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The concept of Virtual Reality had been around for decades, so when it started to graduate from fantasy to reality I took an active interest.
Here’s what I’ve found.
My first VR experience was with the first Oculus dev kit release in 2013. At the office we pooled our funds to buy one so everyone could try it.
And try it we did. There were two almost immediate and obvious conclusions.
First off, the VR effect was powerful and real.
Replacing your entire visual and audio input via a headset is enough to transport you to another world; when you remember being in VR, you remember really being in VR. You were in a different place for that time.
It has new emotional effects. Being jumped by a monster in VR is terrifying in a way you can’t replicate outside VR. Looking down off the edge of a huge drop is heart stopping in a way you can’t replicate outside of VR. And so on.
And, it brings a new scale to generated realities. VR is big. You can be tiny in front of a towering creature or landscape in a way that just does not happen at all with a screen—no matter how big it is.
Second, it made everyone’s stomachs turn, and quickly. A session of five minutes with the first Oculus dev kit was enough to make you feel bad for five or ten minutes.
That made it an interesting toy but nobody wanted to try it more than a few times; we passed the dev kit onto someone else.
When the second dev kit came along, a year later, we did the same, and found much the same. It was an interesting preview of things to come, but still not useful for anything because of the simulation sickness effect.
Then in 2016 came the first consumer release, the HTC Vive.
It introduced room scale tracking for the first time, and a significant setup burden to go with it: you had to mount two tracking base stations high up at opposite ends of your play space.
And, it introduced a fully tracked controller for each hand.
Sometimes an early-adopter product is misjudged, but the HTC Vive was perfect: the tech was at exactly the level it needed to be.
The HTC’s room scale tracking almost completely solved the simulation sickness problem. It turns out, and it’s obvious on retrospect, that sickness was caused by a mismatch between the user’s motion and the visual input received—much like travel sickness.
The Vive added tracking of sufficiently low latency and precision to remove that discrepancy. As far as your brain can tell, the visual input is in sync with your movement. And, it introduced a new paradigm for in-world movement: it should be mostly in sync with actual user movement, with teleportation used for larger distances and to re-align the play space with the virtual world.
With this setup, even people who suffer simulation sickness playing 3D games on a screen can use the Vive—at least, in our small sample size of two, that was the case. Two people who can’t play 3D games on a screen had no trouble with room scale VR with the Vive.
There is of course still software where you “move” in VR rather than teleport, and have to deal with the resulting discrepancy between real and virtual motion; often you’re given a choice between the two modes or some combination of the two. Some surprising details have emerged here. One is that limiting your peripheral vision during the artificial movement helps; the Google Maps VR version does this, it shrinks your view to a tunnel when you move. Another is that it helps to superimpose a stable grid over the artificially moving backdrop, giving your brain something that matches your actual (lack of) motion to anchor onto; the game Climbey does this.
Beyond that how you deal with simulation sickness seems to be quite personal, and perhaps trainable. But the big thing the Vive brought is that for most of the software, you don’t have to deal with it at all.
Unfortunately, the Vive was a little too expensive to capture the market, and there was plenty of space for “me too” launches.
The worst of these were Cardboard and Daydream from Google. They were a way to strap a smartphone to your face in an attempt to capture some of what the Vive had shown to be possible.
Inevitably, the tracking was not good enough, and the software you could run was much less interesting. So not only did the experience make you feel sick very quickly, it also introduced people to under-powered and underdeveloped VR software.
Other mid-level headsets came along, including the first consumer Oculus. I haven’t tried these, so I don’t know how good the tracking is; as far as I know it’s okay and they certainly helped to broaden the ecosystem.
One thing we discovered was that VR is very easy to get into.
It turns out that if you strap a VR headset onto a toddler, they will quite happily explore VR worlds; the only assistance they need is to physically pick them up and place them back in the middle of the play space if they’re about to walk into a (real) wall.
Both my kids grew up with VR and had a great time with it. Two games in particular stood out:
These provide fun sandbox worlds with lots to do.
Another thing we discovered is that multiplayer in VR is amazing.
The head and hand movements of another person are enough to make it clear that there is an actual person there. So, sharing VR space with someone is a genuinely new way to communicate; and you can be playing a game at the same time.
One of the best experiences we had was in the multiplayer world of:
Another sandbox experience, this time you can build worlds. But, the killer feature of SculptVR is that you can resize yourself. It means you can grow to a giant to build a mountain, then shrink to actual size to create some furniture, then shrink to the size of a mouse and hang-glide off it. It’s an experience like no other.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be able to move mountains and to teleport—well, you can find out. I think it’s close enough to the impossible real thing that you’ll be satisfied.
Despite being a whole new universe of worlds to explore, VR does suffer a bit today from limited software.
This is inevitable. We’re used to a games industry that is bigger than the movie industry; the amount of creative energy that goes into it is staggering. VR is much smaller, and so, there is much less to choose from.
Fortunately Valve decided to push the boundaries with Half-Life Alyx; I’ll write about that one another day.
The biggest downside to come out of the VR revolution is this: it turns out that while the special effects are better, and there are some new experiences, the stories are the same.
In retrospect this seems obvious.
Above I said that if you spend time in VR, you’ll remember that you were in a different place—it builds stories in your head.
But computer games have always worked that way. When you think back to playing Half-Life, you likely remember it as if you were there; you probably don’t remember anything about the room you were sitting in, or what you had for dinner that day. In fact, you don’t need computer hardware for this at all; books work just as well. As a human you are receptive to story telling in any form, and VR does not bring anything new.
This, I think, is the big thing that means VR is not going to take over gaming. You can already get most of the experiences in gaming without strapping on a headset; what’s on offer is incremental, not revolutionary.
There are a few games that really make use of the physical movement aspect of VR; I’d put them in the “must play” category:
There is nothing like them.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say about VR, but I hope that was an interesting overview.
Should you try it? Most definitely, if an opportunity comes up. It works—it does what was always promised—and there’s nothing else like it.
Should you buy a VR setup? That one’s harder; for entertainment value you’ll get more out of a simple PC setup or console. But if you already have those, and you have space for a room-scale VR setup, I think it’s a pretty good buy. If you want to go all-in and have multiple sets for multiplayer, as we did, then there is even more on offer. But you probably won’t end up using it as much as the simpler, more convenient gaming options.
It is a sad truth of our time that mobile phone gaming is bigger than PC gaming, which is bigger than VR gaming; convenience matters more than immersion.
VR is there if you want to put in the effort.
As far as I can tell so far it works well enough on Linux, but the added complications on top of the already-challenging room scale setup mean that’s not, currently, for the faint of heart.
So far today, 2024-05-12, feedback has been received 4 times. Of these, 0 were likely from bots, and 4 might have been from real people. Thank you, maybe-real people!
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