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The Present's Made of Virtual Insanity
Dec. 1st, 2017 11:00 pmSO Bitcoin went mad again so I went mad again and bought the ridiculously frivolous purchase of an OCULUS RIFT.
Oculus rift is a virtual reality system for PC. The bundle I got consists of a helmet that contains DINOSAURS, two infra-red sensors for triangulation of something or other, and two "touch" controllers, one for each hand. The controllers are clever in that they feel like two halves of a regular console controller while behaving like Wii controllers I suppose. You can press buttons and squeeze triggers and move thumbsticks around, BUT you can also point and shoot and pick stuff up. Picking up a laser gun and shooting a robot is ONLY THE BEGINNING.
When you first put on the headset you are in a swanky apartment somewhere, and suspended in mid-air is a browser for all the apps you have installed. You can use the controller like a laser pointer to select something. This feels very intuitive and shows that they are working hard to craft custom experiences rather than just make regular stuff more 3D. Some apps get you to select by moving your head but this is less intuitive. Toybox, a free download, lets you get to grips with the feel of picking things up and manipulating them. You can, for instance, light a firework and then HOLD IT IN YOUR HAND in blatant contravention of 80s public information films. Lighting and textures look good, they're often a little simplified and streamlined compared to a modern game but it works well. Physics are good too - if you poke or drop something it generally reacts like it would do in real life. I haven't noticed any lag which would probably damage the experience.
In other apps you get a virtual representation of the controllers themselves which is spooky but also works quite well. In Medium, for example, little icons hover on or near the buttons to remind you what things do. It's precise enough that if you're wearing a virtual watch on your wrist you can poke it (i.e. your actual wrist) and it will do something. Medium is a sculpting app that lets you make art by basically squirting zero-gravity foam into the air. It's very easy to pick up even for someone who sucks at art such as myself.
Another free download is Mission: ISS which combines a informative tour of the International Space Station with a handful of straightforward missions so you feel like an astronaut. You even get to go on a spacewalk! It's weird how quickly you adapt to floating around in zero gravity and pushing yourself off walls to get anywhere.
But you don't have to be completely immersed in the environment. Lucky's Tale is a 3D platformer very much in the Jak and Daxter mould, and it happens right in front of you as if taking place on a tabletop! You can jump and spin and collect coins and all the standard stuff. For many years I believed that I sucked at platforming because it was so hard to judge distance on a 2D screen. Nope, I just suck at platforming. It's a lot of fun though, although I don't like the creepy way that Lucky the Fox stares right at you even if you move your head. Eyes front, soldier.
Other free downloads are more "experiences" than games. Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab is atmospheric but very short and the gameplay amounts to nothing more than pointing at the things you're asked to. It also has a clumsy movement system that involves teleporting and re-orienting yourself in one move, which is both tricky to do and confusing to experience. The topic of how movement should be handled seems to be a subject of research and a lot of apps just avoid it altogether. Those that do have it aren't consistent. In Lucky's Tale, the camera lazily accelerates towards the character, which mostly works but sometimes isn't reactive enough if you're moving very quickly. There's also no rotation - if you want to see something behind you, you've got to look round yourself. It's not a bad solution but I suspect there's a better one out there. Blade Runner also deals with the uncanny valley problem by doing volumetric scanning of actors' faces. This is pretty effective, although the faces are often stuck on top of bodies that obviously haven't been motion captured.
Coco VR, another film tie-in, is similar in that you teleport around and manipulate a few things in quite a superficial way, but it's overall better, in that you have a little more freedom, and the music and colourful design are nice. Coco does have a really weird moment, though, in that you can see your avatar in a mirror, and he's a skellington! That takes a bit of getting used to. One can imagine that trick being used very well in a horror game.
An app that's overtly a horror experience is Face Your Fears, which consists of two parts. In one, a giant robot picks you up and puts you on a precarious platform which breaks and you plummet to the ground. I could cope with that. The other, where you lie in bed and a scary clown doll jumps about and scissors fly at your head and a jack-in-the-box teleports around - nope, I couldn't cope with that and had to stop it. And I'm usually up for any horror film or game.
