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What it means for virtual reality games to really arrive
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
There have been a lot of threads on this forum over the course of the past several years about VR. Some have been about hardware such as the Oculus Rift. Some have talked a lot about frame rates or resolutions. Some people have predicted that VR was going to imminently be a huge deal, while others thought it was a long way off from being anything more than a small niche or a passing fad.
But this or that hardware being good enough or not is not the proper metric. Nor are hardware sales anything more than indirectly relevant. Rather, virtual reality will have really arrived when:
1) A considerable fraction of game sales (e.g., over 10%) are of games intended primarily or exclusively to be played using VR.
2) It is common for large budget games (e.g., over $10 million) to be designed primarily for being played using VR.
3) Many millions of gamers spend on average more than an hour per day playing games in VR.
If any of these happen, then they'll all happen at about the same time. The reasons why time playing games, money spent buying games, and money spent developing games should be correlated are fairly obvious. But for VR to really go mainstream, it has to be widely used as a part of daily life the way that other types of computer games are now.
I don't think that VR usage will slowly rise over the course of many years. Rather, I think it will be a narrow niche before suddenly becoming mainstream pretty quickly. Still, VR going mainstream is likely to happen in multiple waves, comparable to what we've seen over the decades with 3D rendering being used in games.
As I see it, there were three separate phases of 3D rendering being adopted. In the first phase, there were a relative handful of games that tried scattered things. Battlezone, Faceball, Wolfenstein, StarFox, Virtua Fighter, and Donkey Kong Country all represented movement toward 3D rendering in their own ways, though some used techniques that fundamentally have long since been abandoned. Still, none of them heralded a new era of 3D gaming.
The second wave came in the late 1990s, as newer game consoles with far more powerful hardware than before were able to do a lot more with 3D rendering. Instead of a handful of oddball games trying fairly experimental things, we suddenly had many games doing 3D rendering in about the same way. Many major games opted to stay 2D all the way through this era, however. I personally thought that the 3D graphics from this era looked terrible--not just inferior to today's, but inferior to the sprite-based 2D graphics of the same era. But it's indisputable that a lot of people were buying and playing a lot of 3D games, which wasn't the case in 1990.
The third wave attracted a lot less attention. There isn't a fixed date on it, but I'd mark it as about a decade ago. At some point, the tools and hardware for 3D graphics became good enough to be worth using even when building games that were fundamentally 2D. In 2000, if you were making a big-budget, overhead view game, you'd use sprites for it. In 2010, you'd probably use 3D models to make a game with identical underlying game mechanics on an identical budget.
With VR, we're still firmly in the first wave of adoption, and we have been for a long time. With 3D rendering, it was a long way from Battlezone to 3D graphics truly being mainstream. It has likewise been a long time since the Virtual Boy crashed and burned spectacularly. Serious efforts at doing VR are a lot more common today than they were 20 years ago, so we might be approaching the end of the first era. Or we might not.
In a sense, once VR hits its own equivalent of the second wave above, it will have gone mainstream. But the third wave matters, too. What could that possibly mean for VR? Imagine if rendering technologies get to the point where you don't buy a physical monitor anymore. Instead, even for things that are fundamentally 2D, glasses or whatever projection technology project an image of a monitor in front of you for you to read. Imagine being able to rescale the apparent size of the monitor at will, or the implicit resolution of it for the sake of backward compatibility.
We're not there yet, of course. We're not even close to being there. With 3D rendering, there was a lot of time between the second and third waves. And with Moore's Law sputtering on life support, hardware isn't delivering as fast of gains as it used to. It's possible that we'll ram into a wall of physics limitations too soon and the third wave will never arrive. It's even possible that the second wave never arrives. But I'm not going to predict either of those.
But this or that hardware being good enough or not is not the proper metric. Nor are hardware sales anything more than indirectly relevant. Rather, virtual reality will have really arrived when:
1) A considerable fraction of game sales (e.g., over 10%) are of games intended primarily or exclusively to be played using VR.
2) It is common for large budget games (e.g., over $10 million) to be designed primarily for being played using VR.
3) Many millions of gamers spend on average more than an hour per day playing games in VR.
If any of these happen, then they'll all happen at about the same time. The reasons why time playing games, money spent buying games, and money spent developing games should be correlated are fairly obvious. But for VR to really go mainstream, it has to be widely used as a part of daily life the way that other types of computer games are now.
