I wrote last time about how mixed reality (MR) might be better for everyday augmentation of my crazy life, and virtual reality (VR) would be better for lazy days. After another week of thinking, hearing, speaking, dwelling, learning, absorbing, and immersing, I'm beginning to think I'm obsessed. In my lunch circle, I bring up the subject so often that my friends have dubbed me the "VR girl". I can't help it if I've been doing rapid learning and I'm really excited to share and process what I've learned!
Today I want to return to the impressions I had during some of my first VR experiences.
The first time I threw myself into VR was in the 6th floor expo hall at PAX Prime this year, playtesting a student game where it seemed like the goal was just exploration--in a very simplistic, child-like, and limited world. This is all in comparison to 2D video games, mind you. I didn't have anything else to compare with. Of course my graphics and physics standards are high. My favorite entertainment industry has been perfecting the standards of those two areas in every game for the majority of my life.
I don't actually know which headset I tested the game on--but my guess is that it was an educational model of the Samsung Gear VR. I say educational model because it was blue--not white like all the marketing photos--and the student showing off his game slid his phone into it before I could play it.
I put the headset on and was met with the colorful, childish world where the trees were too vibrant a green, and bushes that were too vibrant a purple. My knee-jerk reaction was to think "gah, I know this is a student game, but jeez, I feel like graphics have gone a little backwards in history." (It should be noted that this was also my first reaction to Borderlands, which has since become my favorite game.) But in this sense, I was definitely not impressed.
I felt a controller being pushed into my hands. Instantly I knew it was an Xbox One controller, and my brain clicked on with the very normal expectation that my new avatar would move like I expected when I took hold of the familiar joysticks. It didn't...
I pushed my right thumbstick to look around the world, and realized it was deactivated. The developers were forcing me to look around the world with my head and neck.
Fine. I did.
My eyes met their too-colorful world through an obvious curved lens, and I found I was on an island floating in space. So of course I immediately tried running over to the left side to see what was below. But what I soon found out was that the deactivation of that right thumbstick meant more than just being required to look around with my head and neck. It meant that turning while moving was much more difficult. I used the left thumbstick to move my avatar forward to the edge, but when my head snapped back forward (as your neck tends to do when it gets tired), all of a sudden, my avatar changed direction and moved back towards the overly green trees that were in my initial field of view when I put the headset on. My head movement had determined the direction my feet moved.
It was in that moment when I passed overall judgement on the game I was in. I didn't like it. I wanted to take the headset off and move normally again. But I'm one of those people who likes to give things a chance once I've committed to it. So I kept playing.
The movement that I so disliked is what we call "strafing". Think of a top-down video game, which only gives you a single joystick or a D-pad for controlling your feet, limiting your movement to eight directions only: up the screen, down the screen, left, right, and the 45 degree angles in between. You were lucky if you could hold that 45 degree diagonal, because it made moving around so much smoother. That's what this student VR game movement felt like. I felt like an 8-bit avatar being driven around poorly by a person new to games. I quickly learned to move by turning my head and then moving to navigate around the world semi-smoothly. But you don't turn to the right in the real world by turning your head in that direction first. And you don't always face the direction you're eyes are looking either. It was awkward, and it was uncomfortable.
I traveled through the small world quickly, trying to ignore the strafing movement, and trying to accept it as a truth of the world I was supposed to be in. When I got to their little spiral slide that was growing out of the side of the cliff, I had to keep my head turned to the right for so long to descend, I ended up toddling from foot to foot in place, so that my neck didn't get tired. I'm sure that was entertaining for my sister and friend, who were watching and making sure I didn't toddle myself out into the busy aisle but it was just one more thing preventing me from integrating into the world.
Apart from the challenges of movement in VR from this game, the only other thing I noticed was how current VR headsets don't address the value of peripheral vision in real life. I'm normally a glasses-wearer, so blurry peripherals don't bother me at all. Just turn your head, and you can see that blurry thing moving just outside your field of view. But in VR, your field of view is much smaller. Imagine putting safety caps on your glasses, completely cutting off your view of anything slightly to the side of you. Blind spots become much bigger, and you suddenly feel less aware of the spaces directly around the sides of your body.
