The Goggles Do…Something
For one of his E3 correspondences, Ryan Smith gave us a sampling of wearable virtual reality gear that could be found on the showfloor. As Ryan said in his article, virtual reality had a big presence at E3 this year, extending beyond the exhibition’s fringes, where it’s usually relegated. There was quite a bit of VR skepticism in the comments, though, with many thinking it’s just too embarrassing of a technology to catch on. DL argued against that thinking:
I don’t think there’s as much of a challenge to accepting VR, at least in “our” market, as has been made out to be.
One popular and fairly common aspect of video game playing is the image of the solitary player in front of a screen. Whether the player is a happily married adult taking an hour after the family has gone to bed to enjoy Call Of Duty or the teenager on summer break in their room competing in a racing series in Gran Turismo, there is certainly little aesthetic difference in adding a head-mounted display. The player is not being observed by others and is effectively escaping into the game. VR can only intensify that immersion/escape, while admittedly even providing less intrusion into the lives of others.
The Wii U GamePad is tantamount to an aesthetically pleasing VR set, with a small private screen and integrated controls that can keep the TV from being occupied. Its isolation is only limited to the ability of the player to block external stimuli. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been able to mentally shut out the rest of the room (I just have the wife and dog) while playing on the GamePad with headphones on, so I might as well have been in a VR headset.
Looking like a poor man’s RoboCop only matters if someone else sees you. If others are not watching, then it is effectively invisible. Being able to divorce video games from the television set is definitely both the present and the future, and there’s no reason these technologies are not viable alternatives for many use cases, but only if it adds value to the interactive experience. There can be a future for VR technology as long as we continue to live in closed, private spaces.
But as Dikachu notes, that kind of isolation can be hard to come by:
Unless you live alone, you’d have to worry about people walking up to you and smacking you in the goggles as a prank. At least, I would.
One other concern a few commenters had about the encroaching virtual future was how the weak-stomached among us might fare. long_dong_donkey_kong summed up these concerns:
I sometimes get motion sickness from playing some first-person games. It turns out this is fairly common, and for those of us who get it, it’s because your body sees movement but doesn’t feel the movement, so your brain assumes you’ve been poisoned and gets to work trying to counteract it. Since there’s no poison to counter, you just feel sick. I can play in a well-lit room. I can sit further from the TV. This helps—sometimes. Other times, my body says, “Fuck it, you’re gonna feel sick.” (Four-D rides at theme parks can be a nightmare without Dramamine). I can’t see any way that Oculus Rift or Sony Morpheus aren’t going to make me puke.