“So do you guys have, um, any screenshots of this stuff?” I asked, in what was clearly the most professional possible way after getting a demo of EVE: Valkyrie from the Oculus Rift team at GDC.
Of course the game is by CCP, and CCP is the one that gave me the press demo appointment, so the Oculus team members all shrugged at the question and said they’d get back to me.
There are screenshots of Valkyrie! I never officially got them, but they look like this:
I needed them because that’s a lot cooler than what you look like playing the game. When you’re playing the game, you look like this:
Ha ha, look at those Oculus Rift dorks! Though I did happen to catch the rare snap of what appears to be a non-white dude wearing the Oculus Rift, which if you believe tumblr is a rare sight in the wild. For one brief moment, I was a woman wearing an Oculus Rift. Whoa.
I tried Valkyrie on Thursday, and I was struggling with how to write anything very substantial about the experience because the demo was so short. There was a long line to try it, so it’s reasonable that it was a short experience in order to keep everything moving. But from the perspective of a player, it was over too quickly. It was a lot like a theme park roller coaster that way, so I guess it’s good that the worst thing I can really say about the Valkyrie demo is I wanted it to be longer.
In EVE: Valkyrie, I’m the pilot of a space fighter. If I look down, I can see controls, and then my feet. If I look up, I can see the universe. If I die, there’s a small break while I’m “recloned,” and then I can start again. I’ve written before that I occasionally struggle with simulator sickness, but I didn’t feel that during the Valkyrie demo. It’s possible that this is primarily because the demo was short, but the new Oculus does a pretty good job of stabilizing the visual field and corresponding my head motions to what I see in the viewer.
It’s a dizzying and exciting experience. It’s going to tie in with the EVE Online universe, much like Dust 514 before it, offering a new experience for people who want to experience that world in a more interactive way than the notorious “spreadsheets in space” MMO provides.
It’s an absolute killer app for the Oculus Rift.
It’s also probably one of the only really viable uses of the darn thing. There are a lot of first-person simulations coming out for the Oculus but many of them have the same fundamental problem. Your avatar is walking, but your ass is sitting. This may not seem like an insurmountable problem – we play games in first person sitting down all the time. But the situation feels different when you embody an avatar that’s doing something that’s different from what you’re doing. It takes some getting used to. Having a seated avatar is a good solution: you pilot a space ship, or a giant robot, and so does the person you embody, a smooth one-to-one.
And just while I was thinking, I can’t see too many other great uses for this device, and I was struggling with how to write anything else interesting….
and it’s like… what? It’s not April first yet is it?
It’s funny because I had a conversation with people after trying Valkyrie that amounted to: well, Oculus is an interesting toy, but it’ll never really take off until someone finds some kind of non-game use for it. And now Mark Zuckerberg is all “Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor …” which seems to be proposing just that, all the non-game uses. And then Notch is all “Facebook creeps me out” so later guys and Wall Street was like noooooooo and the comments sections of things are nothing but animated gifs.
So obviously you care what a writer from Tap-Repeatedly has to say about all this. Well, I’ve played with Rift and I’m on Facebook, so…
I think cashing out for Facebook money was probably a smart move for the Rift team. I mean that may seem shallow, but who doesn’t want two billion dollars? And they’ve done a pretty good job handling their affairs so far.
As for the device itself, well…
So in the real world there’s this annoying, but still-regretfully-impossible-to-breach divide between “gamers” and people who just play games. The ESA wants for us to believe that the average gamer is age thirty and that forty-five percent of gamers are women. And I think that this is technically true statistically, but not as a matter of self-identification. If you asked a lot of women my age if they “are gamers” they will say “no.” They just play hours of whatever casual game is popular and on their smartphone. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and I am not judging them in any way. But that device that they’re holding is, to them, their phone, even if its primary function turns out to be three daily hours of Candy Crush Saga. On the flipside I am a HARDCORE GAMER YO and there have been plenty of weeks where I was too busy to be a hardcore gamer and the only reason I booted up the XBox 360 was because I can watch Netflix on it. What I’m getting at here is: there’s a difference between the reason someone buys a device, and what their usage pattern with the device turns into. What matters here is a crossover between consumer perception of a device, and perception of themselves: ie, am I a consumer who buys this device?
