VR/AR and gaming today or tomorrow

Another thread went off on an interesting tangent and I thought that the discussion deserved its own place.

Basically:

What does VR/AR gaming entail and how close are we to that form of gaming with what we have today? Is it all even worth it?

I will just copy what I said about the Oculus Rift in it's thread:

The question isn't "how close we are to VR". We have VR helmets since the 90's. The first ones were monochrome pieces of bs like the Virtual boy, then they were incredibly low resolution CRT monitors hung in front of your eyes, then even when we had decent LCD screens but with horrible latency, and their only way to cover your whole field of view was to surround your eyes with several expensive wide screens.

Now the Oculus rift appears to solve all these problems, so it will be several steps more immersive. But there is no point in drawing a a hard line that "it only counts as "real VR" if it's indistinguishible from reality", and dismiss everything that fails at that. VR has been here for years, the only question is when will it become immersive enough for a mass market?

On the subject of AR, I think it is overrated. All it has, it's the lack of historical failures that VR has, so people somehow got the idea that VR is "dorky" and "niche", while AR will be "mainstream" because of how it will integrate into our everyday lives like mobile phones and Facebook did. Because promo videos of people chatting on a floating AR screen while walking down the street, simply looks more healthy than nerds sitting in their bedrooms being immersed in fictional worlds.

But on the other hand, once it becomes less painfully low quality, VR will have an instant userbase of millions who know exactly what they want to do with a VR helmet, (play FPS games, watch movies, etc), while we are still just speculating about how people MIGHT use AR.

I guess it depends on just how the VR is applied. Simply having a VR display (whether in a full helmet or just a pair of shades with attached earplugs) with the standard gamepad or keyboard and mouse controls may well become common but stuff like full-body motion control or brainwave reading is not going to be as widespread.

The other thing is how VR will be applied to portable gaming or gaming on utility machines like laptops or pads. Would that many users be willing to cart around another device that doesn't really do anything when they're not gaming? Can VR interfaces be used to control productivity software? Would the sensory isolation of a VR system create safety issues in a public space?

In short, we may see a VR generation of consoles and/or arcade machines but VR won't be the only way that gaming will go.

Well, full body motion control in first person is inherently impossible, if you can walk around using your irl legs, you need a room as big as the game setting, and if you don't, then you still have to hold some sort of controller, making the whole system redundant. Brainwave reading, on the other hand, if it can be done to work properly, could be useful, or even eventually solve the dilemma by controlling your leg movement with your mind, and your upper body with your irl arms.

In any case, there will be the wide gap with not much chance for progress between what the Ocuus hopes to acchieve, and the next, Matrix-like step decades later.

I don't think that VR needs to be very portable. PC gaming was desktop-based for quite a long time, and it was still rather relevant. Now that the PC is getting outdated anyways, this might very well replace it as the entertainment hub in the corner of the room, where you spend hours of your free time in a straight row. So I guess it won't take over ALL gaming, but almost all of narrative games, and generally AAA games.

I could go for a spinal plug...

Just the ability to look where you want without having to use the mouse would be neat. Couple it to a gun-shaped controller and you have a way to aim your gun in-game. The system would only have to know what orientation your head and gun-controller is in.

Or use a glove. Hand gestures equate to use commands, opening doors, stuff like that...

I remember watching a video where they built a custom-made floor thingy that basically allowed you to walk in any direction indefinitely. Like a treadmill that works for all directions.

Actually, the video itself is an interesting attempt at VR gaming. The only "controller" is a gun which works because the game was an FPS. Now if I could only remember what the name of the video was... (it was an episode in some video game-centered show)

I recall what you're talking about, and the game they were using as a demonstration was Battlefield 3. But there was a difference in the tech used. For one, no VR helmet was used: instead, they hooked up two high-end movie projectors on the ceiling inside of a 360 degree circular tent that would follow a laser pointer on the head of the player. The controller was an airsoft M4 that had a whole bunch of PS 3 buttons modified onto it, the suit the player wore would "shock" him each time he got shot in order to simulate combat, and he stood on top of a large circular pad that would allow him to fast walk around without hitting the walls. Oh, and the player I'm talking about? The guy was an Ex-SAS operative, and after playing it he gave it his approval!

Only catch though is that the whole setup costs more than several thousand dollars, and requires a lot of space and technical expertise to set up properly. Still wish I could've tried it myself though!

edited 30th Aug '12 4:06:42 AM by SgtRicko

Ah, yes, that's exactly it! I was having trouble remembering the details, but now that you mention it, I really like the shock feedback and the modified airsoft. I would have liked to try it out too, the whole thing was just great.

^^That would probably be good for arcades, admittedly.

Anyways, I want the Oculus Rift to succeed enough so that people try to use it for Mech Warrior: Online.

edited 30th Aug '12 11:18:25 AM by RocketDude

I want to see the Rift with ambient games where I'm just walking around, staring at the scenery. Or at least there is an option to do that, like in Skyrim.

Today's VR and that of the near future will be best suited to that kind of game, I think. Most genres with fast-paced action tend to rely on numerical displays to convey certain info and I'm not sure how those would be implemented in VR without either cluttering the FOV with a HUD of some sort or requiring the player to perform extra steps like opening a menu. The same goes for text subtitles and closed captioning.

If VR will be big enough to influence game development, I expect most genres to converge into first-person games without any menus, where you do stuff by directly interacting with your environment. (for example no inventory menu, but actually taking stuff from your belt. No levelling up menu, but .) For example a Total War-like strategy game would shift between a king fiddling with his fancy Map of the World with figures on it to controls the kingdom's policies( instead of the player seeing a "map mode"), and a general on the field personally herding all units from his point of view, (instead of a non-entity general floating above them).

TPS games would obviously go extinct, their only purpose was to increase the field of view compared to a monitor-based FPS, where you have tunnel vision.