After 25 years of a failed dream, 2015 looks to be the year we all put on headsets to explore strange new worlds. Richard Cobbett investigates why we should hope it works out this time.
Virtual reality isn’t simply a new way to look at screens. Your first experience is, admittedly, a slightly drunken out-of-body one; of reaching for things that aren’t really there – of knowing that you’re sitting with a fancy headset and tangle of wires on your head, yet your brain is convinced it’s in deep space. Or a movie. Or a cyberpunk cafe. It’s an experience that can’t quite be described, and which has little do with the very primitive first attempts that took arcades by storm and then flamed out at the start of the ’90s. This time, some of the smartest minds in the tech industry have devoted themselves to taking us to incredible new places.
Rarely does an idea written off as a failure make a resurgence some 25 years later, but there are good reasons for it here. Virtual Reality in the ’90s was a great idea fighting against the painful truth that the technology wasn’t ready for it. 3D was still in its infancy, games like Doom were still state of the art, display technologies were big and bulky, and computers were expensive.
Today, technology has advanced to the point that a basic smartphone has enough power to be a VR rig. That’s not an exaggeration; Google released a cardboard-based headset design with a couple of lenses on it that anyone can just slot a phone into, using the built-in gyroscope for basic head tracking. In practice, more technology than that is required to do it well, but the basics aren’t much more advanced. The Oculus Rift, the device that brought the dream of VR back and that everyone is watching most closely, currently uses a single, stock Samsung Note 3 display for its screen. Half is dedicated to each eye, with software and a pair of lenses working together to correct the perspective and help turn the flat image into 3D reality.
Almost as important is that while the first wave of VR had one company providing both hardware and software, now anyone can develop games, applications, experiences, movies and much more - the Oculus software development kit being free, and plugging into engines such as the popular and freely available Unity.
This means that companies can create unique experiences solely for VR, or just support them as an extra; space trading game Elite: Dangerous, for instance, is primarily made for playing on a monitor like usual, but includes Oculus DK2 support. (DK stands for “Development Kit,” not intended for consumers.)
That’s a great example of VR in action. It’s easy to grasp the basics – that instead of seeing a cockpit on your screen, you’re sitting in one. What it doesn’t convey is VR’s most important, but hardest to pin down, feature: presence. Space has depth, stretching out to infinity in a way that makes the same image on a monitor look like someone’s just draped a black sheet and sparkled it with stars.
Another experience, Museum of Games, simply puts static models from various games into a basic set of corridors and galleries. Even in the stark light, monsters you might have gunned down in their thousands in a game like Left 4 Dead suddenly become intimidating horrors.
At times, it can be creepy. Looking down from a high building is enough to trigger any acrophobe, and jumping or being dropped down is enough to send your stomach flying. In Elite: Dangerous, the sun coming through your cockpit actually feels warm, just because your brain assumes it is. One of the best demos currently available, Sightline: The Chair, doesn’t offer any jump-scares or particularly creepy moments, but a section where you’re slowly bricked into an ever-shrinking room still carries an atavistic shudder.
“Novelty has probably some effect, but there’s a big difference in how people engage with virtual reality,” says Sightline’s creator Tomáš Mariančík. “They clutch their chair for safety when sitting on a beam of a large building, they move their arms close to their body and are afraid to move when there are lot of spiky things around them, they attempt to grab things on the virtual table in front of them when they put the Oculus on for the first time, they look around and generally behave more naturally. They’re no longer looking at some projection of a virtual world, they feel they are in there and they respond differently.” A good example of this in action is the final Sightline segment, which sees the player transported to a beam at the top of a construction site, just in time to be sent tumbling down towards a grisly virtual end.
All of this is with technology that’s at least a year away from market, the current hardware in particular suffering from low resolution and what’s called the “screen door effect” - being able to see the gaps between pixels. The finished version promises to be far more immersive, hopefully with a lighter and cooler headset.
