloting

Con-goers to this weekend’s San Diego Comic Con got their chance to drift with a Jaeger from Pacific Rim thanks to Oculus Rift.

Pacific Rim Jaeger Pilot Oculus Rift image

It’s a mighty good time to be a Pacific Rim fan. Director of the giant robots fighting giant monsters action flick of last summer, Guillermo del Toro, recently announced that Pacific Rim 2 was in the works along with an animated series.

To top it all off like a cherry on top of a mecha/monster movie sundae, at this past weekend’s San Diego Comic Con fans who visited the Legendary Pictures’ booth were given the chance to pilot one of the movie’s mechs, called Jaegers, thanks to the virtual reality headset tech behind Oculus Rift.

The Jaeger Combat Simulator (awesomest name for a combat simulator ever) was created using the original film assets from Industrial Light & Magic and developed within Unreal Engine 4. With the headset on, the simulator lets players control the Gipsy Danger, the titular robot from Pacific Rim, and take on a kaiju (giant monster) named Knifehead.

Sadly, there’s no direct video of what the Pacific Rim/Oculus Rift experience from Comic Con looked like. Only this short trailer from Legendary Pictures is all there is to tease us of what it must feel like to punch a colossal beast like a ragdoll, a sensation that hopefully one day we’ll all get to enjoy.

No one from either Oculus Rift of Legendary Pictures have given further comment on when we might see an actual release of the Jaeger Combat Simulator outside its Comic Con showing. Reportedly, it was only a mere demo featuring the actors of the movie, and was more of a visual roller coaster ride than an actual game – but here’s hoping it gets expanded on and is eventually released.

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