Virtual Reality in Games

The race for the next step in gaming tech and innovation has been going on since the first digital medium of play, which is still hotly debated to this day as to which one was the first(the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, and so on); we’ve seen the infrared guns, the Nintendo Virtual Boy, the Wii motion controllers, and now… virtual reality.

What is Virtual Reality(VR)?

Virtual reality refers to technology that creates further immersion by placing you inside a virtual space; by making your point of view, your X-Y-Z a playable element in an artificial environment, giving you greater levels of immersion. This has been traditionally done by taking advantage of infrared technology. The first example can be seen with the gun controller that came boxed in with the all-too-familiar game Duck Hunt for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

The gun that came with the box contained a special infrared camera of sorts that picked up certain colours when triggered. If it detected the colour of a duck, then it would have been registered as a hit. To the player, however,  the experience of it all turned into a real duck hunt shootout. Sometimes there would be misdetections and such errors, but for the most part the experience was sound even for such dated technology.

Duck hunt at the time is similar to something like this:

Cool. Where can I get some VR today?

Consumer VR technology is becoming greater in demand, and so the cost of production has been dropping severely in just a matter of the most recent of months. At the forefront we have  Microsoft’s Kinect and the Kickstarted VR startup Oculus with their Oculus Rift.

Oculus Rift

The Oculus Rift is a low-latency virtual reality headset, which essentially allows you to fully place yourself in any three dimensional gaming universe, given that the developer supports it.  You can step inside your game of Call of Duty, and instead of using your mouse to control the camera viewing angle, the sensors in the headset detect and apply the changes in movement to what you see, given you the illusion of control within the game, otherwise known as virtual reality. Freaking awesome.

Microsoft’s Kinect

The Kinect operates a bit differently from the Oculus Rift, and sort of absolves the need for a headset by adopting a high-powered camera to watch and analyze the player’s positions and movements, and have them reflected in game. This would be good theoretically for third person games, but input lag from the Kinect leaves a lot to be desired. The Kinect is good, however, for keeping kids active while remaining indoors, plus it does leave the door open to all kinds of new game design innovations. We’ve already seen call-out commands used in several shooters, and I can definitely say that we’re not done with the Kinect. A new piece of hardware that can take in a different type of input, yet can be used alongside a conventional controller? I don’t think Kinect is going anywhere just yet.

Why haven’t I been seeing more of virtual reality before?

Because VR was such an expensive technology it wasn’t in the financial interests of publishers to produce a feature in games that hardly anyone could even afford or have access to. The were no commercial peripherals for it either. But since the gaming industry has gotten exponentially more competitive, these game makers are always searching for ways to one up one another. Virtual reality is the next step. And with Kinect and Oculus Rift, virtual reality in homes is becoming more of a reality and much less a fantasy. The question is… who’s going to do it first?

The REAL question, however, is actually who’s going to do it WELL the first? Whoever can pull that off will win the market over for a great deal of time, for that game release and all others associated with that developer and publisher. The race is on.