But your brain adapts. It doesn't take my brain long to adjust to wearing glasses and having certain things in focus, and certain things out of focus. It just deemphasizes the value of the images in my peripheral vision, except for in instances of quick movement. Instead of trusting my peripheral vision to track and identify said movement, my brain makes me move the item into my glasses field of view for more focused confirmation. I experience the opposite effect when I put on contact lenses...and admittedly, that view is much more disorienting. I definitely feel like I'm looking through a fishbowl for a good minute after I get my contacts in. But then my brain kicks in, and I can trust my peripheral view again.
But back to VR.
The biggest challenge of VR is to suspend a player's disbelief long enough for them to accept the truths of their new world as those of their own world. This is the challenge of anyone seeking to throw someone's imagination and being into another place, be they authors, film-makers, or game-makers.
I don't think Samsung Gear VR does the best job at solving the hardware problem of sight within a virtual world, but they do solve the problem of making VR hardware cheap and accessible to the masses by integrating with a computer that most people can afford: a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Making it more accessible to students like the students I met at PAX is a very good thing, so I expect the students to work with what they can get, and explore challenges that are solvable by them.
I appreciate that they did not focus on making realistic graphics to suspend my disbelief. I can get over poor graphics. I expect better graphics from game teams who have artists, from game teams who have the time to explore the challenges related to realistic graphics and lighting within a virtual space that your first-person avatar should have unrestricted access to exploring.
The aspect of that challenge I think those student developers needed to explore was, "How can we make movement within virtual space as natural and as life-like as possible?" Samsung VR has given us one solution to the "How can we make sight as natural as possible?" question, so how can we leverage their solution to best solve the movement problem? But I don't think they even thought about addressing that problem. When I expressed my discomfort with the movement in their game, the answer I got from them was "Yeah, we usually recommend that you use a swivel chair to play our game, but the school said there wasn't going to be enough space in the booth for that."
I understand that their goals were probably limited to exploring physics within the game, and not much else. But my question then becomes, why not explore those things in 2D and do them well? Why choose a medium to display your world in, but not take on the new challenges that the new medium offers? Why pick VR and avoid the movement challenge with a swivel chair solution?
I'm being too harsh. These are still students. They're learning to experiment, and they just didn't manage my expectations well before I put on the headset. But as a result, my first VR experience was less than impressive, and idiotically, I let that experience form my opinion of the state of VR as a whole.
Boy was I wrong.
I'll get into my second experience with VR next time. That second experience was what threw me into the passionate, excited, rapid-learning phase I'm in right now. It's that second experience that turned me into VR girl.
Today I want to return to the impressions I had during some of my first VR experiences.
The first time I threw myself into VR was in the 6th floor expo hall at PAX Prime this year, playtesting a student game where it seemed like the goal was just exploration--in a very simplistic, child-like, and limited world. This is all in comparison to 2D video games, mind you. I didn't have anything else to compare with. Of course my graphics and physics standards are high. My favorite entertainment industry has been perfecting the standards of those two areas in every game for the majority of my life.
I don't actually know which headset I tested the game on--but my guess is that it was an educational model of the Samsung Gear VR. I say educational model because it was blue--not white like all the marketing photos--and the student showing off his game slid his phone into it before I could play it.
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| Credit: Samsung |
I put the headset on and was met with the colorful, childish world where the trees were too vibrant a green, and bushes that were too vibrant a purple. My knee-jerk reaction was to think "gah, I know this is a student game, but jeez, I feel like graphics have gone a little backwards in history." (It should be noted that this was also my first reaction to Borderlands, which has since become my favorite game.) But in this sense, I was definitely not impressed.
I felt a controller being pushed into my hands. Instantly I knew it was an Xbox One controller, and my brain clicked on with the very normal expectation that my new avatar would move like I expected when I took hold of the familiar joysticks. It didn't...
I pushed my right thumbstick to look around the world, and realized it was deactivated. The developers were forcing me to look around the world with my head and neck.
Fine. I did.
My eyes met their too-colorful world through an obvious curved lens, and I found I was on an island floating in space. So of course I immediately tried running over to the left side to see what was below. But what I soon found out was that the deactivation of that right thumbstick meant more than just being required to look around with my head and neck. It meant that turning while moving was much more difficult. I used the left thumbstick to move my avatar forward to the edge, but when my head snapped back forward (as your neck tends to do when it gets tired), all of a sudden, my avatar changed direction and moved back towards the overly green trees that were in my initial field of view when I put the headset on. My head movement had determined the direction my feet moved.
