GameCentral looks back at the history of virtual reality and how PlayStation VR – or rather its games – has revolutionised the technology.
If you were to guess when virtual reality got started, you would be forgiven for thinking it was around 2010, when Oculus Rifts prototype was first demonstrated by Palmer Luckey in the halcyon days before his role as full blown alt-right wing nut had been revealed. You might even think back to the good old 1990s and Virtualitys faltering stab at arcade fame. Actually, the term virtual reality was first used in the 1980s but its history goes back a lot further than that.
It may not have let you move your head but the 1960s gave us the first serious attempt at creating an all-encompassing artificial environment, in the form of the quaintly entitled Sensorama booths. You stuck your head into one for an experience that included sights, sounds, touch, and somewhat alarmingly, smells as you watched one of its five shorts films. It had 3D visuals and stereo sound to back that up, which at the time was nothing short of revelatory.
Advertisement
Advertisement
It wasnt until 20 years later that the first head-mounted displays appeared, and you would have had to wait until the 1990s for the first proper VR to be available to the public. Justly renowned for their forward thinking and highly commercialised approach, Virtuality Groups chunky machines were the first time the mass market would discover what it felt like to be somewhere they werent. Although the kind of computing power it needed meant it would only ever be a vastly expensive arcade-only treat.
There were attempts at making consumer headsets though, such as one by Japanese toymaker Takara. Another was produced by Philips, a company with an occasionally dubious history of innovation, some of which ended up a touch half-baked, as the very small number of owners of its ill-fated CD-i console will tell you. Even Nintendo came to grief with the Virtual Boy, a strange and headache-inducing console that made you feel look like Spock in the original Star Trek peering into his retro-futuristic workstation.
Linden Labs had a go at it too, in support of their abortive but exceedingly well publicised MMO, Second Life. But the problem all these ultra-early adopters had was technology. No matter how good your intentions, without sufficient processing power even the best marketed gadgets couldnt overcome the fact that they didnt have the grunt for the frame rates and resolutions needed to make stereoscopic gaming compelling or cheap enough for the mainstream.
And so back to Palmer Luckey and Oculus Rift, a device that suddenly looked ready to deliver on the promises made over five previous decades. It looked good enough, so much so that Facebook paid an eye-watering, and grossly misguided, $2 billion for the business in 2014. That over-valuation only empowered the competition though, and that year Valve unveiled their short-lived SteamSight prototype and Sony revealed Project Morpheus, the codename for what would become PlayStation VR.
Advertisement
Advertisement
It would take another two years to come to market, coinciding with HTC Vive, a more expensive, higher end piece of hardware that introduced room scale VR, where you could wander around whilst still remaining in the simulation. Its at this point that the hardware began to take a back seat, because no matter how good the headsets are, they stand or fall on the quality of their software and games.
Its fair to say that 2016 wasnt exactly a watershed year for VR titles. There was Cryteks Robinson: The Journey, which made you a digital castaway on a distant world, but owing to early experimentation with in-game motion also caused horrible seasickness despite a walking pace equivalent to that of a heavily sedated tortoise. Ubisofts Eagle Flight was no better, giving you non-removable blinkers to counteract motion sickness, which had the unfortunate side effect of cancelling out any sensation of flying.
Obduction, the reinvention of Myst in VR was equally depressing in its ham-fistedness, but it wasnt all gloom in the early days. The Climb gave a very real sense of vertigo in its kinetic mountaineering, and EVE: Valkyrie showed that flying a starfighter while letting you look around and see your opponents closing in, made everything more immersive and exciting – if not quite as thrilling as Battlefronts Rogue One VR Mission. That put you in the cockpit of an X-wing for an experience that will make any Star Wars fan misty-eyed to this day. The fact that EA has done nothing else with the property in VR is bordering on customer abuse.
Advertisement
The emergence of multiplayer was as much of a revelation. In EVE: Valkyrie you could only see other players ships but in Star Trek: Bridge Crew they were right there in the room with you, chatting, gesturing, and making wildly inappropriate comments despite looking just like Starfleet officers. The effect was, and remains, hypnotic, which is why Rec Room has been such an Internet-wide hit. A seemingly throwaway freebie, it lets you and other VR players around the world get together for silly, informal games in a simulated bar environment. It has no right to provide as much fun, hilarity and camaraderie as it still does.
However, the mediums true potential is only now starting to become visible. In Moss, a game where you control a tiny adventuring mouse, your presence in the world is palpable – she looks up at you enquiringly, and you regularly need to reach in and move heavy objects to smooth her passage. It makes you feel part of the game world to an extent unthinkable in even first person games presented on a TV screen. Astro Bot: Rescue Mission pushed the effect even further, getting you to headbutt scenery and duck incoming missiles whilst still guiding your miniature robot friend.
Although full blown VR game experiences like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Borderlands 2 are wonderful testaments to VRs power to reinvigorate older titles and bring you physically into a simulated world, its the new generation that points the way forward. Tetris Effects use of VR combined with music and 3D sound to get you in the zone and Beat Saber finally delivering on the age old promise of wielding a lightsabre. Theyre exhilarating, and even though were still on VRs nursery slopes, they demonstrate just how much this new way to play is about to change the world.
Advertisement
By Nick Gillett
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter
Advertisement
Advertisement
