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Tech

Virtual Reality Is Still Far from Reality

The gap between the hype and the games is real.

Nestled off in a corner of the press area upstairs above the Gaming Insiders Summit, a developer convention on San Francisco's radioactive Treasure Island earlier this month, Ralph Barbagallo was demoing a virtual reality version of his pre-alpha game Caldera.

Caldera is a kind of Tower Defense meets Missile Command—you basically move your head around to point the gun. A number of attendees had gathered around and were excitedly testing it out.

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The cluster of gamers hanging around one of the only working VR demos at the summit struck me as symbolic. Virtual reality is enjoying some epic hype from serious gamers, investors, and developers, but a product that lives up its promises is still far from, well, reality.

It's a reminder that no one working on virtual reality is quite sure how the business side will work, not to mention some of the technical challenges of implementing a successful game or app.

Some corners of the gaming community talk about virtual reality as if it's the most momentous phenomenon in the industry, something that will revolutionize the way we play games. Facebook's acquisition of the virtual reality headset maker Oculus Rift seemed to support that idea. But as time goes on with no sign of a killer VR game, industry veterans are tempering their expectations.

It's easy to understand why people get excited about virtual reality. I mean, hell, I get stoked too

"As someone who's been talking to game consumers for 20 years, and having watched the space closely, it's clear that VR is real and big," Mike Vorhaus, president of the research firm Magid Advisors, told me after his talk about the future of gaming. "But, it's not the only big important thing in gaming, it's one of a few things, like 3D TV, that's going to shape the future."

It's easy to understand why people get excited about virtual reality. I mean, hell, I get stoked too. Birdly, a bird simulator, was the first piece of tech in years where I uttered "holy shit" once strapped in and booted up. Birdly really did make me feel like I was flying. Strapped into the frame—it's a person sized machine that you lie prone on, and it tilts around depending on my pitch and yaw in the air—wearing an Oculus Rift headset, a fan blowing in my face, and headphones for audio, the experience was so real that I was afraid to dive through San Francisco's streets for a while. I even viscerally felt the need to avoid crashing into buildings (which I did once).

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Except, Birdly eventually did get kind of boring. I mean don't get me wrong, it was cool to fly around, it's just that after about 30 minutes I began to wonder: what's next? There was nothing to do, really.

That same question, about constructing compelling VR narratives, is bugging developers too—and they also don't have the answers.

Image: Draxtor Despres/Flickr

Valve Software's Chet Faliszek's talk about virtual reality circled around that question, showing the developers who attended some of the ideas they'd had thus far. Faliszek is no novice game author: he co-wrote the Half-Life and Portal series, and penned Left 4 Dead himself.

Current virtual reality offerings have problems with narrative construction, he said, that much of the time prevent the player or user from suspending a feeling of disbelief.

What attracts Faliszek to VR is the ability for the technology to affect our "lizard brain," as he put in is talk. "You're not pretending, VR feels as though it's actually happening to you."

That's also the problem, because if the technology doesn't perform perfectly—as in zero bugs, or frame rate drops—players start to puke, he said.

Technology-wise, both Birdly, which uses Oculus VR's Rift Development Kit One, and its competitors that use Sony's Project Morpheus, have benefited from millions in research and development cash. In Oculus' case, Facebook's whopping $2 billion investment could give VR believers the necessary capital to turn their dreams into reality, Vorhaus said.

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Facebook's investment is also a signal that there may indeed be VR possibilities that extend beyond entertainment.

When Facebook bought Oculus VR, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that while "immersive gaming will be the first" kind of new experience, the company plans to make Oculus' offerings a platform for other kinds of experiences outside of gaming.

"Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home," he wrote. "This is really a new communication platform."

But before any of those things happens, virtual reality tech must get better.

Image: Caldera

This time around, everyone says that the technical challenges are potentially solvable—gamers at the summit cited vast improvements in 3D graphics and far cheaper access to advanced tech—although no one is quite sure exactly how. It's clear that at least the display and graphics hardware is rapidly improving for existing games, improvements that have ended up in VR.

But, David Coombes from Nvidia, told me that one of the big hurdles is the lack of a useful input system—a keyboard and mouse, but that would function seamlessly in a virtual world. "The critical part was figuring out an input device that's appropriate—whether that's a controller or some kind of device that offers haptic feedback," he said.

I saw one attempt to produce a controller at Gaming Insiders. Merge, a company that's making a budget version of the Rift that uses a smartphone strapped to your head, had a TV remote style controller. Sure, it was kind of neat, in a novelty way, but it didn't feel like the type of solution Coombes was talking about.

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Other companies are trying to produce controllers, but none have done so successfully at a realistic cost. The images Faliszek showed of Valve's effort basically involved sticking large QR codes across an entire room—which, as he acknowledged, is not something most of us would do. He's not really sure how they're going to do it, in fact (which is interesting coming from a man who dropped everything at Valve to work on their VR team). Even the guys behind Rift don't know how to make a good controller.

There are other hurdles to overcome as well. Power consumption for VR devices remains high, so entirely untethering people, remains a challenge, according to David Kaye, Gaming Insiders Founder. One VR developer I chatted with, Barbagallo, also pointed out that it was "hard for people to understand how cool VR was, or its potential, without actually trying it themselves."

Image: Emanuel Maiberg/Motherboard

Socially, VR might take a while to catch on as well. Much like the combination of social media, and smartphones have changed the collective experience, VR might take some getting used to.

"It's this weird antisocial thing," Barbagallo said, going on to describe a meeting that begin with him walking into a tech company's office where four guys sat around a table, facing different directions with VR helmets strapped on. Barbagallo said at the moment nobody is exactly sure how to deal with a social situation like that. That's also one of the reasons he thought that VR would only appeal to the serious gaming hobbyists. "I can't imagine people other than ultra-nerds getting into this kind of thing," he said.

But, no social awkwardness, or unknowns are going to stop the true believers in VR, who now, flush with cash, believe there is a chance to make it a tangible and useful technology—for everyone.