The once-bitten, twice-shy Jack Schofield thought VR was pure hype. Here, he reveals why the virtual revolution could be just months away
It’s been almost 30 years since Dr Jonathan D Waldern founded a tiny company called W Industries to develop a “virtual-reality” system – which included a head-mounted display (HMD), data gloves, a tracking system, and associated software. I still have vivid memories of trying a prototype. How could I refuse an invitation to experience the future?
Later, in 1993, the company – now called Virtuality – was floated on the London Stock Exchange. Its share value almost doubled on the first day, making Waldern a multimillionaire. By this time, the firm had marketable games such as Dactyl Nightmare, in which you battled a green dinosaur, and Grid Busters, a robot shoot'em-up. If you’re of a certain age, you may have played such games in Sydney’s Intensity, or the Embarcadero in San Francisco, or in similar arcade malls in the USA, England or Japan. If you’d been pre-sold VR by science fiction – such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer – you had to have a go.
But the technology never made it further than those early games. Virtual reality crashed and burned.
BEFORE ITS TIME
The basic strategy had seemed sound: consumers would experience VR in malls and arcades, and this would encourage them to buy their own headsets. But the games business failed to deliver. Atari planned to release a Virtuality-based headset to go with its Jaguar games console, but pulled out. Sega promoted its US$200 Sega VR headset for the Mega Drive console at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 1993, but it was never launched. At CES in 1995, Nintendo launched a monochrome VR system called Virtual Boy. It soon wished it hadn’t, though: Virtual Boy flopped, and was cancelled the following year.
Virtuality then did deals with Philips and Japan’s Takara to launch a US$299 Scuba headset, which was released in 1997 and apparently sold more than 55,000 units. Impressive for a system with a 320 x 240 resolution, but as an Amazon reviewer noted: “Today, it’s all too clear that Philips totally dropped the ball here and basically released a product that wasn’t ready for prime time.”
Did the first wave of VR arrive before its time? Yes. Is now the time? Maybe. The industry’s hopes are focused on December 2016. Starship’s Paul Hollywood, who has been developing VR and video-game software for decades, told me: “Christmas 2016 is going to be the first VR Christmas. You’ll have the headsets on sale and there’ll be a wave of content.”
Whether there’ll be a second VR Christmas remains to be seen, but billions of dollars are being invested in anticipation, such as the US$2 billion that Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg paid for Oculus VR last year. That’s a chunky sum of cash for a firm that started on Kickstarter and has yet to launch a consumer product, but it reflects VR’s status as the current golden child of technology.
Last year, a Sophic Capital report, “Virtual Reality: A Virtual Goldmine for Investors”, suggested the VR market could be worth US$7 billion – US$2.3 billion in hardware and US$4.7 billion in software – by 2018. It also predicted headset sales would grow from 200,000 to “about 39 million over five years”.
Gartner research director Brian Blau has also predicted that “virtual worlds will have transitioned from the fringe to the mainstream” by 2018, and that more than 25 million HMDs will have been sold. This doesn’t include phone-based headsets or non-electronic models such as Google Cardboard. Blau doesn’t expect a rapid takeup because of a shortage of mainstream content, but he does expect that there will be more action in the next 18 months than in the past 18 years.
I confess to a feeling of déjà vu. Today, we have another garage-style startup that has made its founders rich, except it’s called Oculus VR rather than Virtuality. And we still think gamers will kickstart sales of HMDs, only this time our hopes are pinned on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Sony’s Project Morpheus, rather than console names Nintendo, Sega and Atari.
But there are two important differences this time. The first is that we have almost ubiquitous high-speed communications of the sort that didn’t exist in the dial-up world of the 1990s. Today, we can stream VR data from almost anywhere in the world, rather than getting it on a games cartridge or a CD-ROM. Real-time conferencing, 3D commerce and virtual tourism are real possibilities, even if we no longer want to set up virtual homesteads in Second Life.
The second major difference is that, thanks to more than 30 years of Moore’s law, we now have so much computer power that even a mobile phone can create a good VR experience.
Waldern’s first system was based on the Commodore Amiga, which had sophisticated graphics chips but limited resolution, to say the least: if your eyesight was that bad, you’d be legally blind. Today’s VR systems are a world apart. In terms of games, it’s somewhat like comparing id Software’s original Wolfenstein 3D (1992) with Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014).
There is, of course, another point to this comparison. In August 2013, id co-founder John Carmack, the father of first-person shooters, joined Oculus as chief technology officer. He’s worked on both the Oculus Rift and the related Samsung Gear VR, and to quote VR evangelist Dan Page from Opposable Games: “if John Carmack’s got something to do with it, it’s going to be good. The guy’s a wizard.”