So if I’m a gamer, then, heck yeah, I will buy Rift, because I want to be a fighter pilot in space.
If I’m a non-gamer (ie someone who doesn’t self-identify as a gamer) I’m not sure why I’d want to get Rift to do those non-gamer tasks. That’s the perception that Facebook is going to have to overcome if it wants to put these in more homes for non-gamer uses: Oculus’s legacy as a gaming device.
Not only that, but, you can’t really multi-task from the Rift. Or at least it’s very hard to do so. You are embodied in a virtual space, and that space requires your full attention. In many ways it requires more attention than real life, so you don’t lose track of your body in the real world while you’re in a virtual one. Ironically enough, “checking your Facebook” has become the media shorthand for the thing you’re doing when you’re multi-tasking and supposed to be doing something else. So can I check my Facebook while I’m on the Rift? I probably won’t want to. I’ll probably fall down. And though I can check my phone for a couple of minutes and then get back to what I was doing, putting that headset on requires a level of commitment.
I do understand Facebook’s place in this. Social networks have been around for a long time on the internet – we just didn’t call them that until more recently. Teenagers seem to be gravitating these days toward tumblr, which is the new LiveJournal, which was the new Myspace. Facebook is nice and all, but your families are on it now, which makes it less cool for teens. Anyone who wanted to have a Facebook already has one; lots of people who don’t want them anymore have quit Facebook. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for the social network to grow in its current form. Maybe it’s just trying to figure out what it could be before it becomes a fossil.
I see an alternate future for the Oculus, a future in which it was an incredibly successful consumer device. That would have involved it taking the same path that made the nascent internet what it is today. It would have involved the content that allowed VHS to kill Betamax in the 80s. It would have involved the type of media that’s slowly propelling the adoption of ebooks over paper formats. But every Oculus in the wild right now is a devkit, so there’s still time to use it for interesting things before Facebook tries to lock it down. More specifically: there’s still time to use it for porn. Whoever discovers the way to easily distribute porn will “win” VR. I’m not sure that that will be Facebook.
But hey, I’m no futurist, so I’m prepared to be surprised. John Carmack seems to believe in the device, and the device itself is pretty good. Is it good enough that everyone will want one, the way everyone seemed to want a Facebook? That will be the question.
In the mean time, the space ship game is pretty cool.
Email the author of this post at aj@tap-repeatedly.com.
I guess I’m a VR bigot: I honestly can’t see the appeal of wearing one of those ridiculous things on your head. Indeed, my first thought upon seeing those dorks sitting there was “what a bunch of dorks! And how about those dorks waiting in line, waiting to be even dorkier dorks.” 🙂
I do agree that a space combat game or something similar is the coolest use for such a device. But then I’ve never even used Facebook, so that likely makes my opinions doubly irrelevant.
I’m not very “good” at Facebook. I almost never use it personally, and the Tap FB page reflects my ineptitude. More than that, I’m first to admit that the company’s general disdain for privacy concerns me – though I’d have been no more thrilled if Google had bought Oculus.
From the Oculan perspective, as AJ notes, this is a great thing. I, too, would like two billion dollars (Facebook! Tap-Repeatedly can be bought, you know!), and while so far as I can tell the company’s handling its money fine, I also suspect that OculusVR is going to need more than one large infusion of cash before this rollercoaster is done. There’s simply a lot of variables that the technology still needs to get right.
I’ll buy an Oculus Rift. Gregg and the gang had mixed feelings about it at Eurogamer (I was trapped in line outside with the plebs and foreigners). We’ll have to see how the tech turns out, and whether it takes off.
AJ’s point about porn is no joke, either. New media succeed when the skin merchants adopt it; there’s little point in denial. Where all this is going, however, I just don’t know. But I know for sure I’d rather Facebook isn’t keeping a log of my visits to shegoatloving.com.
