Consumer-ready virtual reality has now been with us for over a year. This October will mark the first anniversary of the launch of the Playstation VR, the last of the three major virtual reality systems on the market. Google's Daydream and Gear VR have some fun and interesting experiences, but let's be honest, they are a mere gateway drug to the more hardcore Vive-Rift-PSVR platform trinity.
In this year-and-a-half period, the VR software offering has grown to over 200 games or experiences on the Playstation Store and over a staggering 1700 on Steam. I am completely aware that a decent percentage of those are not up to par in terms of quality, but that has next to no impact on today's subject.
Back in March 2016, when the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift were first introduced, teasing and promoting VR game launches with a classic 2D trailer on YouTube made all the sense in the world. Absolutely no one had any equipment to see what the game could feel like inside the headset, so 2D was the default fallback solution. The problem is that virtual reality content doesn't demo well at all in 2D. Every game studio and VR hardware manufacturer knows this.
So my question today is: Why, after 18 months on the market, can't gamers and VR users get to experience a game trailer from inside the headset? If VR is still slugging towards mass adoption, in great part because 2D demos leave viewers confused, or at least hungry for more, it would seem to me that letting potential buyers get a better taste or the product would be considered a priority. I can't begin to fathom how big of a job it is, development wise, to add an option to view a trailer in VR, but it seems to me like it's probably not an impossible task. Sony, Oculus and Steam definitely have the resources to implement that. After all, WebVR has been around for a little while now. Let's be clear, I'm not talking about downloading a playable demo, but simply to experience the 2D demo in a 360 video through the headset.
I feel that such a feature would probably help sell many more copies of games. I, for one, have watched pretty much every single VR game trailer to come out in the last two years and on many occasions, I have only been pleasantly surprised by a game once I had stepped inside of it. Superhypercube and Fantastic Contraption instantly come to mind. Both of them looked okay in 2D, but experiencing them in VR was a revelation.
More than 2.5 million high-end headsets are now in circulation worldwide, and this count is only going to keep growing. Now multiply that number by the number of times a year that a gamer usually makes a purchase. It's becoming more and more relevant to offer such an option. Of course, I'm not advocating it to replace the traditional YouTube trailer. A 2D version is still indispensable to bait non-VR gamers (which are still the vast majority) and to tease headset owners, but they could definitely live side-by-side.
In late 2017, promoting a VR game with only a 2D video makes as much sense as promoting GTA V with a black and white silent movie. Ok, bad example, that would probably look pretty badass, but you get my drift.
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But how long will it be a thing? Is it going to make it, and stick around in our everyday lives? Or is it gonna be a fad, like 3DTVs? The tech is solid, it's a game changer for sure. Yet, everyone seems to agree that VR's killer app isn't born yet. While Google's Tilt Brush might be fun and pretty efficient at demonstrating virtual reality's potential, hardcore gamers are still waiting for VR's "Doom". The game whose creator, John Carmack, has been hired by Oculus, so he could try and repeat the miracle by developing VR technology that goes further than tower defence games. So is VR being stalled strictly by software? Not quite, in my humble opinion.
VR experts seem to agree that VR's mass adoption will first come from gamers. But when we look at the most popular "flat games" (read "non-VR") of the moment, I would say that 95% of them involve foot locomotion of the main character. From first-person shooters to JRPGs to platformers, AAA titles all seem to share that common ground.
Shouldn't that fact alarm VR developers to try and solve this nausea-inducing, very important aspect of almost all financially viable gaming IP? And if they do realize how important it is, what are they actually doing about it?
The subject doesn't seem to come up that often on Reddit, or among VR developer communities out there. If we want VR to be successful and survive the first wave of early adopters and go mainstream, I think VR developers need to get agressive about this issue.
Which brings me to Tesla Motors. Let me explain.
Remember last year, when Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla opened every single one of Tesla's patents and shared them with all the other car manufacturers? Everyone first thought he was crazy, and then we remembered that it's Elon Musk. He did it so the electric car market had a better chance to survive. He figured out that his precious patents were worthless if the electric car industry was non-existent. He thought his company had a brighter future by helping out its competitors.