Transition is altogether a more relaxing, but trippy, affair. It's another short one, and you can't actually do anything, but it involves a boat trip past flying fish, giant heads, giant insects etc while intoxicating music surrounds you. At one point the whole world turns 180 degrees unexpectedly and it's a very strange feeling. More disappointing is San Base Travel, in which you can wander around 3D fractals, but while the fractals are very beautiful, they have to procedurally render each frame so movement is rather sluggish, and the fractals are static - you can't actually do anything again.
So overall, it's a really interesting gadget but there's still room for improvement. Only Lucky's Tale has a decent amount of content (though all this stuff is free, the paid apps may be better) and movement around the 3D environment is not yet as well developed as use of the controllers for manipulating objects is.
And THAT'S when I thought - maybe I could write something in this area? Sure, it seems like a big task, but I did write my master's thesis on online virtual environments, and while that was fifteen years ago (WHAT?!!!), the basics still apply. So it seems that development is done in one of two ways. Either using the Oculus SDK in C++, or using the game engines Unity or Unreal Engine 4. I imagine the former is similar to Android development, but I'm rusty on C++ so I'd have to do some serious boning. As for Unity and Unreal, I know little about them other than that they are heavily used in the industry - Unity mainly for web games but also console games such as Yooka-Laylee, and Unreal for lots of things; in fact I think the upcoming FF VII remake uses it, where up until now Squeenix have always rolled their own engine. Now, in my head, making a game in Unity is like using 3D Construction Kit (remember that?) but I don't really know without looking into it.
BUT what to write? Something involving exploration and puzzle solving would suit me best. I do like the idea of a Pikmin game in VR - picking up the little guys and throwing them yourself! Or maybe a Katamari style game - rolling around and picking stuff up? OR MAYBE a strange hybrid of the two? I also kinda think that a fan remake of Damocles would be all kinds of awesome, but that would be a LOT of work. There certainly seems to be some gaps in the market, though - the Oculus app store has a decent selection but nothing that looks like it might reach "killer app" status. Aside from various tie-ins (there's a Rick and Morty one), Elite Dangerous is the only game that's well known in its own right. There might be others on Steam but that seems to be enjoying crashing a lot for me these days.
What would YOU like to see in VR? Please do not answer "Roj Blake dancing"
Oculus rift is a virtual reality system for PC. The bundle I got consists of a helmet that contains DINOSAURS, two infra-red sensors for triangulation of something or other, and two "touch" controllers, one for each hand. The controllers are clever in that they feel like two halves of a regular console controller while behaving like Wii controllers I suppose. You can press buttons and squeeze triggers and move thumbsticks around, BUT you can also point and shoot and pick stuff up. Picking up a laser gun and shooting a robot is ONLY THE BEGINNING.
When you first put on the headset you are in a swanky apartment somewhere, and suspended in mid-air is a browser for all the apps you have installed. You can use the controller like a laser pointer to select something. This feels very intuitive and shows that they are working hard to craft custom experiences rather than just make regular stuff more 3D. Some apps get you to select by moving your head but this is less intuitive. Toybox, a free download, lets you get to grips with the feel of picking things up and manipulating them. You can, for instance, light a firework and then HOLD IT IN YOUR HAND in blatant contravention of 80s public information films. Lighting and textures look good, they're often a little simplified and streamlined compared to a modern game but it works well. Physics are good too - if you poke or drop something it generally reacts like it would do in real life. I haven't noticed any lag which would probably damage the experience.
In other apps you get a virtual representation of the controllers themselves which is spooky but also works quite well. In Medium, for example, little icons hover on or near the buttons to remind you what things do. It's precise enough that if you're wearing a virtual watch on your wrist you can poke it (i.e. your actual wrist) and it will do something. Medium is a sculpting app that lets you make art by basically squirting zero-gravity foam into the air. It's very easy to pick up even for someone who sucks at art such as myself.
Another free download is Mission: ISS which combines a informative tour of the International Space Station with a handful of straightforward missions so you feel like an astronaut. You even get to go on a spacewalk! It's weird how quickly you adapt to floating around in zero gravity and pushing yourself off walls to get anywhere.
