is VR the doom of modern video games?

This thing has me concerned. Could it replace the video games played on PC, that now we have to use VR rather than our big screen TV.

While I support change and innovation, I would like the games to stay on TV. I have spent a long time working to development on the PC. And now it's gone, no longer valid, now what, I have to start from new, like I never done it.

 

VR is unusable for the majority of game genres. It has a very limited and gimmicky scope, and that's simply an unsolved hardware limitation. Even going up to 1000fps does not remove motion sickness entirely (probably caps out around 250fps), so until motion sickness is a solved thing (probably requiring more hardware to fool the senses) then it will remain limited.

That doesn't make VR bad. It makes it limited to what suits VR.

 

No. I've played and developed with Vive + Rift/Touches for several months and VR will not replace desktop games for a long time and in some type genres/games never. I still play both type games equally. VR gameplay is kinda different from desktop, mainly 1st person oriented.

 

Yeah it's very much sort of it's own category that doesn't cross over that well. Not a bad thing.

 

VR is not a good solution for most games. For VR to succeed, it needs some kind of new game to justify the need for VR hardware. So far, that has not happened.

 

I agree with the other posters that VR is not going to supplant traditional gaming for a long, long time, if ever. I have a Vive, Rift, and PSVR and have attended a VR meetup for a couple of years and have experienced a lot of content.

If you just look at top selling recent games, none of them would be appropriate for VR. Traditional FPS games like Battlefield, COD, Doom, Overwatch, Destiny, etc are too fast-paced and would cause instant motion sickness for too many players. Even in made for VR games like RIGS, some people can't play for more than about 60 seconds. There are VR versions of Minecraft, and guess what, motion sickness is very common.

Sports games and RTS games pretty much need to be played from an overhead perspective. Which honestly might be *better* suited for VR in terms of comfort (looking down at a playfield from a birds eye perspective), but then it becomes a little pointless as a VR experience.

I don't think VR is very suited to long game sessions just yet. You can get eye strain and the comfort level of the headsets isn't quite there yet. I imagine that aspect of VR will change though.

VR is better for short experiences where your character doesn't move around that much. 10 minute sessions where you shoot stuff or interact with things using one-to-one motion work better. Title like The Heist and Arkham VR are some of the better ones, as they focus more on experiencing environments and characters with minimal interaction compared to traditional games. (I will say the shooting in The Heist is fantastic though) They're also quite short by traditional gaming standards. The Heist is 30 minutes total and Arkham VR is around 70 minutes total. Not sure I'd want them to be much longer really.

There is one genre that works quite well with VR: simulations. Not necessarily hard core simulations, but several of the first-person racing games and some flight and space games work quite well with VR. Some people do play Elite Dangerous in VR for hours at a time.

There is an RPG called Vanishing Realms that shows off what you can do when you specifically target VR. It's really fun, but gets tiring after 30 minutes. You wouldn't want to play all the way through The Witcher 3 like that.

 

I don't think I'll be investing into VR when there is motion sickness involved. I get sick to my stomach from playing a 3d game for about 15 mintues. So sick that I have to lay down and sleep for hours before I am recovered enough to move around again.

 

VR won't last. Consider the 3d films; who's making 3d films nowadays? Nobody; it was just a fashion, like vr is in the video game industry.

 

It's just another 'cutting edge' technologically-driven advancement which branches off into yet another niche area and appeals to yet another new audience. It will not replace all other games or devices or platforms. But it will influence the landscape a bit.

 

No. We don't use VR instead of TV right now, movement controls are currently inferior (to those provided by WSAD/gamepad), and VR requires PC anyway. I think that majority of games will stay in traditional format. VR is more of a gimmic with few edge case uses.

 

According to Michael Abrash it sounds like you should still have about 5 years before VR technology matures enough to solve most of it's current limitations:

• Fast enough computers.
• 4k displays.
• Wide Field of View.
• Variable focus.
• Foveated rendering.
• Eye tracking.
• 3D headspace accurate audio.

 

I got the PS4 VR and got the batman arhkam vr game. While it was neat, it seemed more like a cool tech demo then a real game, its going to be like the mobile phones where only some type of games work for it and everything else will be crap.

 

VR will always be only a niche. There was VFX-1 VR helmet around 1995. It's nothing new. There are countless problems with this tech.

 

A quick check of IMAX shows a number of movies available and coming soon.

http://www.imax.com/movies

Then there are thrill rides at the various theme parks. They're still making 3D movies for them too.

No, we're simply at the point where a new technology won't completely replace an existing one. Just as an example do a search for "death of desktops". You'll find tons of articles trying to explain how desktops are disappearing despite the fact that they're still selling well. Virtual reality doesn't need to replace existing technology to be successful any more than desktops need to dominate the market.

