It's really my own fault for forgetting about the spiders.
I'm calling them spiders because they had what any earthling would recognize as spiderlike qualities, but they weren't spiders. They couldn't have been. For one, each was the size of my space boot; for two and three, they were filled with white goo and it often took more than one pulse from my laser rifle to kill them. I'd already taken out at least a dozen of them---some as they crawled up a cave wall, others as they scuttled toward me across the alien landscape---but it wasn't long before other, larger antagonists demanded my attention. And these shot fireballs at me. So I found cover behind a rock to wait out the projectile attack, and I forgot about the spiders.
Actually, you know what? Time out. Let's stop for a second. This is obviously the first part of a story about virtual reality. It's the part that describes the thing I'm doing in VR as though I'm really doing it. And I write a little bit about doing the virtual thing, the simulacrum, and you think Oh, man, that sounds like a fun experience, but then I say Aha, but NO! THIS WAS VIRTUAL REALITY! and we all breathe deep the promise of immersive technology and wonder how our puny brains will handle it. Maybe that thing I'm doing is standing on the edge of a building, or ascending The Wall, driving a racecar, flying like a bird (or Iron Man), or wandering a beach, or being swarmed by alien spiders while distracted by fireballs and then dying an ignominious death of spider bites before I can take out the enemy's energy core.
But every time I do this thing where I describe the thing I'm doing in VR as though I'm really doing it, here's what I'm doing in meatspace: Nothing. I'm standing. Maybe I'm crouching. I'm probably holding a game controller and pushing an analog stick or a button. I definitely have a ridiculous expression plastered on my face and goofy goggles on my head. But I'm not really doing anything.
And that's the thing that Seth Luisi is trying to change.
So the first part of this story about virtual reality is still that part where I describe the thing I'm doing. The difference is I'm really doing it. I don't mean I'm on an alien planet, obviously; I'm standing in an unassuming cubicle den somewhere in Sony's US headquarters 30 minutes south of San Francisco, and I'm wearing the latest prototype of the Playstation 4's VR headset still known only as Project Morpheus, and I'm playing a demo Luisi and his team created.
But here's the part that's different: in real life, I'm holding a prototype of a gun, and in virtual reality I'm holding the same gun. I can turn the gun this way and that IRL, and it twists accordingly in VR; I can hold it up to my face IRL, and peer through the scope in VR to squeeze off a remarkably accurate shot. Its aim is astounding, using Playstation Move controllers to achieve 1:1 precision. In other words, the game controller itself is virtualized, which means something that changes everything we thought we knew about VR gaming: First-person shooters are possible.
And that's just one very small part of what Sony's planning for Project Morpheus. The headset will be released in the first half of next year, but the company is using this week's E3 gaming conference to win gamers' hearts early. Sony is bringing close to 20 games and experiences to E3, which begins in Los Angeles tomorrow. Tonight at the company's keynote event, it will announce games from multiple game studios: Sony-exclusive ones like Guerilla Games, but also third-party outfits and even small indie teams. There'll be a VR version of Ubisoft's Trackmania racing franchise; Harmonix Music VR, a music visualizer from the Rock Band developer; Wayward Sky, a new game from the team behind third-person shooter Monday Night Combat. This strange tech demo Luisi and his team cooked up will be at E3 as well---not on the show floor, but behind closed doors, where select journalists will glimpse what the future holds.
Virtual reality has been solved. We know this now. Sure, it'll continue to improve drastically over the coming years, but the technology exists, and the first half of 2016 sees the wide release of no fewer than three consumer-grade PC- or console-based solutions: Project Morpheus, Oculus Rift, and the HTC Vive.
The question that remains, though, is what we'll do with it. What's going to be the killer app that turns a three-figure gadget or four-figure computer you need to experience VR---from a novelty to a must-have? If Sony has its way, it's games. Lots of games.
"We need to convince PS4 owners to spend several hundred dollars to purchase a Morpheus headset, on top of the PS4 they already have," says Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios. "And more gaming content is what will convince them. We have 30 or more games being developed that we are tracking---not all of them will come out at launch, but there are serious efforts being made on all of them."
"I'm shocked at how broad it is," Adam Boyes, the company's VP of publisher and developer relations, says of the slate of games in development. "You think everything's going to fall into one of four categories---sports, shooters, action, etc.---and that's not the case. Because developers have such great aceess to VR tools in general, they're just throwing everything at the wall." So there are small puzzle games. Relaxation games. First-person exploration games. Networked games where you can play with other people. Games where you can play a different game in a tabletop display---which, just to remind you, is in the virtual space. That is, you're in a VR environment, playing a game you might have once played on a regular console. It's like a 3-D version of picture-in-picture.
