THE STATE OFF VR
Is it really the future or just a passing fad?
VIRTUAL REALITY keeps coming back, like a bad smell. Or a nice smell; a pleasing scent of sandalwood for the proponents of VR, as they insist that it’s “the future of gaming” or “the next level of immersion.” Some of us at MaximumPC are skeptics, while others think VR just hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. There are applications beyond gaming, too, with virtual reality headsets now being used in medical and architectural fields.
The problem is that there have already been a few “futures of gaming.” First it was webcam body-tracking, then it was motion controls, then it was touchscreens, then it was motion controls again, then it was, uh, figurines with NFC chips in them? Yeah, we don’t know what Nintendo was smoking when it dreamed up the Amiibo, but the point is that gimmicks like VR have been a part of gaming for a long time, and most of these fads have fallen apart.
Virtual reality has stuck around for longer than most, with the industry currently in its “third phase” of VR products. The technology is improving significantly, too, with newer headsets, such as the Vive Cosmos and Oculus Rift S, claiming to offer superior motion tracking, graphical fidelity, and immersion. The amount of money being poured into VR projects has certainly risen in recent years, with even Facebook swooping in to buy up big VR business Oculus for a staggering $2.3 billion in 2014.
Where is VR heading, though? Examining the history of the industry demonstrates a lack of innovation since the initial introduction of modern VR headsets. While the hardware has improved, the way VR works hasn’t really developed, and there’s yet to be a killer app that makes VR headsets a must-have product. So, we’re left asking: What’s next for virtual reality?
VR TECHNOLOGY has been around since the ’ 90s, with the earliest commercial attempt being Sega’s brief demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1993, which was then canned before release. A few other manufacturers took a shot, most notably Sony, but the technology wasn’t quite there yet. The experience was fraught with latency issues and tunnel vision, and while it was a hopeful portent of things to come, most gamers weren’t exactly blown away.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and we find ourselves in the mystical, futuristic land of 2012. Plucky tech startup Oculus began a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund its advanced, high-end Rift VR headset, designed by Palmer Luckey, with the support of id Software co-founder John Carmack, a big proponent of VR. The fundraising campaign was massively successful, raising more than 10 times the original goal of $250,000. The finished product was released to consumers in 2016, and was immediately popular, although the initial retail price of $599 meant sales were hardly through the roof.
It was a successful innovation, though, and everyone wanted a slice of the VR pie. Sony came back with a vengeance, giving its successful PlayStation 4 console a VR headset, the inventively named PlayStation VR. Cell phone manufacturer HTC partnered with Valve to produce its own contender, the HTC Vive. The competition was fierce, although primarily between HTC and Oculus; Sony’s offering was console-specific, as opposed to the PC-oriented applications of the other two.
Surprisingly, Sony came out ahead; the PSVR was and still is the single most successful system-tethered VR headset ever, selling over four million units in three years, thanks to a lower initial price, compatibility with Sony’s existing PS Move motion controllers, and an assurance that the headset would work perfectly with the static PS4 hardware. Oculus outsold HTC by a small margin on its first release units, but both the Rift and Vive shared the same problem: needing to work with a wide variety of consumers’ PCs, both pre-built and custom systems.
This is an issue that has plagued the majority of VR headsets designed to work with PCs. The uncertainty as to whether their rig can support a VR platform drives potential buyers away. With the PSVR, it was simple: If you have a PS4, you can use it. With PC-tethered VR headsets, consumers had to ensure that the system they had was capable of running games in VR—and with a huge variety of custombuilt machines in the homes of PC gamers across the globe, that became a problem.
GOING MOBILE
Of course, the companies behind VR were aware of this, and working on solutions. Oculus produced the Oculus Go, a PC-less offering that went without wires thanks to an integrated Qualcomm chip to handle graphics. It wasn’t incredible in terms of graphical fidelity, but it sold well, even exceeding Rift sales in some markets. The more powerful follow-up, the Oculus Quest, was released recently, and you can find our review of it in this very issue.
A different strategy was employed by Samsung, which collaborated with Oculus to corner a slice of the market with a super-cheap solution: a VR headset with a slot for a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, which acted both as a screen and CPU. It sort of worked; the GearVR headset contained its own hardware for motion controls and head tracking, and at less than $100, it was far more affordable than other options, although it did require the user to own a Galaxy phone.
GearVR sold well, shifting five million units, and spawned legions of imitators of varying degrees of quality. Slightly before its release (but long after Samsung’s plans for the GearVR were conceived), Google announced Google Cardboard, a hilarious but undeniably effective VR solution that consumers could buy or even build themselves from cardboard. It used the same smartphone-oriented ideas as the GearVR, but was even cheaper and less sophisticated—because, well, it was made of cardboard. Google put out its own proper answer to Samsung’s GearVR, Google Daydream, a few years later.
WHERE NEXT?
While all of these products did well, none set the world alight. Google Daydream
was discontinued earlier this year, while GearVR hasn’t had a new hardware announcement since 2017. PSVR has remained a constant, a good metric of how well VR as a whole is performing, although as the release of the PlayStation 5 looms, it seems likely that Sony may take a moment to evaluate the direction it wants to head regarding VR.
John Carmack himself was recently decorated at the third annual VR Awards, receiving a lifetime achievement award for his work with Oculus. However, during his acceptance speech, he noted that he and some of his colleagues “really haven’t been satisfied with the pace of progress” with regard to VR development and expansion. He also admitted that VR is still an incredibly niche market, and remarked that there was a lot of work “yet to be done” before VR could properly hit its stride. Since then, Carmack announced he was standing down from Oculus to focus on artificial intelligence projects instead.
