What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You

Re:What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You by beloch on Monday March 31, 2014 @01:21AM (#7499784)

Argument: VR is a non-starter because it only works with gaming PC's, which only uber-geeks still own and normal people think of as being just for work.

Response: What is an Xbox, if not a proprietary gaming PC? Sony is working on VR for the PS4. Meanwhile, Valve is trying to bring linux gaming PC's to the living room. This stuff is not going to be limited to work computers. Eventually, with a wireless connection or a sufficiently powerful mobile computer (i.e. Your phone in a few years), VR will be available wherever you feel like putting on a headset.

Argument: VR is only going to attract the hardcore gamers, and they don't trust Facebook, so nobody's going to buy.

Response: Oculus is just one of several big firms currently making major pushes into VR-land. Sony is another and you can bet MS won't be far behind.

Argument: Presence doesn't work if not everything is perfect, so VR is doomed.

Response: What do you have when you play a game through a monitor? Imperfect presence. You interact with a virtual world through a window. You frequently walk around in that world as a humanoid avatar speaking to other humanoids and you completely forget you're looking through a window into their world. Imperfect presence works. It even worked back when you could see pixels the size of your avatar's head. VR simply puts your head through the window and lets you look around. Why didn't it take off sooner then? Up until now, 2D windows had clearly superior lag properties and limited resolution meant things looked better on smaller displays. It's also pretty wasteful to blow pixels on peripheral vision, so we didn't bother when pixels were expensive. VR headsets don't have to be perfect to take off. They just have to be as good as 2D displays in the ways that matter.

P.S. Bluray cannot be considered dead until a viable alternative arises that addresses its market: Audio/Video-philes. This is a niche market, but a stable one.

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Re:What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You by k__ on Monday March 31, 2014 @01:58AM (#7499891)

"P.S. Bluray cannot be considered dead until a viable alternative arises that addresses its market: Audio/Video-philes. This is a niche market, but a stable one."

I don't think Bluray was developed for this market. It was developed to conquer the DVD, but now this niche market is all it has left.

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Re:What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You by platz on Monday March 31, 2014 @01:59AM (#7499893)

My gaming days are mostly over, but all of the shooter days paled in comparison to playing flight sims (Falcon 4) with a head-tracking mechanism. Unfortunately the simulation crowd isn't exactly like the gaming crowd.

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Re:What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You by eli_gottlieb on Monday March 31, 2014 @04:35AM (#7500331)

So what about the following?

Argument: VR will be a niche market because most styles of gaming have diminishing returns on increased immersion. After all, even with continuous rises in graphics quality in the hardest of the hardcore market, the mass market seems to have refocused its preference-attention on game design around the time mass mobile gaming became a thing and game consoles started costing $400.

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Re:What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You by beloch on Monday March 31, 2014 @02:52PM (#7503382)

AAA PC/console titles are out-grossing Hollywood and continue to grow every year. This explosive growth continued through the last console generation despite the high cost of the Xbox360 and PS3. A bigger danger for console makers is hardware saturation of the market. If gamers don't see compelling reasons to update to the new consoles, we could have another 1983 on our hands. VR, besides offering a potential edge in the console wars, could present a way to combat saturation. This is no doubt why Sony is pursuing VR so aggressively.

The mobile market is still comparatively tiny in terms of gross, but it must be pointed out that it is not incompatible with VR. Current handsets are not powerful enough to support VR but that will change in a few years. The question is, how much immersion do mobile users really want?

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