VR Mission: How Oculus’ New VR Headset Creates New Game Development Challenges

The traditional game interface is fairly abstract: Players move a mouse or thumbstick, and an avatar on a 2D plane in front of them looks around. Using this interface, game designers have developed a wealth of entertainment over the years, but this system keeps players separated from their games. Game and gamer are two distinct entities, tethered together only by a controller. One company is hoping to change that by creating a more natural and immersive display system. Using state-of-the art virtual reality technology, Oculus hopes to wrap players in their digital entertainment. The technology is impressive, but before virtual reality becomes the next big thing in gaming, it has a number of hurdles to overcome.

This feature originally appeared in Game Informer issue 243.

STEPPING INTO THE MATRIX
Palmer Luckey grew up dreaming about virtual reality. A self-taught optical and electrical engineer, hacker, and VR enthusiast, Luckey slowly amassed a collection of over 40 virtual reality headsets (possibly the world’s largest private collection). Luckey dreamed of someday stepping into the Matrix – of walking around a virtual world that looks and feels like the real thing. As computer engineering advanced and the technology inside virtual reality headsets became more and more sophisticated, it seemed like gaming was getting close to achieving that dream. However, no one was building the technology that would allow us to interface with a 3D virtual world. After spending a year working in a military VR research lab, Luckey decided to start his own company, Oculus, and do something about that.

The technology to make virtual reality headsets has been available for decades, but only recently has that technology become cheap enough to be commercially viable. Even still, most head-mounted displays on the market today are heavy, clunky devices with a diagonal field of view of only about 30 to 40 degrees. Worse, the very best commercial sets sell for over $100,000. Luckey knew the technology existed to make a better, cheaper headset, so he began tinkering with prototypes in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California.

Soon Luckey’s work caught the attention of industry luminary John Carmack, who decided to integrate VR compatibility into the rerelease of Doom 3’s BFG Edition. “I believe that I’ve actually made the best VR demo for this type of thing ever made,” Carmack told G4 when he showed off one of Luckey’s
prototypes at E3 in 2012.

Carmack wasn’t the only industry vet impressed with the technology. Designers like Gabe Newell, Cliff Bleszinski, and Markus “Notch” Persson all endorsed Luckey’s design, and when Oculus announced its Kickstarter campaign for the Rift VR Headset for PCs, it brushed passed its fundraising goal of $250,000 in only four hours – eventually raising nearly $2.5 million.

It’s easy to see why so many people are excited about this kind of technology. During this year’s Game Developers Conference, we slipped on a pair of prototype goggles and weren’t eager to take them off. The Rift gives players a virtual window of 110 degrees, creating a field of view far more lifelike than that of traditional VR goggles. More importantly, Oculus has been able to reduce the head tracking latency to a matter of milliseconds. Virtually no lag exists between a user’s head movements and the movement of the in-game camera, something that virtual reality headsets have traditionally struggled with.

Our biggest complaint about the headset is the slight amount of motion blur we experienced when turning. The development kits features two low-resolution panels. Each panel sends a 640 x 800 pixel image into one eye, which adds up to a display image of 1,280 x 800 in total. While this technically qualifies as HD, the images aren’t fine enough to eliminate motion blur. The good news is that Oculus is working to incorporate higher-resolution display panels for the commercial version of the Rift, which it says will eliminate this problem altogether.

Developers are able to buy development kits for only $300, and Oculus hopes to keep the price of the consumer model in that range, but the company isn’t ready to announce anything further about price or release dates. However, Oculus’ biggest problem isn’t keeping costs down while improving the hardware (Oculus has four Ph.Ds on staff already working on those problems). The primary challenge is helping developers overcome the unique challenges and oddities of developing games in virtual reality.

OPENING UP GAME DESIGN
The Oculus Rift’s development kit includes a software package that helps developers integrate the headset with their software. Oculus continues to improve this SDK, making it more user-friendly, but getting a game to run on the Rift is the easy part. Making it fun to play in VR is the real challenge. Valve Software got early access to Oculus’ technology and the company only spent a couple days getting an early Rift prototype to work with Team Fortress 2. By contrast, it spent the following six months iterating on the system’s inputs and rebalancing character classes.

