What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/vr-we-hardly-knew-you/

by chiachun • 12 years ago

23 21 12 years ago

newhouseb• 12 years ago

Meh, has Tadhg actually tried the Valve VR room demo? If he has't tried that demo, I question his credibility in claiming that VR doesn't work.

I'm as skeptical as any about the Oculus acquisition, but having experienced the Valve VR room demo (now owned by Oculus), I think we're a lot closer to the Matrix than anyone would have thought after looking at DK1. My first thoughts after taking the demo rig off was "wow, I'm going to have to reconsider what the next 10 years looks like for humanity."

z3phyr• 12 years ago

Matrix is Simulated Reality. Virtual Reality (imo) is just a component of it.

Believe it or not, but Simulated Reality is as close to us, as Proxima Centauri is close to the Sun. Its just about ~4.6 light years away!

We have MUCH research to commit to for us to get close to SR in an academic way, forget about commercial ways in even far away future....

jblow• 12 years ago

He obviously did not try the demo. The demo meets all specs that Mike listed in his talk and it exists today, thus nullifying the entire thrust of the article.

The demo is not consumer-product-ready, as it is currently expensive and the tracking requires you to paper your room. But those things are all solvable (inevitably with a bit of time, which is why Mike said 'within two years').

A number of the key people responsible for the Valve work are now at Oculus with a mandate to consumerize the best tech possible. So yeah, it is going to happen. Do not believe this article. Oculus CV1 may not get all the way there but it will be better than is necessary to show clearly the writing on the wall (the main factor in its quality being cost, which the Facebook deal helped tremendously with). CV2 will, I expect, be pretty badass.

(I have tried the Valve demo and then spent a few days working with my game on their hardware.)

nasmorn• 12 years ago

Also if conditions need to be perfect but the effect is incredible we will just see the return of the arcade. The OP can have fun with candy crush 2 waiting outside while I fly my cowing through the death star for real. If VR is good people will queue to pay for it, even if doesn't work at home for another 10 years.

mentos• 12 years ago

I think we'll be able to have great solutions to supplying our eyes and ears with believable virtual realities. But I'm not sure what we're going to do about our arms, hands and legs. I'm really interested to see how the experience on a VR treadmill is, I have a feeling it will leave a lot to be desired.

rdw• 12 years ago

Won't take off in the marketplace? Seems plausible. Doesn't produce novel experiences? Already false but maybe this can be spun convincingly. But the technology can't possibly work? That just seems silly.

TulliusCicero• 12 years ago

From what I've read, the problem of motion sickness present in the earlier Rifts (including Dev Kit 1) is mostly fixed in recent versions that incorporate positional tracking, because it reduces the disconnect between your head movement and what you see.

XorNot• 12 years ago

The Facebook acquisition really seems to have broken some people's brains.

Either you think it works or doesn't, whether or not Facebook bought a company doesn't speak to the technology or possible market.

frontier• 12 years ago

Yep and I bet this guy was writing articles about the epic failure of tablet computing in the 2000's too...

tiler• 12 years ago

All this Oculus bashing makes me want to order my dev kit even more.

beloch2• 12 years ago

Argument: VR is a non-starter because it only works with gaming PC's, which only uber-geeks still own and normal people think of as being just for work.

Response: What is an Xbox, if not a proprietary gaming PC? Sony is working on VR for the PS4. Meanwhile, Valve is trying to bring linux gaming PC's to the living room. This stuff is not going to be limited to work computers. Eventually, with a wireless connection or a sufficiently powerful mobile computer (i.e. Your phone in a few years), VR will be available wherever you feel like putting on a headset.

Argument: VR is only going to attract the hardcore gamers, and they don't trust Facebook, so nobody's going to buy.

Response: Oculus is just one of several big firms currently making major pushes into VR-land. Sony is another and you can bet MS won't be far behind.

Argument: Presence doesn't work if not everything is perfect, so VR is doomed.

Response: What do you have when you play a game through a monitor? Imperfect presence. You interact with a virtual world through a window. You frequently walk around in that world as a humanoid avatar speaking to other humanoids and you completely forget you're looking through a window into their world. Imperfect presence works. It even worked back when you could see pixels the size of your avatar's head. VR simply puts your head through the window and lets you look around. Why didn't it take off sooner then? Up until now, 2D windows had clearly superior lag properties and limited resolution meant things looked better on smaller displays. It's also pretty wasteful to blow pixels on peripheral vision, so we didn't bother when pixels were expensive. VR headsets don't have to be perfect to take off. They just have to be as good as 2D displays in the ways that matter.

P.S. Bluray cannot be considered dead until a viable alternative arises that addresses its market: Audio/Video-philes. This is a niche market, but a stable one.

k__• 12 years ago

"P.S. Bluray cannot be considered dead until a viable alternative arises that addresses its market: Audio/Video-philes. This is a niche market, but a stable one."

I don't think Bluray was developed for this market. It was developed to conquer the DVD, but now this niche market is all it has left.

platz2• 12 years ago

My gaming days are mostly over, but all of the shooter days paled in comparison to playing flight sims (Falcon 4) with a head-tracking mechanism. Unfortunately the simulation crowd isn't exactly like the gaming crowd.

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

So what about the following?

Argument: VR will be a niche market because most styles of gaming have diminishing returns on increased immersion. After all, even with continuous rises in graphics quality in the hardest of the hardcore market, the mass market seems to have refocused its preference-attention on game design around the time mass mobile gaming became a thing and game consoles started costing $400.

beloch2• 12 years ago

AAA PC/console titles are out-grossing Hollywood and continue to grow every year. This explosive growth continued through the last console generation despite the high cost of the Xbox360 and PS3. A bigger danger for console makers is hardware saturation of the market. If gamers don't see compelling reasons to update to the new consoles, we could have another 1983 on our hands. VR, besides offering a potential edge in the console wars, could present a way to combat saturation. This is no doubt why Sony is pursuing VR so aggressively.

The mobile market is still comparatively tiny in terms of gross, but it must be pointed out that it is not incompatible with VR. Current handsets are not powerful enough to support VR but that will change in a few years. The question is, how much immersion do mobile users really want?

socalnate1• 12 years ago

Someone is going to post this article to Hacker News in 2022, and we are all going to have a good laugh.

platz2• 12 years ago

curious if Meta (https://www.spaceglasses.com/) is going to fill this niche.

sixQuarks• 12 years ago

These arguments are so poorly constructed, I hope this was just meant to be link bait. Otherwise, the writer is quite ignorant of both the current state of VR and overall history (in my humble opinion).

interpol_p• 12 years ago

I disagree with many of the arguments in the article. I think VR — especially on consoles — has a real chance of making it into gaming.

But I agree that it's not going to go mainstream, not in the way that smartphones have. VR is probably going to get popular with console and PC gamers, but I think many others simply will not care about presence. I say this as someone who has played with the Dev kits. They are fun, and magical experiences the first few times. But ultimately they get put away for more convenient entertainment that is just as engaging.

Edit: which is why the Facebook thing is so weird. I don't think anyone actually wants a metaverse. I think people want fun and interesting unique-to-VR game and simulation experiences.

movinvan• 12 years ago

"I think there is a world market for about five computers"

lazylizard• 12 years ago

he's apparently thinking its tablets and mobiles all the way down? - The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You

Related Stories