Want to try out some primo shooting gear but price tags and social interaction give you the shivers? With a new Oculus Rift app, Canon’s giving you the chance to enter a virtual world of photography and get your hands on a range of their kit.

. . sort of.

Camera Simulator by Canon Labs is a creation from a Canadian development team, and it aims to be the digital vanguard of try before you buy. Users are able to switch between a selection of three Canon cameras and three Canon lenses to use with them. The specs and features of these electronic facsimiles have supposedly been tailored to recreate their real world counterparts with an incredible level of authenticity.

Once you have your gear chosen, you can run around and snap away with it, or as Canon Labs puts it, “Teleport to multiple vantage points and frame your perfect shot by leaning, ducking, and adjusting the zoom level of your camera. ”

/Canon

Zoom is really underselling it though, Camera Simulator actually allows users to take advantage of the full range of manual settings available in the field. This means you can play with exposures, ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and anything else on hand; with the program simulating the actual result of it. This means that yes you can create beautiful bokeh and trippy motion blur.

It’s certainly delightful but we’re unsure if this tool is actually going to push any units. Let’s be fair, it resembles a weird gear obsessed Minecraft mod more than any true recreation of real world use. But complaining about that seems rather petty since it’s absolutely free to download. We in the DigitalRev office are scrambling to get an Oculus Rift back in (don’t ask what happened to the last one) so we can jack into this matrix as soon as possible.

You can download the Camera Simulator by Canon Labs on the Oculus page here

2016-11-10 03:00