As far as we’re concerned, he’s right; VR seems to be stagnating. Oculus released the Rift S in early 2019, and a few months later HTC shot back with its Vive Cosmos. Both were quality, highend headsets, but with more of a focus on improved hardware specs than genuine innovation. Improved camera tracking, higher resolution screens, and so forth; all good improvements, but useless without top-notch software to match it. The biggest change made by the Vive Cosmos is a reworked headset design that enables the wearer to raise the “visor” without removing the whole headset.
Even Oculus, arguably the progenitor of the modern VR headset, isn’t moving rapidly. The Quest and Rift S aren’t rethinkings of VR, just upgrades to existing tech; like the PSVR and Vive Cosmos, they’re not pushing the VR industry forward in a meaningful way, even if they are great products. The problem with VR’s failure to expand might lie elsewhere, then, perhaps more on the software side.
BLAME THE GAMES
A common opinion is that VR is lacking a killer app; that one game or program that is a genuine game-changer. So far,
that hasn’t materialized. A few cool ideas, such as Samsung’s 360-degree camera for immersive video experiences, were eventually laid aside as gimmicks without staying power. Until the technology behind VR can be perfected to provide total, unbreakable immersion, the onus lies on the software to carry the format forward.
Here’s the sad thing: Current VR games are a sorry bunch. There are a few real gems out there (check out the “Games Worth Playing” box), and some fullfledged AAA releases have been retooled for VR with varying degrees of success, such as the excellent SkyrimVR or the slightly wonky Borderlands2VR. But as a general rule of thumb, good VR games need to be built from the ground up to work in VR, and most developers won’t dedicate the time and money to make that happen on a large scale.
Plenty of people are willing to take a stab at producing a game for VR, though, perhaps just out of the novelty of it. What this leads to is a wealth of titles that are short games at best, glorified tech demos at worst. Many developers seem to begin with a unique, interesting idea for a game that would work well in VR, but lack the resources to produce it in any form that lasts longer than two hours. Some are insultingly short; Accounting+, a game from Rickand Morty star Justin Roiland, is hilarious, well crafted, and less than an hour long. And it costs $12!
The alternate approach has been to produce virtual sandboxes for gamers to simply mess about in. This is the bread and butter of so many YouTube and Twitch channels—nonsensical tomfoolery in a variety of settings, often employing a key mechanic to keep things interesting. Blade andSorcery puts players in a medieval arena and arms them with a range of eraappropriate weapons and magical spells for beating the living daylights of hapless goons. Gorn does a similar thing, but with cartoonishly proportioned gladiators and ridiculous, over-the-top gore.
FINDING THE FORMULA
Fooling around in VR is fun enough, but these games don’t have storylines, objectives, or even really any quantifiable amount of game content. PavlovVR is a lot of fun with some mates, as you mess around with automatic weapons in a facsimile of CounterStrike, but it quickly starts to feel more like a demonstration of what VR is capable than an actual game.
Indeed, virtual reality “experiences” are commonplace, enabling VR headset owners to immerse themselves in another life for a short while—all too often, a very short while. That could be a gun range, a rollercoaster, even a plank overlooking an 80-story-high fall. We’re not going to talk about the sexy ones; we leave that to less refined journalists. But the point is that VR “games” often aren’t games at all, merely snapshots, glimpses into exciting worlds and scenarios that are snatched away almost as soon as they begin.
Even some of the “proper” games released for VR are lacking in content, polish, or simply quality. One problem with virtual reality is that games come in a huge variety of genres, many of which simply don’t work in VR. That said, some genres fit excellently with the format of VR. Puzzle games can work excellently in virtual reality, particularly locked-room puzzles, such as the comedic spy jape IExpectYoutoDie.
First-person shooters work relatively well in VR, enabling players to pull off maneuvers that would be impossible within the confines of a conventional
FPS. Driving and flight sims can be fantastic, dropping the player into the cockpit of an F1 car or an awesome spaceship, providing static immediate surroundings while the environment moves around the player. Meanwhile, the extra layer of immersion generated by VR has led to some fantastically scary horror games— ResidentEvil7:Biohazard is a particularly jump-scare-fraught delight.
THE END OF VR?
VR isn’t beyond saving. But it feels like we may be approaching a critical juncture; the make-or-break point for this generation of VR, where the format will either evolve and continue or collapse, presumably doomed to return in another decade or so when the technology has evolved.
It’s hard to see how a single game could fix the problems with VR at this point, though. VR might need a killer app, but it may not be enough. Industry veterans are still divided on whether VR is really the direction in which gaming is headed, and even tech titans such as Facebook and Google have proven unwilling to sink huge amounts of money into VR projects. Valve, meanwhile, has committed to another bout with it recently-released Index VR.
Oculus is showing no sign of stopping either, with the Oculus Quest supposedly being the final product in its first generation. It’s hard to see right now how the second generation will be quantifiably different, though, beyond minor improvements to the displays and processing power of the new headsets.
If VR is left alone to chug along without real support, it will die. Overpriced hardware and a dearth of proper games have already hamstrung the platform’s worth to serious gamers, and supercheap alternatives could actually have hurt the marketing narrative of VR by convincing many consumers that it’s a one-off gimmick, fun for half an hour before you put the cardboard headset down, and go back to using your phone like a normal human being.
Honestly, we’d really love to see VR turn around. The potential is there, and modern headsets provide a far more convincing experience than pre-2010 attempts. But unless developers prove willing to band together and properly push the value of the hardware with new, bigger, more involved games, we don’t see it happening. Perhaps the success of VR is inevitable; like cloud-streamed gaming or motion controls, it’s one of those USPs that comes back around every few years to have another attempt at success. Whether we’ll see it now, or have to wait until the 2030s, is anyone’s guess.