The Vive and the Future

First Thoughts (aka early adopters = beta testers)

After owning this thing, I understand all of the commentary on how hard it is to set up and the glitches and the everything. I really do, whereas before I thought it was all whining (gosh, room-scale requires a room?!?! how dare they!).

I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out why the hell the headset would work fine but stop tracking as soon as I brought up the Steam menu, and it wasn’t until I had fiddled with and reset everything multiple times that the SteamVR software finally decided to mention that the base stations might be too far apart — instead of simply repeating that it wasn’t able to connect to them. It turns out this is a problem no one has (I apparently have more space than any reviewer), but after finally being alerted to it, I shrunk the space a bit and re-angled the base stations to cover more space and things started working again. Well, mostly.

Once it lost head tracking and my 'head’ started moving rapidly towards the floor. Another time, I brought up the menu for something, dismissed it, and my head had teleported under the floor... and it’s not like you can climb through the ceiling or hold W to reposition. A couple of times, it lost tracking on the controllers and you’ll be damned if you can get them to be tracked again without exiting everything. 

I also have other complaints. The cable is long and, while I never got tangled up on it, I was often acutely aware of it — especially in games where you move around a lot. The seal on the mask is a bit weird in that I can’t seem to block out all the light around my nose, which is a bit jarring occasionally when leaning over to look at something closer. The gasket, uh, absorbs sweat, which seems to be not great when you’re doing a lot of things that will cause you to sweat. Which you will, I promise. And so passing it around is weird, and I’ve already ordered more gasket/mask/things.

But here’s the thing:

None of that shit matters.

You know why? Because those things are mere irritants when you are confronted with the totality of the experience. Those things are like saying, ‘gosh, it’s really inconvenient that my jetpack requires fuel’, or ‘jeez, my butler does not sound like Michael Caine as Alfred Pennyworth’, or perhaps ‘I am sad that my workplace only serves me foie gras once a week and my free steak is a touch overcooked because it is not sous vide’. 

Let me paint you a picture.


You’re floating in the air. In front of you: Kennedy Space Center. More specifically, you’re about a hundred yards from the Saturn V rocket, just above the nose cone. And you’re slowly dropping down. In midair. It turns out that the simulation is good enough that your body actually thinks that you’re dropping down, in midair, and you might get a bit queasy. But no worries, soon, you’re on the ground, now looking up at the rocket, which is about three hundred and sixty feet taller than you are. You get a very good idea of the scale. Then you ride in the elevator up, slowly, with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and eventually get yourself strapped in on the left side of the crew module. Banks and banks of switches in front of you, and two windows: one to your left, and one up ahead. The countdown starts at around the two minute mark. Buzz and Neil occasionally respond to the countdown. And soon enough, liftoff, and as you gaze through the window to your left, the Saturn breaks through the clouds, you start to see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space. And in front of you, the sun, bright enough that you should squint, and as the rocket angles and the first stage separates, you see the small disk of the moon, your target. This is Apollo 11. Do you like space? Do you like history? If you didn’t before, this is a good argument for it.

Okay, too mundane of an experience? How are you at shooting? Let’s put you on a platform in the far future, and throw some drones at you. They hover, they bob and weave, and they shoot you. Thankfully, you can shoot back, with the choice of five weapons and a shield (protip: you’ll want the shield). Make it a few levels in, and this is what confronts you: three drones, strafing across the deck from your nine o’clock. Laser one, train your pistol on the slightly stronger one, dodge blaster fire as you blow it apart. Take aim at the third one, but be aware of the other drones coming up from under the platform - reach back for the shield and block, and then set your gun over the top and return fire. Crouch down to dodge. Lean to dodge. Move to dodge and reposition. Fire blindly sometimes. Fire less blindly. Get some good hits. Get a high score. Die, and in dying realize that a goddamned drone has snuck up behind you, and that you need to stop just watching only the 180 degrees that you’re used to. Welcome to space pirate trainer

Kind of exciting, right? Maybe too exciting. Let’s dial it down, and load you in to the deck of a sunken ship. Peaceful, calm, with the sun filtering through the surface of the water way above and casting rays down towards you. There are small fishes, here and there, and you can wave your incorporeal hand and make them scatter. You look around for a bit, and then you feel the deck shake. And you know what? Your brain has bought into the fact that you are literally under water, standing on the deck of a sunken ship, and would like to know why the hell the deck is shaking and unstable. So you turn around, and come face to face with a blue whale. You know how blue whales are large? You’ve probably seen an encyclopedia entry, or maybe a picture. Well, it turns out that they are huge enough that you take an involuntary step back when you realize how close it is. They are huge enough that a whale’s eyeball is the size of your head. They are huge enough that when it moves its flukes to swim away, you take another step back because you have no interest in being hit by that thing, which your brain believes will happen. Is that not intense enough? Next stop, the deepest abyss

I think you get the point. The key thing is that it works.

