The HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus - the three of them are taking gaming towards virtual reality enlightenment. With the Samsung Gear protecting the mobile VR vanguard, the industry is ready to be taken into a virtual world.
We’ve just been skydiving. Except, we haven’t; we’ve been lying on our chest, over a chair, looking down, with an Oculus Rift strapped to our head. “You’ve got to step over the edge,” Patrick O’Luanaigh tells us, he’s the CEO of nDreams (more on that later) and used to be creative director at Eidos Interactive, and head of external development at Codemasters. He’s watching us on-screen, not that we know that, of course, since we’re very much embroiled in this terrifying virtual experience.
“Go on, jump!”
We push forward on the stick – that’s right, we’re still using a 360 pad – and look down. We begin to plummet. Layers of clouds fly past us, and floating islands of rock whizz past our heads. You can hear them go by, in 3D sound through the headphones.We’re told we get more points if we skim as close as possible to the rocks, so we look to our left, edging closer. It almost feels like we’re going to graze the skin off our elbows.
We plummet further, picking up velocity, nosediving, righting, and constantly looking around. There’s a 360 degree field of vision here – we can see the floating rocks we’ve bypassed if we look up, and the (fast approaching) ground below if we look down. We prepare for impact; we actually close our eyes. As we hit the ground, O’Luanaigh taps the front of our headset, giving a kinetic shock to the visual impact.We flinch, he laughs. VR is terrifying.
“When Valve did its original VR demo, it produced this experience where you stood there, on a plank of wood over a massive chasm– like the Death Star – and you’re looking down… and the game tells you to step to the left,” O’Luanaigh explains as we remove the headset, a little shaken. “‘Well, no’, you say. But your brains is like ‘You knowyou’re in a room, you know you’re on a carpet, you know this is safe. Step off.’ You know that, but it’s just too real and you can’t jump. It’s lovely – your brain is telling you that you’ve got a headset on, but, somehow, you really believe that you just might fall.”
Lovely isn’t the word we’d have used at the time, but O’Luanaigh is right – it’s a strange experience. Our last experience with VR before visiting nDreams was with an Oculus Rift DK1 (that’s Development Kit One). It didn’t have positional head tracking, which is the main cause of the so-called ‘simulator sickness’ a lot of frontier gamers suffer with when trying out this tech, and we weren’t hugely sold on it.
After playing around with the Oculus Rift DK2, and the mobile VR headset Samsung Gear, though, our hearts have been swayed. We’ve been converted to the VR revolution. All the naysayers riffing on the old ‘It’s the 3DTV of gaming’ gimmick? They’re wrong.
“I think, largely, you can have the same experience with a 3D film as you do with a 2D film – the technology doesn’t really further anything or change anything,” explains O’Luanaigh, when we ask him about the oftcited comparisons. “With VR, the difference is huge. When you use the [SteamVR], Vive, you don’t go ‘Oh yeah, this game’s a little better for being in VR’, you go ‘Holy shit, this is new, I've never seen this before in my life!’ [laughs] I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone come away from a 3DTV saying ‘This will change everything, you know? I don’t think VR is a gimmick, I really don’t.”
It’s refreshing to hear O’Luanaigh say that – we’re guilty of approaching the VR industry with scepticism our selves; let’s be honest, as gamers we’ve had a fairly rough wide with new tech. When Microsoft first announced Project Natal (which would go on to become the Kinect we all know and, um, love?), the publisher promised it would change the way we gamed. We thought the Wii and its nunchucks would alter gaming for good, too. As it happened, it came and went, gave us some good games, but was largely a gimmick. We’re burnt out, tired of false promises, tired of the same experiences that are trotted out on every new bit of technology.
VR has more going in its favour, though – it’s arrived in the industry around the time that we’re seeing game-makers deconstruct the typical industry cycle. The triple-As are getting bigger, battling only with themselves, leaving the indies to hit the niches that Activision or Ubisoft or EA are leaving open. This applies to VR, too – smaller, more mobile studios can afford to take risks, experiment, alter the narrative of game development.
