Gadgetory

all of this PAX East 2016 coverage is brought to you by saira power who make the Fane book that we recently overclocked past 4 gigahertz I think VR is one of the most interesting things happening right and in fact I would describe myself as one of the pinnacle dr enthusiasts but I'm also appear to be one of the pinnacle VR skeptics I go back you know even even in the early stage like on the Apple to you know they people made some simple VR goggles that you know add a tiny view screen had terrible lag and even dated gloves you could wear you know even something tenant endo way back I think you've made a data glove and and every time one of those come out we get really excited about it and we convert whatever game we were working on at the time we would spend a couple of weeks making it work in VR just because we just thought to be so cool and as a demo even was cool but every time you play with your going like yeah but you know the lag is really making me sick and the peripheral vision is just not there and so to think of actually playing a game that way you're going it's not going to be and it's not going to be a superior experience and so every year these would come out every few years somebody would make this round and and we'd look at them and abandon it right well obviously the latest round of VR has gotten an enormous amount of attention and investment and the hardware is way way better and so we now have VR hardware that is pretty dang good you know not only is it really full visual area the tracking and response time is now very very quick and I go see you Layton sees low I see demos now that are going like that is a really cool demo but I don't see very many things I'm going like I would buy that game and 10 more like it that I can see 10 variations on the theme that will be interesting to explore different ways in which VR is being created or I go to people's booths where they're demonstrating VR and I watch them do things like this one demo might be i'm going to pick up something out of a bowl and set it on a table or a shelf and I watch them struggling do that and I'm just going like yeah okay well you know we're just not there and and while I go some of these things are fun I mean I I enjoy going booth to booth and going like hey that was that was cool that was fun but I haven't seen the killer app not one much less 10 and until there's 10 killer apps you're not going to sell five hundred dollar or better hardware and to get this to get the technical solution you really need to be selling me you know the the phones in cases is cool and will be freely available but doesn't have the wide wraparound of you doesn't let you see your own hands in front of you and so you really need to be buying multi-thousand dollar hardware to really solve the problem and even with the problem solved there's not yet the killer apps so so I remain a huge enthusiast and a huge skeptic but it's at least for me I'm now to the point where I am toying with trying to build something only just not because i think i can solve the problem necessarily but because somebody needs to solve this problem and and it's not that i don't think they do people trying to solve it or at least smarter may be smarter especially in the VR area as I am but it's at least interesting have to begin to toy with right so that's what we've we've done a lot of these demos as you I mean you do the show as you know how many there are that's the problem I've had on the even just the editorial side a lot of it's sort of you ever Everest or the Star Wars down or their cool for a few minutes and personally as a gamer outside of the the gaming industry as a reporter I don't necessarily see myself going home going through the effort to set it all up and then playing the demo is more than a few times right or even look like even if you skip games and just go to more virtual reality say experiences movies or other things there is a a fairly well-known movie maker whose name is eluding me but he did it he shot a VR sequence in a refugee camp I think in Syria and and in that film I thought he did a really great job of learning exploring some new cinematography techniques and what I mean by that is in this little vr tour of this refugee camp he had told everyone that with whose faces he walked through don't ignore the camera assume it's a person and as soon as the person you would like to have an engagement with and so if i was looking towards you you'd be like waving at me saying hey come check this out but if i look over here there's somebody writing buying a bicycle saying hey follow me and you obviously can't look both ways for any length of time but you felt engaged in both ways and so I'm like oh look that's it that's interesting but it was just interesting you know main I'm going like okay there's a new cinematic technique they wouldn't be normal in a normal film but it's only one piece of a cinematic language it's just it's a step and so I still think that there's you know whether it's movies or games there's a lot to learn from a the language and activity to do and and even I was to talk about something the hallway a little while ago you know if you know how would I approach in an ultimate way AVR scene and I'm going you know what I would want to do is I'd be locked in a room and there's a sewer grate and I'd want to get down on my hands and knees and take a screwdriver and pop the great off and then crawl through that tunnel but I'm going hard would be our Hardware won't let me do that right is that it's not gonna infinitely large space with track yeah sorry exactly so there's so even the first things that pop in my mind is what I would like to do if I was really there it still won't do and so it probably won't do any time soon and so so yeah I think it's I think I'm a little bit stumped as to what the first great VR experience will be what's your take on of course you know Warren or inspector he just told us a TCG see that he likes to make statements that get people to provoke them to argue with him and he made the statement of VR is a fad that was his his poll quote that was posted everywhere do you have any thoughts on that view it sounds like you're more towards the middle well no I'm actually closer to Warren uh you know I am not convinced that the billions of dollars that have been poured into this generation of VR will be paid back in this generation of hardware and software development you know eventually you know the matrix will eventually be here or maybe we're living in it now I mean right I mean it could be you know so eventually we will have sufficient technology to be indistinguishable from reality and at that point II of the we you know we will be there it will happen but I'm not convinced that we're as close as the billions of dollars of investment would imply sure right you know that's muddies the waters a bit when there's so much investing going on too because then there's well there's tons of people wanting to make a true right it's if this generation of VR does not work it's not for lack of effort or money because you know there's a lot of that going into it you know it's it's one of these things where you know I mentioned my in treatment with it you know in one way one of mine treatments is if I'm wrong you just want to be left too far behind you know you're doing you're going like I had a baby it would suck to like be the naysayer in while it all happens and by the way I've done that before you know like I remember it's really funny if you if you look at my prog nest like prognostications for the future I'd say my hit miss ratio is about 5050 at best you know like and my first one was my great my greatest lesson of in business was you know I wrote my first games on the Apple too and you might remember that the first IBM PC that came out wasn't a particularly great machine it had a chiclet keyboard it didn't run really particularly faster than an apple at the graphics weren't any necessarily any better had the IBM name on it but I didn't care about that and and so when I saw come out I was like well anybody who knows this at all is clearly going to pick an apple and this PC things not going to work and and so for software development which you know we even back then it was taking a year or two to make a game and so I kept our development teams working purely on Apple too and we'd probably port to the pc if it ever became relevant but then the pc took off so fast and the Apple Apple to cratered so fast that we realized we would have no games to sell their we know market into which to sell those games and we had to completely change our staff over to pc developers that was actually the last time I programmed I never program on a PC I never had time the only thing I'd have time to do was quickly higher Andrey managed to everything to get over there before we ran into money it very nearly put us out of business we my brother and I both had to put on all the money we had in the world and had to borrow another couple million dollars to keep the doors open to get i think was ultima 5 out on time the only game ever shipped on time because it was we were to go out of business but didn't no choice and and things were fine after that but that was my big lesson of you can't predict what the public's gonna do you know well you have enough you can have an opinion but you know but it's groupthink and trying to predict groupthink is fraught with peril but if i had to make a stand I'm with Warren this this we're still generation early at least