I have finally got my head around virtual reality

Live sports streaming is the killer app for VR – but will poor hardware kill it at birth?

Queueing for an hour to find a sick bag waiting at my seat: it wasn’t the most promising of starts to Intel’s CES press conference. By the end of it, however, it had proved the most memorable event of my four days in Las Vegas, and one that forced me into a rare admission – I was wrong. At CES 2016, I had been treated to an early demo of the HTC Vive, and I could barely have been less whelmed by my first proper exposure to virtual reality. The demos were silly, the headset uncomfortable and I could fully understand why Intel took the precaution of providing sick bags to this year’s attendees: the Vive left me feeling more nauseous than an all-nighter in Vegas’ cocktail bars.

So, having queued for almost an hour to discover that Intel’s press conference required attendees to wear VR headsets, I let out a weary sigh. As spare seats in the hall began to evaporate, I came seriously close to doing a Bullseye: I’ve had a lovely day, Jim, I’ll let someone else have a go. I’m so glad I stuck it out, because a year to the day after I first pulled on a VR headset, I finally understood what the fuss was about.

My lightbulb moment had nothing to do with new hardware. Yes, we were wearing Oculus Rift headsets instead of the HTC Vive, but if I hadn’t seen the logo on the outside of the goggles I would have been none the wiser. Instead, it was a demo of what these headsets could do that won me over.

Midway through the conference, our headsets flicked to a live basketball game, which was being streamed using technology from a company called Voke VR that Intel bought recently. Suddenly, I found myself courtside. Look straight ahead and the players are warming up, look to my right and there’s a bloke in the seat next to me tucking into a hot dog. Yes, Intel had screwed up its timing and switched to the game at halftime, but I couldn’t care less: I got it.

Immediately, I could see the potential for streamed sports events. Just like being at a real game, no longer are you forced to watch through the director’s eyes. You can watch what’s happening off the ball, see what the coaches are doing on the bench, even gawp at the cute girl in the third row if you want to.

What’s more, you don’t have to sit in one seat. By looking down to my left, I could change the camera angle from the side of the court to behind the hoop, getting an entirely different perspective on the game. The potential for such technology is huge. How long will it be before Sky Sports VR offers you the chance to sit in the dugout alongside José Mourinho, for example, or in the Kop for a Liverpool match?

That’s not to say all the problems I encountered last year have been immediately wiped away. Far from it. The hardware is still amazingly clunky. I’m sure it was no coincidence that Intel asked journalists to put on and remove the headsets several times during the hourlong demo. Had we been wearing those enormous, heated rubber masks for a solid hour, we’d all have left drenched in sweat. And not only from the heat of the mask, but from the fans of the enormous gaming laptops that were sat on every journalist’s desk, required to power the VR headsets in the first place.

Then there’s the cost of that high-end hardware. I’d estimate there was half a million pounds’ worth of laptops and headsets in that room, serving 260 of us. VR will never become mainstream if you need to be tethered to a two-grand gaming laptop. It needs to be a lightweight, wireless headset that connects to your Sky box, and we’re at least a couple of generations of hardware away from that scenario – maybe more.

Display resolutions also require enormous improvement. The basketball match was impressive, but it felt like I was watching on the Betamax video player my dad brought home from Dixons in the early 1980s. The refresh rate was so poor you could see the ball smear as it arced into the hoop. We’re used to Full HD resolution on a smartphone: standard-def VR simply won’t cut it.

Yet, that’s a huge bandwidth problem. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich explained that rendering a football match in full 3D generates two terabytes of data per minute. Try streaming that over your broadband connection, and you may just get to watch kick-off by the time the game has finished. Which is why I utter a hollow laugh every time one of the imagination pygmies from BT tells the Today Show that fibre-to-thecabinet is “fast enough”. No it’s not. Look what’s coming.

The truth is current hardware – headset, client and networking technology – simply isn’t good enough to deliver a compelling experience at an affordable price, and it might not do so for another five or ten years. By which time, VR could be as dead as 3D TVs. Given the enormous potential I saw at CES, that would be cause to reach for the sick bag.

How long will it be before Sky Sports VR offers you the chance to sit in the dugout alongside José Mourinho?