Funny thing about fashion by the way... it never completely disappears and occasionally becomes very trendy again.

 

Theme parks documentaries, that's not films, you know, like 3gravity".

 

I disagree. I think the current, first generation of "real" VR has already proved itself several times better than all of the others past 30 years times ten. I am of course talking about VR with positional tracking and motion controllers and not those $9.99 mobile VR things.

 

One goal of films is to provide entertainment. A theme park 3D movie is meant to be entertaining. Thus it's a film.

 

Keep in mind that Michael Abrash works for Oculus, so all of his comments are based on the assumption that VR is the next big thing. Even if all of those technical things are solved, there is still the issue of people simply not wanting VR and games not being made better because of VR.

For VR to really take off, it needs that one amazing game that justifies the immediate purchase of VR hardware. For 3D hardware, Quake II was that game. That was the first game to require a 3D video card to play the game. Some games prior to that had the option to use with or without a 3D card with varying results, but Quake II required a 3D card to play at all. What VR only game is so amazing that it justifies the purchase of VR hardware?

 

I don't think there will be just a single game that would make someone to spend so much. However there are already lots of good stuff for VR that made at least 3 of my friends buy Vive today because of the big discounts (Black Friday). They have seen various games and apps past 6 months I've showed or seen elsewhere and finally wanted their own setup.

Google Earth VR has been one of the most recent ones that has made some cry and many ask how much do these cost. Enabling/allowing human scale mode and flying on top of Eiffel tower, Hollywood signs, etc. and watching the scenery which looks like you are there and in scale is just something you need to experience before saying it's the same crap that we already saw years ago. Then try Destinations, theBlu, Tilt Brush, Recroom, Dirt Rally, Elite, etc. etc.

When the displays will improve in future to match at least like a TV at normal distance, wireless editions will appear, more comfort, etc. I'm pretty sure I will probably play most desktop games inside a VR theater mode than on a small monitor. We have also already watched a couple of movies inside Bigscreen with everyone being at their own home. These things will also probably increase social "activity" in future compared to normal where everyone has to schedule stuff to meet somewhere, get ready (dress up,make up, etc.) and then people cancel or bother less. Instead you can hang out in few minutes and look like S*** under the headset and/or not wait for the wife setup, find the car keys, etc.

 

The main problem with VR is not related to technical limitations. The problem is that A LOT of types of content are not usable with VR headsets. Basically only SOME first person experiences are suitable for VR and that means that most games are not.

There are some subtle issues there. For ex. in VR looking left requires 90 degree head rotation. The same look using mouse may require only one inch palm shift.

 

You can place a virtual TV inside VR and make your 2D game display on that. http://imgur.com/a/XeZ1q

 

This post made me laugh, but I some how can help but notice that your serous.

 

I wonder before I post this if this is a serious thread lol...

But anyway I have had the opportunity to use microsoft's hololens, and let me tell you, VR/AR through that is really really awesome. I've tried the oculus rift, the htc vive... they pale in comparison to the experience presented over real life with the hololens.

Butttt.... that is gonna take a good long time to really get all the kinks worked out and get a good high adoption rate of regular gamers. All of them are rough around the edges, like an overgrown google cardboard though someday they might be really mainstream if the industry keeps going this way...

And when/if that happens, it will still only cater to specific kinds of games and stuff, and controller/keyboard/joystick based input is still king as far as usefulness while gaming...

Only way I see that changing is if somebody creates really innovative ways to use kinect like sensors and hololens type accuracy, and htc vive/oculus rift like immersion.... all while capturing your every movement (your body live motion captured and projected onto your avatar). Then things will change, and games could be so much more deep... the controllers you can use on todays VR headsets are close, but not enough....

 

The things is that all new tech falls into the crap of naturalistic interface, when in fact they become mature when they have develop sufficient abstraction on their interaction language to be sufficient and that enough people are literate with these abstraction that truly sophisticate works start to happen. The one thing VR need to solve over traditional game though is NAVIGATION, we are not there yet, and AR need to go around the fact that reality have really crappy level design for game.

 

There is that one tiny little company called Disney. Of course they are hardly a significant industry player when it comes to movies.

You could always learn VR. You'll be in pretty deep trouble in this industry if you can't move with new techs.

In reality VR isn't replacing PC gaming anytime soon. PCs are like mobile phones, in that their primary function exists outside of gaming. So until The primary function of a PC can be replaced, you don't have to worry about games going away.

 

VR is not supposed to be an interface to all existing games. VR needs mainly games that are designed for it or work by the nature of them like simulators. You will never play ranked StarCraft properly with the motion controllers but the same works the other way, for example you will never will play a dual wielding gun games or sport games on desktop properly.