VR developers should steal that idea and do just the same. They should aggressively pursue solving comfortable and immersive locomotion in VR and be encouraged to share their learnings about it. Ideally, some major VR-invested corporation should offer a big cash prize to whoever solves it. The most memorable and immersive VR experiences so far are cockpit-oriented. Eve Valkyrie and Project Cars come to mind, among others. We know those work great because they feel natural to the gamer sitting on a couch or chair. It's no stretch of the imagination to imagine yourself in that situation. For foot locomotion, the teleportation hack is kinda cute, but let's face it, it's not viable in the long run.
So I truly hope that someone takes this idea and runs with it. Build a community around just this very precise challenge and work at it until they solve it, because once it's out of the way, the road ahead is paved in gold.
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That said, AR headsets will have much to gain by going light and nimble. Let's face it, nobody wants to look like a dork in public, so the argument for an unobtrusive solution will be sold at "our lightest yet", wink wink, Apple. But is that also true of VR? I highly doubt it.
Just think of headphones. Earbuds have been around for a good twenty five to thirty years now, and over-ear, "Beats by Dr. Dre" studio style headphones are still selling like crazy. the buds are great for your daily run or on the bus, but when you're at home, you're looking for comfort and you don't really care what you look like. You want to be immersed in the sound, to feel the music better.
Why should visual stimuli be any different? Virtual reality is the home theatre of the future. And a good theatre needs to be pitch black, perfectly dark. I don't see any half-assed AR/VR compromised solution having any success at providing a quality experience of both. Sure, a million kickstarter campaigns will try to get you to pledge on a black AR headset case that protects AND serves as a darkroom for VR home use, but come on. These things always end up leaving you wanting more, don't you agree?
The way I see it is that, just like you have an iPhone and an iPad today and use them for different situations, just like you own both tailored suits and gym pants, you're going to want to have two headsets. A stylish one, untethered (and most likely with a twenty-minute battery) for outside the house, and an absolute beast of a piece of tech for your VR fix come "me time" back at home. And you know what? I don't mind it one bit.
]]>Palmer Luckey’s Oculus has been the VR trendsetter for over four years now. Ever since their original Kickstarter campaign, they have been at the forefront of the VR revival, making us believe again that virtual reality could actually come out of sci-fi and be a real thing. So it was only natural that Oculus be (just) first to market when they introduced the Rift, the first virtual reality product available to the consumer. But was it for the best?
The Oculus Rift’s launch from late last month was a relative hit. There were a few snags about delivery times and a general dissatisfaction from early adopters about communication issues from a PR standpoint. All of those are quite understandable. From both sides. When you’ve pre-ordered a game-changing product four years ago, you’re bound to grow a little impatient at the very end. And from Oculus’ point of view, having such a big product as your first launch could have been much, much worse. Anyways, Zuck picked up the tab for everybody’s shipping charges and now everyone’s happy again. Raving reviews and unprecedented press coverage abound. VR is finally a reality. And it’s absolutely awesome. Luckey’s bunch has stuck the landing after all.
But this week’s launch of the HTCvive, introduced two short weeks after the Rift, seems to want to shuffle the VR deck a little. Although the HTCvive is offered at a full two hundred dollars more than Oculus’ product, it does come with two, very high quality motion controllers and, more importantly, a couple of motion sensors that allow gamers to stand up and move around in the room. Room scale VR is what they call it. “The best and most immersive VR experience on the market.” has been written so many times about the vive in the last 72 hours that I’m starting to feel like Oculus’ time at the top will be even shorter than Holly Holm’s.
Oculus will introduce Touch, their very own motion controllers late this year. But for now, the perception is that HTCvive clearly has the better product. “Cancelling my Rift pre-order for a vive. #Roomscale.” is now what I’ve read on Twitter all week. Did Oculus have the right strategy to rush-launch the Rift to beat the vive to market? Or should they have waited for their motion controllers to be ready to launch a complete product? How much will they sell those for? From what I understand, the package will include two controllers and a second motion sensor to allow room scale VR. If they price it above two hundred dollars, Rift fanboys might start to feel like they’re getting screwed. After all, the HTCvive is still the better product, specs-wise. On top of that, that launch will probably be partially (read completely) obscured by Sony’s PlaystationVR launch in October.
