Watch MSI’s Backpack PC portable VR gaming rig help me fight an alien horde - featherlansider

When the combined armies of Zorg are sackin photon weapons at you, 5 kilograms doesn't seem care a lot.

Even the cables and straps that are a necessary part of MSI's Rucksack PC languish into the downpla when you're immersed in a virtual reality game.

That's what I discovered when I took MSI's new Backpack Personal computer for a test spin happening Wednesday at Computex in Taipei. The device is an entire gaming PC well-stacked into a backpack that allows for completely untethered virtual world gaming.

Present-day VR games run on a computer that sits on a desk or floor and stubbornly won't move every bit you jump around in a practical world. IT means long-staple cables are needed and that can comprise a pretend and a beset.

With the Backpack PC the cables aren't completely gone, only they are shorter and put on't get in the fashio.

160601 msi backpack 1 — The whole ensemble looks like the kind of affair James Bond might slip along to go aqualung diving.

Slip on the pack, then the virtual realism headset, the headphones and finally uplift the control and you're set to do battle.

At Computex, I had two MSI employees assistance me put it on, simply it's not the form of matter you rattling necessitate help with once you know what you'ray doing.

The Backpack PC was running a demonstration game that implicated small round spaceships coming towards Maine from all directions.

If I didn't attack them with my laser weapon profligate enough, they'd utter little energy balls that would drift towards me. I couldn't blast those and had to jump to avoid them hitting Maine. If uncomparable got to ME, it was game over.

Spirited complete happened very much.

In part it was because I was frightened to jump around. I didn't flavour comfortable wriggly around freely in the new space because I feared bashing into things. It's certainly something that will be easier at home although it's really comfy to become disoriented.

160601 msi backpack 4 — MSI's Backpack PC during a demonstration at the Computex trade show in Taipei on June 1, 2016.

But the overall live was a lot of fun.

Helped by the rich graphics that are the result of using a unpeasant-smelling-power gaming laptop computer and the HTC Vive headset, it was easy to forget nigh all the gear I was wearing away—even if I couldn't forget the walls and desks round me.

And as I took it off, I realized that's perhaps the key thing for some piece of VR gear. If the mental image is good enough and the content piquant plenty to allow you to soak u yourself, so the rest of it doesn't matter overmuch.

MSI says the Backpack PC will be available in the arcsecond one-half of this year but there aren't any more inside information. An MSI employee told me the specifications and design are likely to change—this International Relations and Security Network't the final dealing version—and then the company International Relations and Security Network't saying anything more about when Beaver State where it wish set up or how much information technology will cost.