It was in that moment when I passed overall judgement on the game I was in. I didn't like it. I wanted to take the headset off and move normally again. But I'm one of those people who likes to give things a chance once I've committed to it. So I kept playing.
The movement that I so disliked is what we call "strafing". Think of a top-down video game, which only gives you a single joystick or a D-pad for controlling your feet, limiting your movement to eight directions only: up the screen, down the screen, left, right, and the 45 degree angles in between. You were lucky if you could hold that 45 degree diagonal, because it made moving around so much smoother. That's what this student VR game movement felt like. I felt like an 8-bit avatar being driven around poorly by a person new to games. I quickly learned to move by turning my head and then moving to navigate around the world semi-smoothly. But you don't turn to the right in the real world by turning your head in that direction first. And you don't always face the direction you're eyes are looking either. It was awkward, and it was uncomfortable.
I traveled through the small world quickly, trying to ignore the strafing movement, and trying to accept it as a truth of the world I was supposed to be in. When I got to their little spiral slide that was growing out of the side of the cliff, I had to keep my head turned to the right for so long to descend, I ended up toddling from foot to foot in place, so that my neck didn't get tired. I'm sure that was entertaining for my sister and friend, who were watching and making sure I didn't toddle myself out into the busy aisle but it was just one more thing preventing me from integrating into the world.
Apart from the challenges of movement in VR from this game, the only other thing I noticed was how current VR headsets don't address the value of peripheral vision in real life. I'm normally a glasses-wearer, so blurry peripherals don't bother me at all. Just turn your head, and you can see that blurry thing moving just outside your field of view. But in VR, your field of view is much smaller. Imagine putting safety caps on your glasses, completely cutting off your view of anything slightly to the side of you. Blind spots become much bigger, and you suddenly feel less aware of the spaces directly around the sides of your body.
But your brain adapts. It doesn't take my brain long to adjust to wearing glasses and having certain things in focus, and certain things out of focus. It just deemphasizes the value of the images in my peripheral vision, except for in instances of quick movement. Instead of trusting my peripheral vision to track and identify said movement, my brain makes me move the item into my glasses field of view for more focused confirmation. I experience the opposite effect when I put on contact lenses...and admittedly, that view is much more disorienting. I definitely feel like I'm looking through a fishbowl for a good minute after I get my contacts in. But then my brain kicks in, and I can trust my peripheral view again.
But back to VR.
The biggest challenge of VR is to suspend a player's disbelief long enough for them to accept the truths of their new world as those of their own world. This is the challenge of anyone seeking to throw someone's imagination and being into another place, be they authors, film-makers, or game-makers.
I don't think Samsung Gear VR does the best job at solving the hardware problem of sight within a virtual world, but they do solve the problem of making VR hardware cheap and accessible to the masses by integrating with a computer that most people can afford: a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Making it more accessible to students like the students I met at PAX is a very good thing, so I expect the students to work with what they can get, and explore challenges that are solvable by them.
I appreciate that they did not focus on making realistic graphics to suspend my disbelief. I can get over poor graphics. I expect better graphics from game teams who have artists, from game teams who have the time to explore the challenges related to realistic graphics and lighting within a virtual space that your first-person avatar should have unrestricted access to exploring.
The aspect of that challenge I think those student developers needed to explore was, "How can we make movement within virtual space as natural and as life-like as possible?" Samsung VR has given us one solution to the "How can we make sight as natural as possible?" question, so how can we leverage their solution to best solve the movement problem? But I don't think they even thought about addressing that problem. When I expressed my discomfort with the movement in their game, the answer I got from them was "Yeah, we usually recommend that you use a swivel chair to play our game, but the school said there wasn't going to be enough space in the booth for that."
I understand that their goals were probably limited to exploring physics within the game, and not much else. But my question then becomes, why not explore those things in 2D and do them well? Why choose a medium to display your world in, but not take on the new challenges that the new medium offers? Why pick VR and avoid the movement challenge with a swivel chair solution?
I'm being too harsh. These are still students. They're learning to experiment, and they just didn't manage my expectations well before I put on the headset. But as a result, my first VR experience was less than impressive, and idiotically, I let that experience form my opinion of the state of VR as a whole.
Boy was I wrong.
I'll get into my second experience with VR next time. That second experience was what threw me into the passionate, excited, rapid-learning phase I'm in right now. It's that second experience that turned me into VR girl.
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