What? natural movement is one of main concepts of roomscale VR. Youtube some Brookhaven or Onward gameplay videos or just Vive commercials. It's sad that people doom VR when they have not even tried it.

 

When you can do the above in a 4k HMD without needing a barf bag, that is when VR is the new standard for games.

Although high end VR has been used for military training. (http://www.cp-journal.com/why-virtual-reality-will-change-the-way-our-military-prepares-for-war/)



But it still looks very static.

However there are arena style real world VR arcades springing up, with high end backpack VR / PC's and team tracking systems it's just becoming possible to have people move around within a VR world.

On the aspect of VR nausea, apparently you can use zap your skull with electrodes to solve it (article)

 

You would need a barf bag in real life too, I wouldn't do in real life, I'm ill in cars!
Nausea isn't just a VR problem, it's a real world problem.

That said, Galvanic vestibular skin stimulation might be the next step for hard stomach people.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...im-4D-stimulates-ear-nerves-make-VR-real.html
It literally send equilibrium signal to the user to feel movement and gravity.

The only problem is automatic calibration so it doesn't give you burning sensation because all skins have different sensibility.

 

But it seems odd the seated users even playing fast flight sim games tend to report less problems with VR sickness, is that right, even for games like this or are sim players less prone to motion sickness?

 

I honestly thing the future of VR is in free roam games. Places like Zero Latency and the like. I see VR as being a thing one goes out to experience, rather then a wide spread consumer tech.

At least at this stage. Who knows what the next generation of tech will bring.

 

Interior like environment provide a stable frame of reference, aka the world is moving not you, that's why they are more acceptable, it's not a technological solution. But some people DO get ill even in these setup, even though it's less of them.

You see this turn into abstraction in apps like google earth where the reference grid appear when moving things around to create that stable spatial reference. It's still an abstraction.

Like I said before, interface don't get better when they are naturalistic but when they are abstract, in fact even human movement have a huge part of abstraction, there is nothing "natural" (not all animal get it) in pointing something with the figure, or even the whole lot of social ritual we have. That's the dirty secret of interfaces in general, they must feel natural and intuitive but in reality it's about smart abstraction.

 

Motion sickness is related to your sense of balance. Your body doesn't have to do much balancing while sitting.

 

Apparently walking on the roof in free roam is also legit. Turns out if you curve the ground slightly, the player will accept it, even on flat ground. Over a 50m warehouse you can twist enough to have them standing upside down. Trying to find a video of it, but it doesn't look like the game is publicly released yet.

 

We are barely scratching all the hacks possible, from what I have seen, some screen shaking under a certain threshold is acceptable, 3 frames of fast movement in linear fashion is acceptable, walking in circle in real life to move forward in VR works too. I'm not experimenting with VR yet, I keep a close tab because of these kind of things. All point to slight adjustment will allow adaptation.

Still we need those myo haptic device (stimulate nerve and muscle to create fake contact and even fake temperature) and light field rendering for DOF focusing, eye tracking will also allow faster rendering with foveal rendering.

 

Just found an article about a homemade omni treadmill.

http://hackaday.com/2014/02/18/low-budget-omnidirectional-treadmill/

 

So, we're hacking vestibular system now?

 

Books are surviving pretty darn well despite radio*. Radio is fine and continuing to innovate despite TV* coming along. TV is doing great even though video games and the Internet are here.

Even if VR becomes a media format as ubiquitous as those in its own right there's no reason to expect that the others will suddenly go away or become invalid. VR as a format allows us to do cool new things, but it's not going to replace prior formats at the things they're good at.

Despite being an avid gamer and Internet user I still read good ol' books for a significant chunk of time each day.

* By "radio" I'm referring to audio-based media regardless of how it's transmitted. Similarly, by "TV" I'm referring to any video-based format.

 

Survivorship bias.

What about the telegram? The sonograph? The Pony Express? Instant messaging?

New technologies do replace old ones, if they can fill the same need more effectively. But I don't see VR actually filling the same need as any existing technologies.

 

You may want to try it anyway. My wife has motion sickness problems but at Unite she played several VR games and didn't have a problem.

 

TO be frank, outside that news about samsung (and some older paper that view it as curiosity), I haven't seen much activity (yet) about it, that's surprising, I know occulus has been looking into it, but that's all. I wonder if there is any update about it. Screen and tracking related stuff are the hot topics now.

 

Virtual Reality, VR, is so 25 years ago.

It originally became a "thing" in the late 80s/early 90s, until it eventually failed horribly because the games sucked, OK yeah the technology has probably improved but if the games still suck, that means nothing.

 

At the moment Valve is making VR titles skip Greenlight so there's clearly an interest to support them but this is making that a lot of shovelware VR gets to Steam. For me this is pretty telling, they are desperate to push this tech so I'm not sure if it can survive on its own.