It really does. It does enough to fool your brain that what you see in the headset is where you are. You can walk around the tops of turrets to get a better shot with your longbow to stop the hordes that are coming. You move around to readjust yourself so that you can get a better putt in place. You can be anywhere and do… a lot of things. Not everything, but there’s a feedback loop where you think about doing something, and it’s doable, and that tells your brain that you’re actually there. The things that you expect to happen - when you throw an apple, when you shoot a gun, when you pull a switch - they happen, and your brain uses this as confirmation that what you see is what exists.

And it’s just the beginning: there’s so much more. Video games — interactive experiences — have always been limited in how you can interact. Whether by gamepad or mouse and keyboard, we’ve always been limited in our ability to affect things through a finite number of inputs. And with regards to immersion, we’ve always been separated by a flat screen on which everything happens: in front of us, not to us. There are still limits, but this is a gigantic leap forward. There will undoubtedly be refinements, and version 2 and 3 and X, but this doesn’t feel like a proof-of-concept. It feels like primetime. It feels like the future.

Other Games

This is just a section remarking on some highlights of games I’ve played. I’ve already noted three of my favorites above, but there’s much more. This section will be updated as I try more.

Tilt Brush — 8.5/10

It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous and people should enjoy it and it’s incredible. It’s also not a game, but I think it’s an example of what the medium can and should be. It’s a tool for artists to create incredible things and share them with others. It has a built in showcase that is prepopulated with incredible art — and when you load them, it actually goes through the drawing process for you! There’s also the ability to create gifs of the work as well, so if you do something cool, you can show others. I would encourage you to sit down and just stare at someone drawing a space dragon. Even if you’re not an artist, I think you can load into Tilt Brush and realize the potential that it represents.

Audioshield — 8.5/10

Audioshield is something like boxing to music. Or maybe boxing, with the music as your opponent. Made by the same developer as Audiosurf, it’s a standing experience where you have to defend/deflect projectiles that are generated by the musical track you feed it. EDM music and songs with heavy beats will likely be more engaging than softer songs, but as I write this, there’s a piano concerto in the top 15 most played. It really is an incredible use of immersion and paring both music and lights and body presence, and I see a lot of people coming back to this again and again. I certainly will.

Hover Junkers — 8/10

One hand holding either a three-barreled shotgun or six-shot revolver, the other hand steering your hovercraft around, purely depending on which direction your wrist is in. Mix in the physical aspect of crouching against your cover and peering around it to shoot the enemies — who are other human beings — and you have the incredible game that is Hover Junkers. The multiplayer aspect is huge, and the first time that you see someone dodge some of your shots and realize that they are, in fact, standing in some room somewhere physically dodging your shots is pretty incredible. I’m looking forward to more games like this, that give you both physical movement in your playspace and more global movement via, say, an engine attached to your platform. 

Job Simulator — 7.5/10

This is one of the games that I actually spent the most amount of time with, and the one singular game that I think demonstrates all of the strengths of the platform. I think it’s a great tutorial into VR, even though I’m not super compelled to return to it. The conceit is simple: you’re a robot, doing jobs that robots think humans did! But underneath that surface, it’s actually even simpler: play. Play with the coffee machine. Play with the CDs. Play with the buttons. Everything that seems interactable is interactable. Throw things at robots. Drink the wine. Burn the toast. Use your hands to do things that you would do. Realize they are slightly clumsier than you are used to and that you will burn the tea.  Do the thing. Do anything. Like I said, it’s an incredible introduction into VR.

Final Approach — 7/10

This was actually a super interesting experience for me. On it’s surface, it’s a VR version of Flight Control, which is a pretty lo-fi low budget casual mobile game. The big difference, though, is that in a 2D game where you can see everything, it’s pretty easy. With Final Approach, you’re a disembodied avatar in the middle of the action, and that means that you never have a birds-eye view of what’s happening. Instead, the planes are flying around (and through) you, and it is incredibly easy to miss impending collisions across runways when you’re busy trying to get a burning helicopter to land. There are also mini-events that add on some additional distraction by throwing you into a first person view to hose down planes or scare birds away, but even without that, it’s surprisingly challenging. The biggest thing, though, is that it really illustrates the great potential of doing a top down RTS this way — after fifteen minutes with it, you get very used to having a God’s eye view of the map, and dragging in planes to land becomes second nature (and then hearing them crash because you set two planes to land on opposite sides of the same runway….). But those planes could easily be units, marching off to battle. I’m happy to come back to this and work on it some more.
This was actually a lot of fun, but you kind of have to like golf, you know? If you don’t, this is going to be far less interesting of an experience. The physics work, the 18 hole course is interesting, and the movement is well executed. It also turns out that you can hit the ball while it’s still moving….but that’s not usually a good idea. It’ll definitely be improved with multiplayer, when that launches, but even as is it’s a good vehicle to experience the difference between VR and, say, the Wii. 

Games TBD

Vanishing Realms. Fantastic Contraption. Gallery Starseed.

Feel free to comment with games that should be played!