I don't think that VR usage will slowly rise over the course of many years. Rather, I think it will be a narrow niche before suddenly becoming mainstream pretty quickly. Still, VR going mainstream is likely to happen in multiple waves, comparable to what we've seen over the decades with 3D rendering being used in games.
As I see it, there were three separate phases of 3D rendering being adopted. In the first phase, there were a relative handful of games that tried scattered things. Battlezone, Faceball, Wolfenstein, StarFox, Virtua Fighter, and Donkey Kong Country all represented movement toward 3D rendering in their own ways, though some used techniques that fundamentally have long since been abandoned. Still, none of them heralded a new era of 3D gaming.
The second wave came in the late 1990s, as newer game consoles with far more powerful hardware than before were able to do a lot more with 3D rendering. Instead of a handful of oddball games trying fairly experimental things, we suddenly had many games doing 3D rendering in about the same way. Many major games opted to stay 2D all the way through this era, however. I personally thought that the 3D graphics from this era looked terrible--not just inferior to today's, but inferior to the sprite-based 2D graphics of the same era. But it's indisputable that a lot of people were buying and playing a lot of 3D games, which wasn't the case in 1990.
The third wave attracted a lot less attention. There isn't a fixed date on it, but I'd mark it as about a decade ago. At some point, the tools and hardware for 3D graphics became good enough to be worth using even when building games that were fundamentally 2D. In 2000, if you were making a big-budget, overhead view game, you'd use sprites for it. In 2010, you'd probably use 3D models to make a game with identical underlying game mechanics on an identical budget.
With VR, we're still firmly in the first wave of adoption, and we have been for a long time. With 3D rendering, it was a long way from Battlezone to 3D graphics truly being mainstream. It has likewise been a long time since the Virtual Boy crashed and burned spectacularly. Serious efforts at doing VR are a lot more common today than they were 20 years ago, so we might be approaching the end of the first era. Or we might not.
In a sense, once VR hits its own equivalent of the second wave above, it will have gone mainstream. But the third wave matters, too. What could that possibly mean for VR? Imagine if rendering technologies get to the point where you don't buy a physical monitor anymore. Instead, even for things that are fundamentally 2D, glasses or whatever projection technology project an image of a monitor in front of you for you to read. Imagine being able to rescale the apparent size of the monitor at will, or the implicit resolution of it for the sake of backward compatibility.
We're not there yet, of course. We're not even close to being there. With 3D rendering, there was a lot of time between the second and third waves. And with Moore's Law sputtering on life support, hardware isn't delivering as fast of gains as it used to. It's possible that we'll ram into a wall of physics limitations too soon and the third wave will never arrive. It's even possible that the second wave never arrives. But I'm not going to predict either of those.
Comments
No I'm not talking about sitting in a char jacking into some sort of matrix like people are saying they "won't try VR until" such a thing happens.
We've seen early concepts of AR devices using short wave laser technology to project images directly into you eyes. We are on the cusp of better battery technologies that will allow for devices with greater processing power to be carried on you or in a pocket and streamed to a visual device as light as a pair of sunglasses, and about as unobtrusive.
VR and AR will take off when the technology catches up to an ease of use standpoint. When you're carrying around your television, cell phone, home and work PC in your pocket, it will be a paradigm shift in everything, the way smartphones are today.
While 3D rendering will play a big part, I don't believe it is the driving factor for widespread adoption. Its case of uses, which will increase exponentially as mobile sets become more powerful, less obtrusive and more affordable. By the way, the AR devices that use short wave lasers to display images in ones eye.... glasses wearers need not have it refract through glasses for the images to be crisp and clear, which is a major problem currently with VR.
Looking forward to seeing what happens next.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
The devices are able to measure your precise movement. The following generation might measure eye gaze as well. This is useful in terms of entertainment, but invaluable people in the data business. Whoever manages to deliver widespread adoption of VR will have access to an unprecedented amount of information on human behaviour.
Understanding what people like is already fairly straight forward. You don't know what a person thinks, but you can imply future behaviour based on past patterns. Being able to record the muscle movements of a person's body will be a game-changer. It will allow tech companies to imply thinking in real time. I think the true VR adoption will be linked to this. Whether it is Google, Amazon or another big player in the tech space, one day VR will make enough sense in their advertising machine that they will just make it happen.