Traditional game design breaks down when a game is ported over to virtual reality. This is because many developers use a series of software tricks to optimize their games for a flat screen, and these tricks no longer work in VR. Players don’t usually notice the digital magic, but it exists.

For example, most first-person cameras are rarely as high off the ground as players might think. The first-person camera in Skyrim is actually placed only four feet off the ground. Players feel like they’re of average height while playing Skyrim on a TV or monitor, but the truth is apparent while playing in virtual reality.

Player movement is another example. Acceleration feels slower when viewed off a 2D plane (like a television set). As a result, many developers crank up their characters’ travel speeds. For example, the default running speed for Unreal Tournament 3 is 35 mph, while the Scout in Team Fortress 2 travels at an insane clip of over 40 mph.

“Those were gameplay decisions they made for a monitor,” says Luckey, “but in VR it’s like, ‘How in the world does this work? It feels like I’m a freakishly short person running at an absurd rate of travel.’ We’re going for immersion. Sometimes that’s for better or worse. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Even something as simple as designing a user interface becomes a challenge in VR. A user’s HUD is traditionally relegated to the side of a screen, but when you can move your head and look anywhere in the environment, there is no side of the screen. Game designers have to rethink not only how their players move through the world, but how they convey information such as ammo count or health while working in VR.

IS VR WORTH IT?
VR game design still has a number of wrinkles, but the Oculus Rift has the potential to change the way players interface with their games. Many functions such as jumping, attacking, and object manipulation are still controlled through a traditional mouse and keyboard interface, but the Rift effectively creates a 360-degree wrap around a player’s head, pulling the user into the game. Players no longer have to use a controller or mouse to move the game’s camera, but can simply look around their environment with the tilt of their head or shoot a glance behind them to see if they’re being tailed. This simple change in mechanics sends immersion skyrocketing. Virtual reality has the potential to create a whole new branch of gaming that could suck in a new crowd of gamers who, for whatever reason, never caught on to traditional gaming.

On the other hand, similar arguments were made about 3D gaming. Proponents touted the increased immersion and added level of realism seen in 3D gaming, and yet 3D televisions and games failed to catch on to the degree that many within the industry had hoped. Why should virtual reality be any different?

That is a question that Oculus needs to answer in order to succeed, and it is an answer that will take the form of gaming software. For Oculus to sell the general population on virtual reality, it needs to showcase some stellar gaming experiences that can’t be had elsewhere. The most popular mobile games on the market today aren’t ports of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto; they’re experiences that are unique to the touchscreen technology. Likewise, the best virtual reality applications will be those that take advantage of the technology’s unique features.

The original Nintendo Entertainment System came bundled with Super Mario Bros., which did a fantastic job of selling consumers on the merits of the system. The original Xbox shipped with Halo, which helped Microsoft gain a foothold in the market and become a relevant publisher in the console space. In order to succeed, the Rift will need a Super Mario Bros. or a Halo of its own.

So does the Rift have any killer apps coming down the pipe? Right now this is a big question mark. Up to this point, the Rift has only received promises of support for existing games like Minecraft and Half-Life 2, as well as assurances of future compatibility for titles like Doom 4 and Hawken. However, Oculus recently sent over 900 development kits out to interested parties, so hopefully someone is working on that special project that gets both players and other developers excited about the Rift’s functionality. Otherwise the Rift could end up a niche consumer electronics peripheral that only a handful of enthusiasts use to play the next Doom.

Luckey doesn’t seem too worried about any of this. “The technology is finally here. In the past, VR had to rely on specialized hardware that was either expensive, terrible, or both. Now we have mobile phone displays that have higher resolutions than most televisions. We have motion-tracker chips that are very high performance and cheap. Sensors that used to cost thousands of dollars now cost a couple bucks. We’re seeing developers saying, ‘Let’s do this right, because this is awesome. This is what we’ve been waiting for.’”

Unfortunately, the rest of us are still waiting. After getting our hands on the Rift, we’re excited to see the system’s final specs when Oculus is ready to announce a release. We’re excited to see what big publishers and indie studios might announce for the system. And we’re excited to jack into the Matrix; we just need something to do when we get there.