Obviously, Sony isn't the only company working to make this happen. Oculus has an internal game studio as well as a number of trusted partners like Epic Games, and the HTC Vive is being developed in conjunction with Valve, an acclaimed game developer and publisher in its own right. However, the Playstation 4 might be poised to raise the bar faster and higher than anyone expected. For one, while the Rift and the Vive are PC peripherals, and PCs can have any number of hardware configurations, the PS4 is a locked platform---developers know exactly what their game needs to run on, and thus don't need to hedge their bets to ensure performance on a wide range of setups.
Further, the fact the PS4 has a very PC-like hardware architecture means it's surprisingly easy for people to develop a game for a PC solution like the Oculus Rift, and then move it to the PS4. Yoshida and Boyes both mention Morpheus titles in development that began as projects on Oculus devkits, but whose developers got them up and running for Morpheus in a matter of days.
And third, the PS4 already has more than one input solution. For gamers who grew up with a controller in their hand, there's the tried-and-true layout of the Dualshock 4 controller; Sony's Japan Studio development division created a suite of experiences for the Morpheus that effectively virtualized the Dualshock so gamers could see a VR version controller that mapped perfectly to what they held IRL. There's also the Playstation Move for a more intuitive gesture-based option.
Or, if you're Seth Luisi, there's a bizarre frankencontroller that mashes both options into one that might fuel the next generation of first-person shooters.
Luisi has worked for Sony's videogame wing in some capacity for 18 years. At first, he localized Japanese RPGs so they could be played in the US. If Final Fantasy VII was a formative experience for you, you have Luisi to thank. Later, he worked on the long-running combat series SOCOM, and as part of a subsidiary called Zipper Interactive, he helped create an ambitious multiplayer first-person shooter called MAG. Then, in 2012, Zipper went under, and Luisi began wondering what to do next.
While at Zipper, he'd set about trying to make gaming more intuitive. "I've done a lot of games with a controller," he says, "and a lot of that goes back to the mouse and keyboard days, where you're moving around a cursor to a point on the screen." If he could find a way to implement accurate gestural aiming, he reasoned, he could make a shooting-based game feel more like the real thing. He'd begun exploring the idea by modifying a gunlike peripheral called a Sharpshooter, rubber-banding an extra Playstation Move to it, but it seemed premature.
Then came the sudden resurgence of virtual reality, and with it a brainstorm: Luisi could see not only how to achieve that accuracy, but to do it in a far more immersive environment. He formed a new studio, Impulse Gear, and set about doing just that for Project Morpheus.
There was still one problem, though: first-person shooters weren't supposed to work in VR. The fast-twitch reaction times and high rate of speed, everyone thought, was a recipe for inescapable simulator sickness. Oculus' own best practices for developers recommend that players' characters in first-person-view games move at only 1.8 meters per second---far too slow for a true action game based on player locomotion. (When there's a stationary frame of reference, like a racecar or a spaceship, there's much lower risk of high-speed movement making you lose your lunch.) And of course, there's the dreaded "right analog stick" problem: Players generally don't feel discomfort with walking in a given direction, but using a controller's right stick to move the camera---in a first-person view, that's equivalent to turning your head in a given direction---is a short road to nausea. It's a clash between your eyes and your vestibular system, and your brain ends up telling your body that you've been poisoned.
So first came the aiming mechanism. "Without detached aiming," Luisi says, "you're stuck with either using your head to aim or moving the whole screen or some sort of cursor in the world---and none of that is intuitive." People have kludged together gun-like peripherals before, and Sony's London Studio has used the Playstation Move controller to allow players to pick up and manipulate objects in virtual space. Impulse Gear's solution was a little bit of both: Based on Luisi's earlier work with the Sharpshooter, they 3D-printed a prototype combining Playstation Move and navigation controllers and the guts of a PS3 Dualshock 3 controller. The result offered aiming speed and accuracy that fit VR needs perfectly.
Then the Impulse Gear team found some creative ways to overcome the other issues. Setting the demo on an alien planet allowed them to boost player speed to 6 meters/second---more than three times what people thought could work. The reason is scale. "When you put someone in a hallway," Luisi says, "they have an understanding of the size of a hallway, ceilings, doorways; if you're moving that fast you feel like you're moving that fast." Keeping the landscape unfamiliar and the distances between objects much greater than they would be in a conventional shooter helps mitigate the effects of your running speed.
Again, this isn't a game. It's not even an official demo. It's just something that Luisi and Impulse Gear cooked up to see if they could. And it turns out they can. The next step is turning it into a game. Luisi won't cop to anything specific, and the game might not end up even taking place in the same world the demo does, but he's pretty sure they'll stick with a sci-fi approach. Not only does it offer opportunities to get around the design bugaboos, but more importantly it's a change of a pace for a guy who's designed earthbound military titles for more than a decade. "I've made lots of modern combat games," he says. "It's good to do something different every once in a while."