BTW , i think we should change VR mean by "vision replace" instead of original mean of VR .
I'll probably have 3 or 4 then because some will play certain games better then others and all my friends will have several also.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Fifty years ago, predictions of where technology would go in the future commonly expected that in the future, when you talk on the phone, you'd be able to see the other person, not just hear him. Those predictions ended up mostly being wildly wrong. Today, we have the technology to make it happen if so inclined, and occasionally we do want to see the other person. But usually we don't--or perhaps rather, we don't want the other person to see us.
We've actually gone in the opposite direction. Instead of real-time communication with faraway people allowing you to hear a voice, we've moved to predominantly getting rid of the voice and making it text-only.
Will that happen with VR? I'm not predicting that it will. But I am saying that it's a mistake to assume that even if the technology is someday there to allow what people today think they want, that it will be used as widely as we expect. The people who live then might decide that they don't want it, or perhaps only occasionally use it but not nearly as much as we expect that they will.
Why would that happen? I'm not predicting that it will happen, but if it does, it might be for reasons that we don't expect. Laxie makes a good point about the privacy implications of it. It's likely that people 50 years from now will think of privacy very differently from how we do today, and in ways that we can't necessarily predict.
With 11.2B people projected for 2100, privacy ideas will be changing too....
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
While Magic Leap isn't creating the short wave laser tech, their mobile set and processing unit is the first step in the shift of where VR has been migrating to.
Take the Vive Pro and the WiGig peripheral, making streaming to a wireless headset from a more powerful PC not just possible but with virtually no perceptual lag.
Take into consideration that we're at the cusp of 5G now too, where download speeds could easily hit between 300 - 450 MBPS on applicable devices. That several of the largest game companies and hardware companies have invested heavily into game streaming services, and that the battery technology will be increasing, our last major risk to putting all of this together in the next 3 - 5 years would be keeping the components cool enough (which is partly due to the batteries which will be replaced in success with polymer lithium batteries)
While we can't guarantee what the future might look like... I mean... back to the future predictions aside, a lot of things don't always pan out, but in the next few years we're going to see at least proof of concepts that have the potential to change everything.
VR has a ways to go before it can be truly consumer viable and the current tech is still missing that something that will allow it. They're still trying to get by an impasse VR met in the 90's. It doesn't work on it's own. There still needs to be accompanying props and setup. There has been no breakthrough moment for the tech. The "LOOK GUYS I GOT IT!!" moment never happened. It's more like "Look guys, the headset is smaller and only 51% of the population vomits!"
I see VR (applied to entertainment) as something that at best will only be viable for wealthy people who have an X-Men Danger Room specifically for it. By the time this happens AR will probably have a better mainstream application.
There's a lot more to Virtual Reality than our eyes and ears.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Philosophy of MMO Game Design
AR has already come on leaps and bounds, in a sense having a smartphone that can guide you around is AR. What I have always said about VR is that they would have to be no bigger than a normal pair of glasses. Google Glass is nearly just that, the concept just needs some more miniaturisation, which we have been doing so successfully for decades now.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
I wasn't expecting much, but it was very impressive.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Your statements started out very accurate and to points often missed nor even understood.
However...
1) A considerable fraction of game sales (e.g., over 10%) are of games intended primarily or exclusively to be played using VR.
2) It is common for large budget games (e.g., over $10 million) to be designed primarily for being played using VR.
3) Many millions of gamer's spend on average more than an hour per day playing games in VR.
I do not believe a single game was "intended" for VR but more so trying to cash in on a marketplace ,a gimmick.In otherwords,just a cheap game with the ability to use VR to simply apply the cheap game to a gimmick sell.
"common" i highly disagree,the high budget games are more commonly targeting known IP's.Example IP's such as Warcraft ort Final Fantasy or Everquest,anything that is KNOWN,another example...Star Wars,licensing can also raise the costs above their value.HERO type gasmes are also in this bracket,soon you tag on Marvel when making a hero game is is going to cost too much but is warranted because known IP's tend to sell no matter how poor their quality is.
Opening statements basically touched on numbers not telling any kind of real story,as is the numbers of people playing VR at least one hour a day again means almost nothing towards the QUALITY of these games.Yes i know you never stated the quality as such but i brought up the point because no matter what ANY number says,all that matters to ME is the quality of these games and NOTHING to do with the VR set.