More new systems could appear, but at present it looks like Christmas 2016 will be a straight fight between the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, with Morpheus picking up PS4 users. Oculus VR has Facebook money, but the HTC Vive could get a head start if it launches this year. Ordinary consumers could go for Samsung’s Gear VR as a relatively painless way to explore VR – the catch being that the cheapish headset requires an expensive Samsung phone.
GAMES AND AFTER
Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony Morpheus are all targeted at gamers, because gamers are the most visible market for VR. This is both a blessing and a curse for a technology that wants to take over, or replace, the world. “I expect VR to be huge hit with PC gamers, but that’s a niche,” said Page. “Reaching everyone who owns a high-powered PC isn’t going to be seen by some people as a mainstream success. And there are so many other uses for VR in engineering, medical applications, training, experiential marketing and all sorts of fields.”
It may also be harder than some expect to crack the gaming market. Many games are already interactive and in 3D, so the transition looks easy. “That may be naive,” said Gartner’s Blau. “You’re taking a keyboard and mouse and changing to some other kind of controller, and we don’t even know what 2D, even though the game worlds are 3D, and that may not make the leap either. If it’s not a good experience, people aren’t going to buy: it doesn’t matter how good the hardware is.”
As Dan Page says, the problem isn’t creating a virtual-reality experience, it’s creating a good virtual-reality experience. That was something Virtuality and others learned in the early 1990s: you can blow people’s socks off with a short demo, but it’s much harder to develop a game they’ll want to play every day.
Unfortunately, even with all the technical improvements, VR still has limitations. One is the feeling of nausea or motion sickness caused by what AMD’s LiquidVR spokesperson calls “motion-to-photon latency”. This is caused by a delay between you moving your head and the scene updating. You may also feel disorientated if the scene changes rapidly but you haven’t moved your body. “A roller-coaster simulation can make you feel terrible because you’re sitting still,” said Starship’s Hollywood. “You need something like a cockpit to give you a reference point so you can have movement going on around you.”
These are the sorts of things VR game developers have to worry about: they don’t want to make too many people sick.
A WIDER AUDIENCE
Developers in other areas are hoping gamers will popularise VR, and thus make headsets widely available. For example, Plextek Consulting’s Collette Johnson is working on a medical training system which has specified Oculus Rift for training soldiers on a virtual battlefield. “The gamers will drive [adoption],” she said. “We want them to drive it, because they’ll buy big numbers and normalise VR for a wider market.”
Hugo Pickford-Wardle, chief innovation officer at Matter, takes a similar view. He sees gamers as early adopters of cuttingedge technologies. When they buy headsets, “it makes VR available to the rest of the family, where people can use it as a Skype alternative or for shopping in a virtual mall,” he said. “It’s almost a trojan horse.”
In the short term, the Samsung Gear VR may turn out to be an effective trojan horse. “You can take it down to the pub, pass it around and show very high-resolution, very low-latency VR to people without having to lug a big PC around,” said Opposable Games’ Dan Page. “The 360-degree movie content is a really easy way to show people just how special VR can be.”
FIRST CLASS VR
Samsung is certainly trying to bring Gear VR experiences to a wider (and more upmarket) audience. For example, in a three-month trial with Qantas, Samsung is providing headsets in First Class lounges in Sydney and Melbourne airports and “in the First Class cabins on select A380 services”. Passengers will be able to watch movies on the headsets, and enjoy “VR experiences”. Expect more companies to try this sort of thing while it has PR value.
Samsung also used Gear VR headsets at the World Economic Forum in Davos to show “more than 130 global leaders and dignitaries” a UN-backed film directed by Chris Milk about a 12-year-old girl living in a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. Milk showed clips from the film in a TED talk titled “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine”. In that, he said: “We’re just [starting] to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality. It’s not a videogame peripheral. It connects humans to humans in a way I’ve never seen before.” You can view the talk at tinyurl.com/pt6jwkr.
Milk fan Simon Sparks, co-founder of immersive video producers Yoovi, thinks that 360-degree VR movies could become really popular “because they can take you somewhere you never thought possible”, whether that’s on stage at a concert, the bottom of the ocean or the surface of the moon. “They’re filmed with rigs covered in GoPro cameras – they seem to be the weapon of choice – then stitched together,” he said. (On 28 April, GoPro bought Kolor, a French company whose software allows users to stitch together photos or videos to create immersive views.)
But as an AMD spokesperson reminded us, capturing an immersive audiovisual experience is just the start. To achieve “full presence” in another environment, we also need “touch and other stimuli such as temperature, kinaesthetic sense and balance”. But since VR headsets have yet to take off, it may be too soon to start thinking about VR body suits.