Other technologies are also available or on the way, including an omnidirectional treadmill from Virtuix (priced $499) intended to be used with the Oculus so that you can physically walk and run around worlds; and controllers like the Razor Hydra with a Wii-style controller for each hand.
We’re some distance away from actually simulating physical objects, but the equivalent of force-feedback (the rumbling of joysticks and controllers) would be better than nothing. Even so, early experiments are already showing other ways to bring reality into things.
The University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern has one of the most exciting: combining virtual reality with a rollercoaster. Users ride the coaster, but instead of seeing the death-drops and corkscrews, get to experience an impossible fantasy ride through the skies; racing and fighting dragons or chasing through the woods, with the real-life motion synchronized with the VR experience and the ability to look around in 360 degrees. Imagine something like a Harry Potter ride that could actually put you into the world instead of just showing it on flat screens. Ironically, the creators also get to claim “These rides feel much more comfortable than riding an Oculus Rift coaster at home in front of your desktop,” simply because for once your eyes and ears aren’t left fighting over whether or not you’re moving.
This kind of project is why at the moment people talk less about VR games than VR “experiences” – though there are a few games already built for the Oculus Rift in mind, including fast-paced racer Radial-G, shooter Time Rifters, and bar game Shufflepuck Cantina VR. In terms of characters, early demos are primitive, but there’s already something different about being able to make direct eye-contact, or – with the help of the Oculus’ ability to track the headset’s movement and position – to stand up and have your character rise as well, or shift a little to the side to dodge a bullet.
Much of the focus right now is on that kind of interaction; the subtle stuff that you’re not even necessarily aware of. Original VR for instance, and the first version of the Oculus Rift, had no concept of moving your head forwards – it could detect movement up and down and left and right, but if you leaned in, nothing happened. This is a big contributor to the motion sickness that many people suffer with the technology.
The Oculus DK2 adds a camera that tracks your 3D position, making it possible to lean around and look at something from the side, or to peer in. Elite: Dangerous, for instance, pops up menus and status windows as you look around your cockpit, but the current generation of VR is too low-resolution to read them comfortably. The natural inclination is to lean in for a closer look. Previously, that did nothing; now, it works exactly as it should.
The more invisible the technology, the more potential it has. One of the most interesting early VR applications was VR Cinema, which gives you a personal theater – a huge screen, a choice of seat, 3D movie effects thrown in for free with a supported movie. It also supports multiple viewers, allowing friends to get together to watch a movie in VR, with the playback synced and microphones conveying directional sound to each other just if you were sitting there for real. While at the moment the hardware isn’t very comfortable, if it can be slimmed and cooled down a little, essentially everyone can have their own IMAX experience.
In other movie experiments, some filmmakers are playing with cameras capable of filming between 180 and 360 degrees. These put you in the middle of a place, such as taking a trip through Tokyo, or right in the action, but allow you to look around to various degrees, allowing for a far greater sense of immersion than 3D movies and directorial control. Drone maker Parrot has even released a quadrocopter with one of these cameras and VR support, letting you fly through the air as the drone.
It has to be said that much of this was being mooted in 1990 as well, and there’s a chance we’ll be looking back in 2035 and wondering how we all got fooled again. Certainly, at the moment the technology isn’t mainstreamready, and a bad debut performance from the Oculus Rift especially could critically wound the entire market before it even has a chance to flourish. The current DK2 headset, for instance, is still big, heavy, clumsy and hot. Many issues remain unresolved too, including the way you have to retrain yourself to move your head to look around instead of just glancing with your eyes. (If you do that, you just see a mess of distortion and the edge of the screen.) To fully flourish, VR needs to be thin, light and fully wraparound with eye-tracking, and about twice if not four times the current resolution: all problems rather easier to describe than to cheaply fix.
Just a few minutes in an Oculus Rift or Sony’s VR headset Project Morpheus, though, make it clear that a VR future is one worth hoping for. It’s the potential for one of the biggest technological revolutions since the invention of the screen – a chance to step into the future in a way the ’90s could only dream of.