2342: A Belated Account of My First VR Experience

It occurred to me a few days ago that I had a go in Virtual Reality recently and didn’t write about it. Let’s rectify that right now.

My friends Tim and Tom both grabbed the HTC Vive pretty much as soon as it became available, because both of them have disposable income and a gaming-related gadget fetish. Last week, I finally had the opportunity to give Tim’s setup a go. And I came away rather more impressed with the whole thing than I was expecting to be.

The Vive headset itself is surprisingly comfortable and not ridiculously bulky like the Virtuality headsets of the ’90s, which were my only previous experience with VR. The picture quality was reasonably good, too — certainly a far cry from the Virtuality screens, which felt like holding two Atari Lynxes up to your face — but I did find it a little tricky to position the headset absolutely perfectly so that everything on the display was in focus; I found stuff around the edges (particularly the lower edge) was difficult to remove the blurriness from, but I adjusted to it after a little while.

The first thing I tried was the Vive “training” setup, which gives you some examples of how to interact with virtual worlds using the headset and the two Vive controllers. It introduces you to the idea of “room scale” play — the ability to actually physically move around and have your body movements accurately reflected in your virtual viewpoint — and how the Vive controllers offer 1:1 motion tracking that is so accurate, even though you can’t see your own hands while you have the headset on, you can still reach out, grab the controllers and press the buttons without any difficulty.

I think the most immediately striking thing about the Vive’s VR is the room scale thing, which is, after all, that particular setup’s unique gimmick. I was very surprised how natural it felt; there was no kind of input lag when moving my head around, nor when I moved my body; I could tell I wasn’t actually in the location I was looking at, due to the lack of tactile feedback in the environment, but I could move around and interact with things as easily as I could in the real world. Particularly impressive in the training demo was the part where you inflate balloons using the controllers, and can then hit them around the room as if they were right there. Again, there was no tactile feedback, but the accuracy of the motion tracking was such that I could intuitively reach out to hit them with a controller, and they would react appropriately. Impressive.

The next thing I tried was Space Pirate Trainer, which is one of the first games to come out on the platform. It’s a very simple affair that sees you standing on a platform wielding two pistols and having to shoot down waves of drones that pop up from all sides. The pistols can be switched to various different fire modes, and you can physically dodge the incoming laser bolts from the drones to avoid being hit.

This latter aspect was the thing I found most unusual and surprising to adjust to. I’ve played games that involve physical movement before — primarily on the Wii, but a couple of EyeToy and Kinect games, too — but I’ve never played a game where you can see a bullet flying at your face and actually lean out of the way of it. I mean, sometimes I instinctively do it when playing Overwatch (I can’t help it!) but in Space Pirate Trainer you actually have to do it in order to survive. And it’s not a Time Crisis-style situation where you can either be “hiding” or “shooting” — you can position yourself how you please. You can kneel down to crouch under the shots. You can sidestep them. You could probably even jump over them if you tried. It’s kind of amazing, although the game itself is fairly bare-bones, to say the least.

Next up I tried Google’s VR art package Tiltbrush. This is actually one of the things I was most interested to try, despite it being utterly “directionless” — it is what you make of it, in other words.

Essentially, Tiltbrush allows you to paint in 3D using various materials. The left Vive controller acts as an artist’s palette with several sides, and the right Vive controller acts as your paintbrush and cursor to pick things from the palette. You can then paint with light, colour, fire and various other substances, then the truly impressive part is that you can physically walk around your creation in 3D to admire it from all angles. By extension, this also means that you can create 3D sculptures rather than just flat paintings, and indeed many of the example materials produced by both Google and the community are designed with this in mind. What’s really nice about them, too, is that loading them up allows you to watch a recording of the exact strokes and steps they took to create the finished product; it can be fascinating to watch and, moreover, give you some ideas of your own on how to make some interesting designs.

Last of all, I tried Audioshield, a game by the developer of the excellent Audiosurf, and a game designed in the same mould: create levels from your own music tracks or those pulled from Soundcloud, then play through them. In the case of Audioshield, you wield two different coloured shields, one in each hand, and have to block incoming coloured balls that reach you in time with the beats and sounds in the music. While there’s less moving around than something like Space Pirate Trainer — the balls only come from one side, though you will have to look up and down — it’s probably the most “physical”-feeling of the games I played, in that there was a very strong urge to “punch” the balls (hurr) as they arrived, rather than just blocking them. Indeed, the game rewards you for actually doing this, as well as moving around more than is necessary (“dancing”, in the loosest possible sense of the word, in that convulsing like a spastic having an epileptic fit while in anaphylactic shock will also get you credit)  to actually block the incoming beats.

By the time I took the Vive headset off, I was actually sweating. The various games — particularly Audioshield — proved to be a surprisingly intense workout, although the foam thing on the headset that goes around your eye area also seems to just naturally get a bit sweaty. (That and Tim’s flat is usually the temperature of the Sun.) I’d had a great time, and I came away much more convinced that VR is something that is going to be really cool in the near future than I had previously been. I’m still not necessarily convinced it’s the future of gaming as some seem to think, but I’m certainly completely on board for experiences like Tiltbrush and its ilk.

I’m very interested to see how the launch of PlayStation VR in October of this year affects the VR landscape in general. I have a strong suspicion that it will help drive the technology into the “mainstream”, and we’ll start seeing a lot more interesting products than the current swathe of what are effectively tech demos that we have now. Very impressive, fun tech demos, admittedly — tech demos that make me kinda want a Vive of my own — but tech demos nonetheless.

So yes. VR looks like it’s going to be around for a while yet; we finally have the technology that allows us to have fairly convincing experiences in our own home, which is considerably more than can be said for the last time VR tried to be a thing back in the ’90s.