You could sell me a VR set worth 10k for $1 but if the games are crap i would have zero use for that VR set and is typically why as of this very minute,i don't own a VR set nor do i remotely want one.
We are stil a LONG way away from getting a high majority of AAA games,less than 1% of the market,so we need a LOT of work in the game development BEFORE we even think about VR gaming.
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Fifty years ago, if you said something off-the-cuff that was highly offensive, maybe you'd offend anyone who was there in the room with you. But ten years later, anyone who wasn't there would have no way of finding out what you said or that you had said anything offensive at all. Even the people who were there might not remember the details, or even that they met you that day at all. The only real exception was things that were published or otherwise recorded, which very few things were, and even then, searching through them was an enormous pain.
I read a story a while back about a presidential candidate who said something really offensive at a campaign event. When it was first reported, the candidate denied it. A local newspaper tracked down six different people who were at the event and confirmed that the candidate had said it. But still, the campaign denied it. As there was no recording, no one could really prove that he said it, and so the scandal didn't really gain much traction before disappearing.
Today, however, the Internet never forgets. If you put something foolish out there with your name on it, it will still be there 10 or 20 years later. Even things that were reasonable at the time might look horrible when removed from their context.
While publishing things used to be a major pain, now it's easy to post things on Facebook, Twitter, or a number of other sources. They're also searchable, so it's much easier to find anything that you said on a particular topic. If you say something offensive and you have some enemies inclined to try to track it down to hurt you, you could end up being defined in the eyes of many by some stupid comment.
Think of what happened to Joy Reid recently. She said something or other on her blog some years ago, then people found out about it recently--several years after it happened--and turned it into a huge scandal. Had she said exactly the same thing a decade earlier, or anonymously, or in some offline context, people wouldn't have discovered it and the scandal would never have happened.
People posting all sorts of things on Facebook and Twitter under their own name has the potential to make that sort of scandal massively more common. Views that are common today might be viewed as beyond the pale 10 or 20 years from now. Young, immature people posting things carelessly under their own name creates the potential for all sorts of foolishness.
How is that going to play out a few decades from now? Will there be many tens of millions of people who don't dare become a public figure because they know that if they do, their political enemies will ensure that they're defined by something stupid that they posted or tweeted many years earlier? Will society come to regard having said highly offensive things years earlier, then apologized for them, as just being part of life and not fair to hold against the person years later? Will people overwhelmingly go for anonymity and generally decide that it's foolish for all but a handful of already public figures to ever post anything under their own name online? Will it generally be assumed (and perhaps enforced by laws) that sites shouldn't archive blogs, forum posts, tweets, and the like for more than a week or a month or a year or some other period of time to ensure that it doesn't come back to haunt people years or decades later?
As Laxie pointed out, VR has the potential to aggregate far more intrusive information on people. It's easy to post stuff on a forum like this. But until you click "Post Comment", whatever you type doesn't go anywhere visible by anyone else. If you type an angry rant, then think better of it and delete it before posting it, no one will ever know. You can even edit your posts after they're up, and so long as you do it quickly, whatever you wanted to change about the original post will probably be effectively unrecoverable.
But a VR headset that tracks eye movement and head movement doesn't give you anywhere near that sort of editorial control. As Laxie said, seeing how people react in real-time would be hugely useful to advertisers. What if VR headsets not only track your movement, but send it to some central repository to store it? That would be very useful to advertisers, after all. And what happens when (not if) that repository gets hacked? Are we going to have scandals about people who looked at something for a second and a half longer than a "reasonable" person would have taken to close it or look away?
If using VR in the future means that that sort of intrusive information is recorded about you and stored, then I'm not going to use it for anything other than professional purposes. Unless there are major shifts in societal attitudes, I'd probably be very much in the minority on that. Look how many people use Facebook today, for example, and their entire business model is to assume that their customers don't care about their privacy. I'm not one of them, precisely because I don't like the privacy implications of it. But shifts in societal attitudes do happen, so it's impossible to know today how people will feel decades from now.
That stated, I use my Gear VR maybe 10% of the time for all digital leisure. It's something I have to be in the mood for. Being completely cut off from the environment isn't something I always want, and user input schemes within VR need work.
The hardware is there with a few snags, some experiences are there; overall the state of VR, today, has been worth it to me because it is so unique.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
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Maybe people are buying really large glasses?!?!
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Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests