Ben Hardwidge takes a look at the room-scale technology behind the Steam VR system
And I’m back in the room. That’s good, as it means I haven’t been mobbed by zombies because I couldn’t work out how to reload my gun after all, but taking the Vive off my head and returning to real life is a truly odd sensation. I’ve apparently paced around the entirety of Overclockers’ new VR room while wearing the Vive headset and trying out the Brookhaven Experiment zombie shooting demo. It isn’t a photo-real demo; I clearly wasn’t actually there, but the Vive really makes you feel as if you’re right there in the middle of the action, and it’s bizarre to be returned to the bare walls and empty floor of the demo room.
This year sees a whole load of VR gear being released, including the Oculus Rift, but also Sony’s own VR platform on the PlayStation, as well as Samsung’s mobile Gear VR system. The Vive is the only VR system that offers what HTC calls ‘room-scale’ VR technology though. You’re not just sitting in a chair wearing a headset; you can position ceiling sensors in two opposing corners of a room and use the whole room as a virtual playground.
Hardware setup
I was initially sceptical about the idea of room-scale VR, as the space is so limited, but it works surprisingly well. The Overclockers folks take me through the setup procedure, which is really simple and user-friendly. A cartoon in the setup app takes you through each stage, starting by pointing the two Vive controllers at the monitor, then putting them on the floor, then tracing the outline of the room with them. You can also mark boundaries for any furniture in the room so you won’t end up tripping over anything. And that’s it; you’re then ready to put on the headset and start playing.
The headset itself is covered with UV LEDs that the sensors can use to triangulate its position. Likewise, the controllers are also detected by the sensors, as well as containing various motion-detection hardware. They look a little odd, being basically sticks with an angled circle on the end, but they’re comfortable to hold and are USB-rechargeable. Meanwhile, cables are routed through the top of the headband and over your back to prevent you from tripping over them, although Overclockers is considering routing all the cables through the ceiling and mounting the headset to a bungee to remove the issue of cables entirely. Handily, you also get a connection passthrough box with the Vive for easy connecting and disconnecting, featuring HDMI, USB and analogue audio ports, although the Vive also supports DisplayPort.
You do need to make sure the headset fits properly though. I was happy to find that it worked fine with my glasses, without needing to pop in my contact lenses, but the headset needs to be adjusted so that your eyes are the correct distance from the screens, or your virtual vision becomes severely out of focus.
When it’s all set up, though, the experience is surreal. By default, I’m now in a wireframe representation of the room, and I can see the controllers on the floor. I reach down and pick them up, despite the fact that I can only see a virtual representation of them. I then try walking round the room, and it all works well. If I approach a wall or a piece of furniture, a blue barrier gently appears in my vision to mark the boundary before I walk into it, and it becomes more vivid as I get nearer to the boundary.
Software demos
With everything set up, it’s time to try out some proper VR software, and I’m given a standard audio headset to provide sound, as there’s no audio from the Vive itself. The first demo we try is called theBlu. It places me on an underwater shipwreck surrounded by moving fish. I kneel down to have a look all around me and the experience is mind blowing. You really feel like you’re there. Fish are swimming everywhere, and I’m able to walk around the wreck and look anywhere I want. A big whale comes into view later, and you can watch it from any angle you like.
The only slight distraction is that the screens’ limited resolution of 2,160 x 1,200 is obvious on the little fish, which all look a little pixellated, with jagged edges, up close. That’s a fairly high resolution on a monitor that’s sitting a small distance away from you, but it’s not high enough to fool the eye when it’s right up close.
Next up is Job Simulator, which is a surreally meta experience. It sounds dull, but it really demonstrates the power of the technology. You can walk around the office and interact with various objects, with your controllers appearing as hands in front of you. The phone rings, so I pick it up with the controller and then bash my head with it, smacking me back to earth and reminding me that I’m not in a virtual office at all. You can pick up objects and throw them, use a computer with a mouse, make a cup of coffee – the controller is very quick and responsive. It all playfully hints at the virtual worlds we may be occupying in the future.
The next demo is an art package called Tilt Brush, which enables you to draw 3D art in your virtual space with the controllers. A cube-shaped menu enables you to select various options, from your environment background (I choose a space scene), to your brush size and shape and colour palette. You can then freely draw with the controllers, and walk around your drawing in 3D space – you could draw a circle around you and then walk through it. There’s potential to create some great interactive art here.
The final demos we try with the room-scale tech are shooting games, starting with The Brookhaven Experiment, which pits you against zombies from all angles. You can walk around the area to a certain extent, but it’s basically a shooting gallery. This time, my right controller has turned into a gun in front of me.
A zombie appears, I shoot it several times, before remembering that zombies, of course, need to be shot in the head. I line up the sights and get a clear headshot. It’s like using a light gun from the 1980s, but way better.
Another zombie comes towards me and I need to reload, and that’s where the first problem occurs. The physical controller I’m holding looks nothing like the gun in front of me, and I can’t find the reload button, so I end up getting mobbed by the undead.
We then play Space Pirate Trainer, which is similar in that you can walk around a small space and shoot spaceships, but it’s still basically a shooting gallery. This time, though, you have to look up as well as to your left and right. Again, it’s good fun, and a neat touch is that you have both a shield and a spare gun in your virtual backpack – you can reach your left hand over your shoulder to take out a shield for defence; do it again and you’ll get a second gun. It’s like the mouse scroll wheel, but in 3D space.
Elite Dangerous
Of course, the real test of the Vive is how it copes with real games. There isn’t a great deal of choice at the moment, but we install Elite Dangerous to get an idea of how it could work. The game recognises the headset natively and sets itself up for the Vive with no trouble at all. Remarkably, setting up the joystick is much more work than setting up the VR system.
This game is also best spent sitting in a chair, rather than pacing round the room. The Overclockers staff say they tried playing it with the room-scale setup, but that you could end up walking outside your ship’s cockpit and going into space. I put down the controllers, sit in the chair and put on the Vive headset again.
The experience is still awe-inspiring. I can look down and see the virtual joystick in front of me respond to the exact movements I make to the real-life joystick in my lap. I can look all round the cockpit, above me, and to my left and right. What’s more, the use of stereoscopic 3D makes the whole cockpit come to life in a way that makes sense. Your whole field of view (110 degrees, as on the Oculus Rift) is engulfed by the cockpit, so it makes sense that some objects are in front of others – it’s much more realistic than stereoscopic 3D effects coming out of a flat monitor. You can’t help thinking that Disney really needs to get to work on licensing a new X-Wing game.
Final thoughts
One thought does strike me about playing Elite Dangerous, though, which is that the experience would likely be the same on the Oculus Rift – there’s no benefit of the Vive’s controls or room sensors that cost the extra money. The same is likely to be true for most current games too. VR shooting galleries are fun, but you’ll need a lot more space to be able to enjoy a first-person shooter, and that’s space that most people don’t have.
There’s great scope for multiplayer VR shooters in a laser tag-style scenario, of course. You can imagine companies hiring big warehouses and kitting out teams with Vive gear to go on a large-scale, virtual shooting spree. But at home, where many people don’t have much free space anyway, the Vive could be a difficult sell.
There’s also the problem of persuading people that VR is worth buying. After stereoscopic 3D in the home largely crashed and burned, partly because people can’t be doing with the faff of putting on glasses to play games or watch TV, the VR industry needs to work hard to get people to part with their cash. As with many new ideas in tech, the best route here is to get people to have a go on it.
You can’t gauge the awesomeness of VR from screenshots and pictures of people wearing headsets. You need to try it for yourself. Do that, and you’re pretty much instantly sold, because the experience is just mind blowing. All it needs is killer games and software to support it, and people will buy it.
Another issue is the hardware you’ll need to cope with the demands of VR. Overclockers reckons a Core i5 and a GeForce GTX 970 are the bare minimum, but you really need all the GPU power you can get (much more so than CPU power). The Vive works fine with the Core i5-6600K system in the OCUK VR room, which has a GeForce GTX 980 Ti card installed. However, it’s already clear that VR needs higher-resolution screens in order to really fool the human eye, and that will require even more GPU power. Nvidia and AMD have plenty of work to do.
Gaming isn’t the be-all and end-all either. There are massive implications for a product such as the Vive in all sorts of scenarios. You can imagine interior designers using it to map out a room in your house and then showing you exactly how it will look with different floors and furnishings. You could use it to virtually explore hard-to-reach places in the world – it would be great for showing kids around far-off places in the world.
It remains to be seen whether VR is the future of gaming or just another fad, but experiencing the Vive shows amazing potential, showing that the world of Ready Player One, where we interact with each other in virtual worlds, is no longer a far-off fantasy.
At the moment, there’s still some way to go before we reach that stage, and both the Vive and the Oculus Rift will also need decent game and software support on release, but the potential is there.
If you aren’t convinced, you can always have a go on the Vive yourself. Overclockers will give you a 15-minute demo between 9am and midday in its VR room, and you can book your slot at www.overclockers.co.uk, where you can also preorder the Vive for £700 inc VAT, plus shipping. The preorder bundle includes the sensors and controllers, as well as Job Simulator and Tilt Brush. Overclockers currently expects pre-orders to be fulfilled in May, but availability may end up being later, depending on HTC.