As an Oculus Rift owner I've been able to play HL2 for three hours straight with zero breaks. It was hands down the best gaming experience of my life and this is coming from someone who really doesn't appreciate single player games.
People don't believe it but you DO have to gain your 'vr legs' before diving into fast paced games like FPS.
You have to gradually work your way through games that are just at your limit until you find yourself able to handle something fast paced like FPS. For me it went roughly Blue Marble,Alone in the Dark,VR Helicopter,War Thunder (for 2 weeks), DoD:Source, HL2.
I think what may have been key to my transition was when I played DoD:Source, I just treated the Rift like a big screen in front of my face and used my mouse to look around the world rather than my head (DoD currently does not have separate head look/mouse look so where your head moves your cursor moves and vise versa). When I finally got around to playing HL2 (which has separate mouse look/head look so you can look up a flight of stairs, and than bring your cursor up to shoot) it was a small enough jump from DoD that I was able to play a half hour my first night, an hour my second and 3rd nights, and 3 straight hours on my last when I beat the game.
I think the greater issue Oculus Rift faces is that, even if you are careful to slowly acclimate yourself as I did, over time you will build a slight aversion to the Oculus Rift as your brain associates the odd glitch of nausea that are inevitable in any game with the Rift. So while I did say that HL2 was the best gaming experience of my life, I do admit that I haven't been back to it since. I don't know if thats a function of me beating the game or nausea, but I'd probably put it at 80/20 respectively.
I think that it will just be a matter of how compelling a game is to overcome the nausea/aversion. I suspect that if GTAV releases for the PC that I'll find myself logging multiple hour session in the Rift again.
That's probably going to take a few generations, and they might do it faster and with better results if they used this technology instead, which apparently doesn't give eye-strain like LCD's do, too:
http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-virtual-retina...
By the way, check out this Redditor's crazy story about falling asleep with the Oculus Rift, and waking up feeling like he was actually in there for the first couple of minutes:
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1oe33h/so_i_fell_asl...
Sounds like we'll be on one hell of a ride in the next 10 years, if Oculus Rift gets so immersive, and hundred of millions of people have them, all preferring to be in their high quality virtual realities over real life, most of the time, and feeling "disconnected" when they aren't there, just like we feel now without the Internet.
Much as dislike this outlook, it might actually make a lot of currently somewhat "overpopulated" physical real places (with traffic jams etc.) a lot more pleasant, so yeah, let's see :D
But srsly, 4K resolution is an absolute must.
[1] http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2013/10/02/oculus-rift-dev-...
It's only one data point but I've not had any nausea with extensive playing of Minecraft and HL2. Indeed, the biggest problems by far are the lenses steaming up and the gigantic pixels/low resolution (I'm not even sure 1080 would improve this significantly since it's already 720, isn't it? It feels like it needs a doubling, at a minimum.) However, every other (adult) person I've tried it on has indeed felt quite nauseous very quickly.
Like others though, I think the big initial wins won't be in FPS games since they also encourage you to run around and interact with an environment that doesn't exist. Flight sims, space sims, underwater sims, racing sims.. this could be a huge deal.
5 minutes with Occulus and a game pad resulted in about 10 minutes of mild nausea.
5 minutes with Occulus and Omni resulted in about 30 minutes of moderate but not debilitating nausea.
Complicating factors: tried the Omni test first, perhaps increasing my tolerance for the next test. Also used the lower resolution Occulus devkit with the Omni.
petercooper hit on the big problems: the lenses fog up quickly and the low resolution in the dev kit is distracting.
Also, in some games like surgeon simulator 2013, there is drift which means you're spinning slowly in a circle to keep looking at the same spot. It's horribly frustrating, and ruined the (already frustrating) experience for me.
Unreal works very well with it, however. I think any game which doesn't rely on fast transformations to the perspective will benefit greatly from the immersion the retail Rift brings.
I would definitely try the demos which were written with the Rift in mind, not general games. RiftCoaster for example is superb (be even better if I could get it to work under Wine ...).