“If VR happened ten years ago when it was all big publishers doing things how they used to be done, things would be very different,” O’Luanaigh tells us. And his past in Eidos and Codemasters gives us confidence in his opinon on the matter. Up until about 18months ago, nDreams was focused on PlayStation Home, and has had preliminary experience working with virtual worlds that, really, was the perfect training ground for a studio-wide VR shift. It was a prototype stage for the company – an area it could experiment with business models, learn what people liked.
“As it happens, VR has come at the time of games as a service – and self-publishing, KickStarter, Steam Early Access. It’s not just £39.99 triple-A titles; there’s a massive mix and access to everything – from one hour experiences to two hours, four hours, eight hours… There’ll be a really nice blend in the VR stores, just like there is on Steam […] that means VR developers don’t all have to be doing Eve: Valkyrie or Alien: Isolation. It also means you don’t have to be doing small one/two-man indie stuff.”
The only hands-on experiences we’d really had proper time with when it comes to VR were with the games O’Luanaigh mentioned above – we were lucky enough to get some time with the Alien: Isolation demo running on Oculus (it’s horrific) and we probably spent a bit too long gawking at the twinkling cosmos from an Eve: Valkyrie cockpit. The thing is, those games – and a lot of the others that are making a name in VR – are all first-person, or in a contained area, like the aforementioned cockpit. Won’t that begin to get boring in, what, around a year? Can VR do more than first-person and horror?
“Absolutely!” replies O’Luanaigh. “Some of the best experiences we’ve been playing with are actually what [our developers call] ‘diorama games’ – if you imagine a big diorama, like the things you’d see in a museum, or even Warhammer – those kind of things work fantastically well in VR. You can move your head in, look closely at your units, pick people up… that feeling of seeing something so small and moving people around from god-view is incredible. Imagine RTS or tower defence games in this diorama!
“Even slightly more traditional third-person adventure games work nicely, too. We’ve demoed something similar that worked out alright, and I know Oculus has got a game called Lucky’s Tale that has a third-person view. Everyone assumes VR experiences will be through the eyes, but that’s not all we can do – it’ll be a real mix, I think.”
On that note, one of the first things O’Luanaigh showed us when we visited the nDreams studio was the Gear VR – which is basically a Samsung S6 slotted into a purpose-built Oculus shell.
“There’s a massive difference between mobile VR and PC-powered VR,” O’Luanaigh explains as we turn the Gear VR over in our hands, honestly a little in wonder. “That’s where the biggest gap is. Therefore, the games and experiences we make form obile have to be smaller than the PC experiences because… bless it, it does such a good job for its size, and it’s got such an impressive screen, and I think what we’ve got with the Gear is great, but it’s never going to be photorealistic, it’s never going to do as many polys as PC.”
We were amazed by how a little phone like this could generate VR. We played Perfect Beach – which is more of a traditional app than a game; an experience that had you sat on one of three beaches, with your own music on, chilling out. That was it, that was the point of the game. “Imagine this on your commute – you’ve just had a crazy day and you want to unwind,” O’Luanaigh posits, “strap this on, when you’re on the tube or something, and you can get away for a bit, really help yourself relax.” The graphics actually put us in mind of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate – understandable, relatable and stylised, but not really realistic or ‘uncanny’. For a phone, though, running two eyes’ worth of graphic data, it was impressive.
Though Perfect Beach is a really relaxing experience (there’s even a ‘Meditate’ option if you really want to get into your virtual zen place), we were still sceptical that people would actually want to do that on a train. With the whole ‘glasshole’ backlash that accompanied the Google Glass, is it likely people will adopt VR willingly in public? Tuning into a new world in your own home is different – no-one can see you there, there’s no shame – but on a bus or a train… we were dubious.
