Written by Raven Smith
Images by Creative Commons
Virtual reality is the new hot button issue. From the Occulus headset to the Virtuix Omni, there seems to be a drive toward a new, fully immersive type of gaming. Immersion is a term used to describe the flow state one enters when playing a game. It’s the moment the player loses track of the real world and becomes truly enveloped within the game world. Virtual reality allows us to approach immersion in a whole new way. It’s an exciting time of ingenuity and development to advance gaming into a whole new era.
One way companies are trying to achieve immersion is through headsets. The Occulus Rift project was originally thought up by Palmer Luckey, a head-mounted display designer at University of Southern California. Luckey pitched the idea for a Virtual Reality Headset (VRH) on Kickstarter to create an affordable headset for the average gamer. Headsets before this were clunky, not compatible with modern gaming consoles, and expensive.
The Kickstarter was successful and in the two short years, the Occulus Rift received ample support and funding, most recently being bought out for $2 billion by Facebook. While this generated mostly negative reviews from the public, most of the people working on the project were thrilled. With access to Facebook’s resources and finances, this acquisition can hopefully give the Occulus Rift all the support it needs to be a successful product when it’s released on the market.
The Occulus Rift isn’t the only headset in development; Sony also decided to dip its toes into the VRH game. Sony’s headset is known as Project Morpheus and it has a smoother, sleeker design than the boxy Occulus Rift. Though appearance isn’t everything, the Morpheus headset is leading in another category: sound. The headset currently features more than 60 speakers located around the player’s head. The designer behind the headset claims that good immersion comes from not only seeing the game, but hearing what’s going on in the world you’re playing in. They currently have plans to add more speakers into the headset, upping the overall count to 120.
Gameface is a company also developing a headset, but with a twist. They want to make the headset completely wireless by making it rely on Bluetooth and wireless charging to interact with the console.
Each developer has a different strength and focus for their respective headsets, and though the competition is fierce, it’s a good thing. The companies are in a race to deliver the best product first, and the competition inspires each developer to outdo the other in order to deliver the best device possible.
There are already products being made to support and enhance the virtual reality experience. One product that has a lot of people talking is the Virtuix Omni, a ‘treadmill’ that allows the player to actually run and jump around in a game.
The system resembles a baby jumper. The player sits in a diaper-like harness suspended in a ring over a round bowl-shaped apparatus. The ring and harness allow the player to sit, lean and turn easily while strapped into a headset, and the bowl shape works with special shoes to track the players steps and jumps. Though it looks a bit ridiculous, it seems to be the most efficient way for an essentially blindfolded person to safely interact with a digital environment.
The Virtuix Omni was also funded by Kickstarter and the developers started working with the creators of the Occulus Rift to combine the two products as early as last year–only six months into the Occulus Rift’s development. The Virtuix Omni can theoretically work with any game that requires a keyboard, as the motions you perform while suspended in the rig translate to keystrokes on the computer. However, its main strength comes from being used while strapped into a VRH, mostly just so you don’t have to see how ridiculous you actually look.
The Virtuix Omni is already available for pre-order and is due to come out this September at the low price of $499. This seems a bit hasty, as companies working on virtual reality headsets haven’t even released an estimate of when their products will be ready to hit the market.
This is where companies developing virtual reality headsets will have to be careful. With all the hype on the Internet and in the gaming community surrounding the current growth of virtual reality, any product released will be heavily scrutinized. The realm of virtual reality is so new and unexplored that developers cannot afford to release a product that is in anyway disappointing to the gaming community, or else risk losing their audience, and killing virtual reality before it even really takes off.
Gamers are always looking for the newest and most interesting approach to gaming. Virtual reality systems are just that. In the industry, the greatest evolution and growth of the last few decades has been in games themselves. Consoles have simply focused on giving us better graphics and more processing power. The Wii and Xbox were a step in the right direction with movement tracking technology, but often considered gimmicky. It’s the difference between playing an empty dance game rather than an intense shootout in Battlefield 3.
The current support for virtual reality systems indicates the gaming industry is heading in a completely new direction. Gone will be the days of gamers glued to sofas, staring at screens in the dark for hours on end. Instead, we will have ‘athlete gamers’ sporting saddle sores instead of tendonitis as a badge of honor.