The end result is that Oculus will have launched a half-baked Rift just to beat HTCvive to the punch and that their one chance to shout “me too!” and claim the second spot will be sabotaged by an even more dangerous competitor. A year from now, the market’s perception will be that the vive is the best product on a technical point of view, and that the PlayStationVR has the best games, leaving Oculus stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s gonna take a lot of good marketing to reverse this perception. Good thing that Zuck’s got deep pockets because I feel that he’s gonna need to foot the bill again on this one.
]]>So the Oculus Rift is finally a reality. After almost five years of development, VR is officially reborn. The first Rifts are just now being delivered to, first, the Kickstarter backers, and next, gamers who have pre-ordered them directly from Oculus. In the next weeks, a lot of unboxing porn will find its way onto the internet, posted by anxious gamers who will feel the need to pound their chests and let you know that THEY’ve finally received it.
What you won’t see in these videos, is the two games that come bundled with the Rift. One of them is Eve Valkyrie, a space dogfighting game for which the tech demo has been around for almost as long as the Rift has been in development. The other one is Lucky’s Tale.
At first glance, Lucky’s Tale looks like a very unoriginal and underwhelming way to showcase VR. When I saw its demo, my first thought was: “this is VR’s Mario”. And I didn’t mean it in a good way. I mean, here we are at the dawn of a groundbreaking technological advancement, a revolution in gaming, and they couldn’t find a better way to present it than by repeating what Nintendo had done thirty years ago? Every console has tried to create their Mario. Sega did Sonic. Sony did Crash Bandicoot and more recently, Ratchet & Clank. Isn’t there a new way to make the Rift shine and disrupt the gaming scene? One that takes full advantage of all of the particularities of VR?
The answer is yes. They could have gone with a really intense game with a very high “wow” factor, but they were smart enough to steer clear of it. Actually, scratch that. That part is pretty much covered by Eve Valkyrie. But someone at Oculus was smart enough to realize that something was missing from the launch bundle. Something that felt familiar and comfortable to casual gamers. Something that would make them think: “I know this game. But what is this VR thing?”
You see, by creating a game built on a tried and true recipe, one that every gamer on the planet has experienced, they can better isolate and showcase the one very important difference between flatscreen gaming and VR gaming. If they had chosen to introduce entirely new and different games, it becomes way more difficult for users to compare it with what they’ve played before and therefore identify the added value of VR. On the other hand, if you basically spend an hour with Oculus’ Mario, you can instantly understand how virtual reality is so much more immersive of an experience.
I firmly believe that the decision to bundle the Rift with Lucky’s Tale is not a technological move. It’s a marketing move, and a damn good one. You see, in this millenium, the odds of successfully introducing a new technology to mass market are close to none. VR isn’t just some small iteration of an already familiar way to interact with gadgets. There’s a definite learning curve here. Some people get sick from VR. Just let that sink in for a moment. You’re trying to convince people to spend 600+ dollars on a piece of tech that might make them nauseous from time to time, and for which they can’t really see the benefit without trying it on for a demo. Considering all those obstacles to mass adoption, it’s no wonder that they went down the safe path when selecting the game to bundle with the Rift.
The choice of a third-person POV game is probably not the first option that was considered, but I’m pretty sure that it is much less nauseating to the average gamer, therefore has a higher satisfaction percentage among first time users. If you’re targeting mass adoption, that is a wise decision. I haven’t had the chance to play Lucky’s Tale yet, but from what I’ve seen it masterfully uses the addictive elements of a Mario game (simplicity, fun and replayability) to introduce and highlight the possibilities that virtual reality opens up. We’ll just have to see if the guys at Playful Corp. will be creative enough to build it into a lasting new IP.