“The headsets will get cheaper, and the mobile headsets in particular will get lighter and easier [to use], and they’ll get positional tracking, too,” O’Luanaigh explains, when we ask him about the problem with usability in public. “Even the Oculus and the Morpheus and the Vive will get lighter and smaller and easier over the next few years, they’ll get more wireless, too! But this is a great starting point, I’m really optimistic for VR, I really am. I’m convinced it’s going to catch on.”
‘Catch on’. It’s an interesting turn of phrase for VR, because that’s what a lot of the movement’s success depends on: adoption rate. With the likes of the Vive and the Oculus Rift requiring an incredibly high-end computer to run, it’s unlikely the majority of gamers (based on console) will want to invest. The Morpheus, however, has the advantage of already having a potential player base of 18.5 million people [as of January 2015].
“Every PS4 is the same,” states O’Luanaigh. “[As a developer], you know that every single person wearing Morpheus VR will be able to get a headset, plug it in and be off. That’s a big advantage actually, and I think it may mean Morpheus sells faster when it launches than the Oculus or the Vive because those headsets will need powerful PCs.”
But will people be willing to move out of their console comfort zones for a (potentially) better, or at least more immersive, VR experience? “People will spend quite a lot of money getting the right PCs and the hardware up-front eventually, and the average PC will come down in price in the long run, but right away? You’re going to need a beefy PC and be a gamer that enjoys running a top-end gaming computer to take advantage of it, whereas the Morpheus is something everybody can use.”
With developers and publishers looking at taking advantage of existing markets, it’s essential that the people working on VR now make the launch games immediately accessible. That’s a big task – after all, aside from a few VR arcades in the Nineties, VR hasn’t really been publicly available before, and that means there are a lot of starting points that need to be worked from in order to appease an already sceptical audience. This new wave of VR needs to distance itself from the past.
“Even though we’ve been working with VR for 18 months now, we’ve still got an R&D department working around the clock looking at all the new things we want to try,” O’Luanaigh explains. “We keep getting new hardware, so even when it’s things like the Vive – moving around in the headset suddenly introduces new solutions to problems we had, so there are still so many things we’re getting better at, even at this early stage.”
Movement is one of the trickiest things VR has to get right in order to succeed – developers can’t simply rely on sticking a pad in the players hands; aside from not being able to see the thing at all, it also takes away from the feeling that you’re in the game. The Vive, at least, has built-in tech that allows you to see your limb placement in-game, but that’s not a standard for the other headsets. nDreams, it could be argued, is writing the rulebook when it comes to addressing how these different VR challenges are being tackled.
“There are a lot of ways of moving in VR, so we’ve done a lot of work and a lot of user testing trying to find out if there’s a ‘comfort mode’ we can create for new players that’ll make it easier for them to understand. Gamers might prefer to just switch to the controller, though, so we’re figuring out how that works, too.
“We’ve spent the last 18 months experimenting with all sorts of things – I think we’ve made about 40 prototypes [at nDreams] in all. We’re experimenting with things… Like sticking your head through a wall, right? You don’t want the player to be made to stop moving their head because that feels quite weird and can cause simulator sickness, but then you don’t really want players sticking their heads through wall or ceiling [meshes], so what’s the answer there?”
We’d been discussing the potential future of VR with O’Luanaigh all day, talking about how interesting narratives could come from the enhanced agency you’d feel actually being behind a character’s eyes, about the way you could deconstruct games tropes by examining them in VR, discussing how you could play with perceived reality and altered perception with stylised graphics and optical illusions… but that question of immersion stumped us.
It was illuminating to see the very simple problems O’Luanaigh and his team at nDreams run into on a daily basis. Considering collision with walls and boundaries is a problem that was solved in gaming over a decade ago, but here it is again, represented and redefined for a whole new school of development. As we sat there, trying to think of a reply, O’Luanaigh continued.
“If your character’s got glasses, how does that feel in VR? What about if you’ve got a tall character, a short character, how does it feel playing a female or a male? We’ve been looking into some really crazy things, some that we’ve found out were never meant to be tested [laughs], and some that have been really fun. We’re now working on a couple of launch titles for the major headsets – so we’ve got two titles for the Gear VR: Gunner and Perfect Beach. But then we’ve got much bigger titles in the works for the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus and HTC Vive. The only one we’ve announced so far is The Assembly – a made-for-VR adventure game that’s really mysterious, with a few characters you jump between, great dialogue and, hopefully, [sets the standard] for the kind of experience you can expect when VR formally launches.”
The Assembly is still being kept under wraps (expect it to be revealed at E3, along with a slew of other VR exclusives), but O’Luanaigh’s tease made us think… what exactly is going to define the VR industry for gamers? We’ll certainly see a lot of experiences – the skydiving we mentioned at the start of this feature, Perfect Beach, or another terrifying experience we’ve seen where you’re actually put in a coffin and a VR sim plays out burying you alive – but in terms of games… neither ourselves nor the developers know what’s going to take off. O’Luanaigh explains.
“That’s what’s exciting for us – we’re not copying existing games or saying ‘We’ll port X over to VR’. You can’t just get rid of the cutscenes and change the GUI a bit in existing games – I mean, some [developers] will do that, for sure – but it’s what you can do in VR that’s different that excites me. We’re learning that right now – the kind of things that just can’t be done elsewhere, and that’s exciting.
“Nobody knows what the biggest selling game in VR is going to be, nobody knows what the best mechanics are going to be… there’s a lot of sharing between developers in VR, especially in the UK – we have a lot of meet-ups, talking about what works and what doesn’t work. There’s a very non-corporate feeling to it all, there are no PR secrets, no ‘We’re going to beat you!’ mentality. We’re just helping each other out, learning, seeing where it’s going. There’s such a huge, wide open territory here, you know? So many genres for people to tackle, so many games and things you can do.”
And that’s just in the gaming sphere – that’s before you get into what else VR could be applied to. Facebook bought the Oculus Rift last year, and has remained fairly silent about its intentions since. It stands to reason, though, that Facebook wants to use VR to get people ‘in’ its system (you know, like in that South Park episode) and have you virtually hang out with your pals, bringing pictures and videos and stickers from your pockets and sharing them with your friends in a virtual bar or something.
“And that’s before you start thinking about education side of things!” exclaims O’Luanaigh. “Think of the kids in schools wandering around WWI trenches, in proper historical detail, thanks to bit of hardware. That’s amazing to consider, right?”
It is. It really is. We’re on the verge of a technological breakthrough – the biggest shake up the industry has seen since the introduction to 3D graphics. The only barrier we’ve got in the way of an actual progression (in terms of the games we can enjoy; genuinely new experiences) is the price point.
“I think headsets will be more expensive than everyone expects at launch,” speculates O’Luanaigh, “I think everyone has this figure in their head of $200-$250, and I think that’s optimistic. I think the headsets will come down to that, in the end, but I think we’ll see around $500 for the headsets alone to start with. There’s a lot of kit in there, a lot of stuff going on under the hood. I mean – don’t quote me on that! – I don’t know for sure, I just suspect they’re going to be a lot more expensive than people seem to think they’ll be.”
We need to end this feature on that note, because otherwise we’ll end up far too excited for tech that hasn’t yet been fully pushed. But after playing around with VR for the past few months, visiting various studios and seeing them in action, trying different games out at trade shows, we’re truly sold on the idea that developers and creative can do wholly new things in this domain. Yes, the headsets might be expensive when they launch, and no, we might not see the most diverse array of games available on launch, but with our support and a loyal hardcore propping up the middle of the VR industry, within a few years we’ll see the headsets really begin to infiltrate the mainstream, invade the living room, kill the TV.
The only downside, for us, right now, is the proposed (yet still unconfirmed) price point. Otherwise, we can’t see a single reason not to get excited by VR. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got to go skydiving again.