My point is: don't bet your house in VR.

 

I would not call it desperate since it was there from day one. If they would have done it for example few months later after Vive release it could be probably interpret like that. Oculus has also been investing a lot various ways and been giving free dev kits in the past and still do if you apply.

Every "new" device type needs content or it will die regardless how good it is and there's a lot of gadgets and game devices that have died with little to none dev support. For VR there's already a lot of content and even more coming in following weeks and months from many high profile companies. VR still might not be a breakthrough because of the high costs but its a lot more any gender any age device type than wii/hololens, etc.

Again I'm talking about the high end VR with roomscale and not the cheap mobile cartboards

 

Absolutely!

However... I feel that's slightly missed my (attempted) point? You're looking at the tech, the underlying "how" of the media, where I'm looking at the media itself, the "what". You're correct, new technology does indeed replace old technology. But the technology is just the transmission format, the media being transmitted still survives.

From that point of view, for example, not only are instant messaging and telegrams the same thing, but they're also still alive and well - I use multiple IM tools on a daily basis both as a part of my work and socially. (Facebook Messenger, Quip, Slack and Skype being the ones in current use for me.)

Edit: I could well be misusing the word "media" there? Since I think "media" comes from "medium", which is the material or means through which something is transmitted as opposed to the message itself.

 

I get your point. I'm just playing devils advocate.

Some technologies do completely replace others. Letters are extinct in favour of emails. This is because letters and emails fill the same niche. We use them both in exactly the same way. But emails are dramatically better.

On the other hand YouTube and TV exist perfectly happily next to each other. We don't use them the same way, so both can exist in the market.

I think PC gaming and VR gaming are different enough that both will exist side by side. (Also ignoring the fact that VR does not exist in a vacuum, you actually need a PC to play a VR game.)

 

VR is kinda sorta crap in someways lol

its REALLY uncomfortable lol

 

Plus emails don't charge you $0.47 to mail them in addition to the cost of the materials.

 

Yes we only need to pay our electric and internet bill. We have the requirement of electricity because we will have our house condemned, and we have the requirement of the internet because the world is moving to internet only. (employment applications.)

 

Well knowing the number of TVs and gaming consoles I've seen in some households a few inexpensive VRs will a cost effective way to watch television and play video games if they get the multiplayer and game controller parts of the equation right. Many people think of televisions as big eyesores but like the social aspect of watching TV and gaming on consoles more than the actual content in the games or on television, which often isn't that great.

 

Before VR even COULD be the Doom of anything, it first needs to survive the first few years of high early adopter prices, hard to solve teething problems and consumer fatigue. As far as I am concerned, it could go the way of 3D TVs unless new hardware solves a lot of the problems that riddles the 1st gen devices today, and we finally get more fully fledged games instead of tons of small tech demos at full game prices... while the hardware is so expensive that only the most dedicated early adopters will apply.

Really, VR might be the big craze now, but I don't think it has established itself yet enough to have a certain future.

On the flipside its not for everything, as others have said. You cannot shoot a traditional movie in VR. It simply does not work. You can create a new type of expierience which does not hinge so much on the viewer seeing EXACTLY what the movie director wants him/her to see... but it will never be quite the same as a traditional movie with a fixed view.

Same with games. So many of todays genres will never work in VR. You CAN create a VR Shooter just fine... but you need to throw many things overboard that will make it a way different game. The hardcore shooter crowd is pretty sensitive to changes to their firstperson player controller skillorz physics (meaning zero physics). If they cannot turn the view as fast as they can move their mouse, they get pissed.
That will never work in VR. Such physically impossible view rotations will make EVERYONE immidiatly sick. FPS Shooters will have to stick to realistic player physics, and add inertia and other effects to view rotations and player movement. Not going to be enjoyable for many hardcore shooter fans.

And those are just examples. Basically, VR is a completly new medium to traditional 2D screens. It will ask for new types of expieriences.
Will people at some point choose VR expieriences over traditional 2D expieriences the way RTS games have become a niche instead of the #1 PC game genre? Maybe. I doubt this going to happen until VR is way, WAY more technically advanced, and cheap enough to fit into everyones budget.
And even then, people will chill out by hanging out in the sofa in front of the TV, watching the newest action flick or playing a round of Mario Kart 21... while donning their VR full body suit, or their direct brain interface if they are up for a more intense expierience that most probably will not leave them chilled out, but exhausted after an hour or two.

Even IF one day you don't need a frictionless threadmill and physical motion controls to get the full VR expierience, and only the brain is active. VR in its final form will be a full body expierience, more comparable to doing sports than watching TV. Or playing dance dance revolution rather than Dragon Age.
Its a different activity for a different mood, and energy level. You don't simulate a full body workout to chill out.