]]>2016 is already recognized by anyone and everyone in tech to be the birth year of virtual reality. The year VR finally takes off, where the early adopters can, at long last, put their hands (or eyes) on a VR headset and see what the fuss has been about, ever since Palmer Luckey shocked the tech space in 2012 with a taped prototype that re-ignited so many people’s broken virtual reality dreams. The year where not one, but three major brands; Oculus, HTC and Sony, submit to gamers their solutions to the long-awaited promise of a believable, immersive VR experience.
But if this year is the one where the first consumer products hit the market, next year will be the one where we could see the first signs of mass adoption. I’m predicting that it will come through Sony’s PlayStation VR, almost exclusively.
It’s also been widely acknowledged that virtual reality will first come into our lives through gaming platforms. Of the three being introduced in the next few months, Sony’s PSVR is clearly the most modest offering, tech wise. Oculus’ Rift and especially the HTCvive Pre are wonders of state-of-the-art technology that will wow even the most demanding VR evangelists and connoisseurs. They run on the best hardware and software, and offer the most immersive experiences. But where Sony lacks in uncompromised quality, it more than makes up for on marketing experience, infrastructure and community. Now there’s absolutely no doubt that a Facebook-backed Oculus can compete, and even outrank Sony in deploying a solid infrastructure and that HTC also has a respectable amount of marketing credentials to put forward. But no one can create a better synergy with all three than Sony.
Ever since the launch of the PlayStation 4 back in 2013, Sony has clearly prioritized games over technical execution, which allowed them to keep the PS4 at a decent price point and offer games with mass appeal. They have put games developers in charge of their new console’s success by investing in their relationships with them and giving them the tools to build great games that gamers love. This strategy has already been proven successful in the three short years (actually two and a half years) of the PS4’s existence, simply by measuring the PS4’s worldwide sales next to Microsoft’s XBOX One’s. Sony comes out the clear winner of this particular face-off, so much so that Microsoft is now offering cross-platform compatibility to try to leech off of PlayStation’s head start and try to win back online gamers in the process.
There is absolutely no reason for Sony to change the strategy for the introduction of PSVR, and we already know that’s the way they’re taking it since they have announced about 230 PSVR projects in development, a full six months before launch. they have clearly leveraged their relationships with game devs to convince them to invest time and resources on PSVR, which was probably not very difficult, let’s be honest. When introducing a totally new technology, nobody knows what will stick and what won’t. With 230 titles coming PSVR’s way, they have chosen to let the users decide in what direction it’s going to go. It’s a model borrowed from Apple’s Appstore: give them the tools and the infrastructure, and let the dev’s duke it out. The cream will inevitably rise to the top.
Oculus’ Rift and HTCvive’s Pre both cater to the same niche of early adopters, a very small market when compared to the general gaming and entertainment community covered by the already very successful PlayStation franchise. A market of geeks who aren’t afraid to perform open-heart surgery on a 1500$ PC to boost CPU performance by three percent. They are a necessary step and a loyal bunch, but they are anything but the mainstream. Most people are looking for a plug-and-play solution that won’t need to be constantly upgraded to work with the latest Call of Duty release. They consider gameplay before graphics and probably won’t ever complain about it if they haven’t put on a better quality headset before.
Sony is blessed in that way, to have not one but two competitors. Both of the other guys’ focus is going to be mainly on each other, which will lead them to engage in a “platform war” the way XBOX and PlayStation have for years now. And with Microsoft going the AR road with Hololens, and being still years away from a consumer-ready product, the path is clear for Sony to take the market fast and not leave much behind.
Of course, Sony probably won’t be able to retain the top spot in the VR game for many years.VR will diversify and spread in many more fields while Sony’s focus will rightfully stay on gaming. It will be interesting to see if Sony ends up being the one who breaks the window to let everyone out while perishing in the fire. Mass adoption of VR might just be Sony’s last meaningful contribution to the world before slowly going to sleep. The PlayStation franchise has dominated the gaming space for twenty years now and history has shown that disruptive technological advancements usually claim the champ’s belt. Let’s all just hope I’m wrong about this one.
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