“Whoever discovers the way to easily distribute porn will “win” VR.”
It’s funny because if you look at porn *gaming* you are looking at a small, depressing field in which all games fall under one of two categories:
1) visual novels that can’t even afford animated CGs
2) “games” with dropdown menu selections and clipping issues
Adapting to VR is the least of its problems.
(there might be a small niche market for “zoomable” 3D porn in VR with prerendered models and/or multi-angle camera shots but it’s probably not going to be enough to sell VR units)
@AV Well, I didn’t say I had the answer there as to how to make it distributed. But I’m not actually looking here at the cross-section of porn and gaming. I’m looking at the cross-section of porn and VR. It probably won’t be a game in the traditional sense.
You’re right of course, AV (welcome to Tap-Repeatedly, by the way) – games are a good example of a medium that didn’t need porn to succeed. Video and film, however, did. The internet did. Streaming media did. Comics did not. So it’s untrue to claim that every new media needs porn, or rather that every new media only becomes a Thing once there’s porn on it, but I can imagine that something like VR is going to have a pretty large red light contingent.
VR’s challenges are technical and social. Technically VR is hard to do. Holodecks are a long way off. Oculus Rift type devices represent the first realistic, consumer-level option, and even they are primitive compared to the ideal of true VR. Still, Oculus and some of the other players have shown that the technology, at least, is a surmountable obstacle. We always assumed that.
The social one is more complicated. For one thing there’s the doofus factor of wearing these devices. But the social backlash implications are far more significant. “Video games are more immersive than…” was and is the rallying cry of the ban-it-all crowd. Soon there’ll be tech that’s more immersive than the traditional video game. Assuming the technology continues to progress, it’s not long before the Oculuses of the world can stimulate more than just two senses, and that’s when all hell will break loose.
I wrote about this speculatively years ago, and find myself wondering about it now – the threshold beyond which VR is going to be fighting regulation and raising alarming philosophical questions. We’re still a long way off from that, but the pornography angle is certainly going to be a major part of it.
Generally speaking, I agree with AJ. For VR to really take off, at a TV or microwave level, it’s going to have to go beyond games (and beyond porn) into full-spectrum utility. Facebook’s purchase of Oculus suggests that they see potential for that to happen, but there are many unanswered questions.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen (unlicensed) porn games in development for Rift. I’m at work so no way am I going to try to find them again, but…you know. Distribution may be a question, of course.
I am still really dubious about Rift, and VR in general. I got to play with an HMD a fair amount in grad school and it was kind of terrible. We have a Rift here at work (that we don’t really do anything with yet) and wearing it, at least, is better than the old stuff, but I still find it uncomfortable and have yet to see much indication of anyone doing anything with it that I’d get a lot of extra from doing with a headset instead of a TV. For one thing, using a headset of any kind has always felt super awkward to me with glasses. That’s…potentially a problem for a large portion of the population, right?
As much as I’m a devotee of the starfighter sim, I’m not convinced that Valkyrie would be a killer app for Rift – not because it isn’t good, because maybe it is, but because it’s still a hard sell. These days, a “killer app” needs to move millions and millions of copies. I just don’t think that that genre has anywhere near the market penetration anymore, least of all for a device that people don’t already have, and I suspect the type of people who have made Star Citizen‘s fundraising so successful (myself included) will look at this “sim” using a controller of all things and think, “Where’s my keyboard?”
I can imagine Rift making a difference for horror games and such. I’ve seen some let’s play of Slender: The Arrival‘s Rift port and I feel like I would find it more frightening if it were in my face, but I’m unlikely to buy a device on that basis.
As to what Facebook does with it – I think it has more potential there, but I kind of suspect it will more likely hit the uncanny valley that the Kinect does, where the transition from watching something on your TV or computer screen to watching it on your face, without the added sensory input of “being there”, will make people just feel silly and dumb. And yeah, I’d be bothered that I can’t multitask. I think they’d have to make these…video feeds, or whatever…some proprietary format that only works on the Rift, or else people would just watch them on their computers. I mean, I’m all for being able to consult a doctor live from my living room, but I’d much rather do it through Skype or something than Rift.