But you don't have to be completely immersed in the environment. Lucky's Tale is a 3D platformer very much in the Jak and Daxter mould, and it happens right in front of you as if taking place on a tabletop! You can jump and spin and collect coins and all the standard stuff. For many years I believed that I sucked at platforming because it was so hard to judge distance on a 2D screen. Nope, I just suck at platforming. It's a lot of fun though, although I don't like the creepy way that Lucky the Fox stares right at you even if you move your head. Eyes front, soldier.
Other free downloads are more "experiences" than games. Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab is atmospheric but very short and the gameplay amounts to nothing more than pointing at the things you're asked to. It also has a clumsy movement system that involves teleporting and re-orienting yourself in one move, which is both tricky to do and confusing to experience. The topic of how movement should be handled seems to be a subject of research and a lot of apps just avoid it altogether. Those that do have it aren't consistent. In Lucky's Tale, the camera lazily accelerates towards the character, which mostly works but sometimes isn't reactive enough if you're moving very quickly. There's also no rotation - if you want to see something behind you, you've got to look round yourself. It's not a bad solution but I suspect there's a better one out there. Blade Runner also deals with the uncanny valley problem by doing volumetric scanning of actors' faces. This is pretty effective, although the faces are often stuck on top of bodies that obviously haven't been motion captured.
Coco VR, another film tie-in, is similar in that you teleport around and manipulate a few things in quite a superficial way, but it's overall better, in that you have a little more freedom, and the music and colourful design are nice. Coco does have a really weird moment, though, in that you can see your avatar in a mirror, and he's a skellington! That takes a bit of getting used to. One can imagine that trick being used very well in a horror game.
An app that's overtly a horror experience is Face Your Fears, which consists of two parts. In one, a giant robot picks you up and puts you on a precarious platform which breaks and you plummet to the ground. I could cope with that. The other, where you lie in bed and a scary clown doll jumps about and scissors fly at your head and a jack-in-the-box teleports around - nope, I couldn't cope with that and had to stop it. And I'm usually up for any horror film or game.
Transition is altogether a more relaxing, but trippy, affair. It's another short one, and you can't actually do anything, but it involves a boat trip past flying fish, giant heads, giant insects etc while intoxicating music surrounds you. At one point the whole world turns 180 degrees unexpectedly and it's a very strange feeling. More disappointing is San Base Travel, in which you can wander around 3D fractals, but while the fractals are very beautiful, they have to procedurally render each frame so movement is rather sluggish, and the fractals are static - you can't actually do anything again.
So overall, it's a really interesting gadget but there's still room for improvement. Only Lucky's Tale has a decent amount of content (though all this stuff is free, the paid apps may be better) and movement around the 3D environment is not yet as well developed as use of the controllers for manipulating objects is.
And THAT'S when I thought - maybe I could write something in this area? Sure, it seems like a big task, but I did write my master's thesis on online virtual environments, and while that was fifteen years ago (WHAT?!!!), the basics still apply. So it seems that development is done in one of two ways. Either using the Oculus SDK in C++, or using the game engines Unity or Unreal Engine 4. I imagine the former is similar to Android development, but I'm rusty on C++ so I'd have to do some serious boning. As for Unity and Unreal, I know little about them other than that they are heavily used in the industry - Unity mainly for web games but also console games such as Yooka-Laylee, and Unreal for lots of things; in fact I think the upcoming FF VII remake uses it, where up until now Squeenix have always rolled their own engine. Now, in my head, making a game in Unity is like using 3D Construction Kit (remember that?) but I don't really know without looking into it.
BUT what to write? Something involving exploration and puzzle solving would suit me best. I do like the idea of a Pikmin game in VR - picking up the little guys and throwing them yourself! Or maybe a Katamari style game - rolling around and picking stuff up? OR MAYBE a strange hybrid of the two? I also kinda think that a fan remake of Damocles would be all kinds of awesome, but that would be a LOT of work. There certainly seems to be some gaps in the market, though - the Oculus app store has a decent selection but nothing that looks like it might reach "killer app" status. Aside from various tie-ins (there's a Rick and Morty one), Elite Dangerous is the only game that's well known in its own right. There might be others on Steam but that seems to be enjoying crashing a lot for me these days.
What would YOU like to see in VR? Please do not answer "Roj Blake dancing"