@Dix That bit about feeling silly doing stuff is pretty true. I think getting over the “feeling silly” barrier will be a problem for Rift adoption for sure. Like you’re wearing a box on your head, and, you’ve seen the photos of what that looks like from the outside. But maybe it’s something that can become normative and what people are used to; right now it’s not very… stylish.
@AJ I’d once again point to the Kinect in this case. I know they do very different things, but both face the same “I feel like an idiot using this” hurdle…and the Kinect, while probably more fundamentally idiot-feeling (and frustrating) at least didn’t literally weigh on you like a…like a thing you’re wearing on your head!
I also wonder how many people will (erroneously, I suppose) think of Rift as “like 3D”. I know a lot of people, gamers and otherwise, who feel inconvenienced by the 3D glasses you have to wear to go see a movie…I wonder what would convince them to put on a Rift, even if they don’t correlate the two in a “3D sucks, as it turns out, so why is this any good?” manner.
@Dix
It should be understand that when I say anything about XBox/Kinect etc anymore that I work for Microsoft now.
Be that as it may, regarding Kinect: Kinect has a lot of games where you feel goofy playing them, like the old Kinect Adventures, and that’s a party game and it’s totally intentional. Same with Dance Central etc. It’s a way to cut loose and the fact that Adventures takes your picture when you’re doing silly stuff is part of the experience.
At GDC during the Xbox One demo the demonstrator showed how the newer Kinect can do something a lot more subtle now, like, for example, even if you are sitting down, touch your temple to activate a special vision mode in a game, and the Kinect can read that. Or touch your throat to activate push-to-talk, etc, basically using your body like another button. So there are some more subtle functional uses of it that people don’t necessarily capitalize on yet and might in the future. I don’t know if this will take off among devs or not but it’s possible!
To be sure, I think there were other issues with the Kinect besides just the “looking stupid” factor – and you’re right, if you were playing something like Dance Central or whatever, that probably wasn’t a big deal. Whether or not the new Kinect takes off is going to be partially tied into how the Xbox One does, which is kind of hard to figure out at the moment, actually, because as I Google around there seems to be some confusion about what sales are/were, especially around Titanfall – and, of course, the comments just devolve into console fanboys shouting at each other.
I have read a few places (anecdotally) that the Kinect’s current functionality for the One leaves something to be desired. But if someone can figure out how to really blow the lid off developing a game for it, that could change. That’s hard, because gestural interfaces just generally aren’t very ergonomic or user-friendly. Small things like you mention may be a different story, but I wonder how much of that kind of stuff would come off as “using the device because it’s kind of here and we had to justify it somehow”.
Microsoft should really be pushing the Kinect as a separate device that just happens to be compatible with their consoles. I think the things the Kinect does that aren’t about games or interfaces, generally speaking, are more compelling than what it does as a controller-surrogate.
The strategy right now MS side for the Kinect packin is totally different. This is all public-facing stuff said at GDC, so: the idea behind the packin is that developers can feel confident developing a game that leverages the Kinect features knowing, on the One, that it WILL always be there. If you look at it that way the bundling makes sense, but lots of people are still seeing it as something that should be separate or optional. I think you’re right that it’ll take developers embracing it to really make it shine though!
I think up there with “people don’t want to look dorky” is “people are lazy”. People don’t want to have to strap some giant apparatus to their head to get a great gaming experience. They already moan about having to wear 3D glasses to watch a 3D film. I just can’t see people actually using these things in their own homes. Until this kind of technology is developed into something much smaller and less obtrusive, I really can’t see it taking off in a big way, no matter how impressive the technology behind it.
This is the cue for the time-traveller from 2025, when it’s inconceivable for any home to have less than 3 Rifts, to swoop in and make a devastating jibe.