Gadgetory

for most of my life virtual reality was the stuff of films like The Lawnmower Man and Johnny mnemonic it looked pointless or just silly in retrospect it was also the stuff of books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash a magical alternate world so ambitious that the most powerful computers today couldn't build it but virtual reality it turns out might mean none of those things the first time I tried the oculus rift it was only a prototype held together by duct tape I spent a couple of minutes slowly walking around a low-resolution virtual spaceship the year was 2013 and virtual reality was actually coming in the following months people started releasing demos that could only have worked in VR you can feel vertigo on a steep cliff or have your head cut off with a guillotine first person shooters became genuinely first person John Carmack one of the fathers of modern-day videogames left the company he helped found to work on the rift at the 2014 Game Developers Conference virtual reality was vindicated Sony announced project Morpheus its own headset for the PlayStation 4 promising partnerships across the gaming industry less than a week later Facebook yes Facebook bought oculus but even a Facebook has grand ambitions the last year has been about finding the limits of virtual reality including the fact that simply walking around can be literally sickening at GDC the oculus demos were low-key one of them just put you on a couch Sony's were slightly more ambitious but sometimes this only highlighted their shortcomings my hands kept shooting across the room with the Move controller and when my diving cage started shaking in one demo it just made me realize that my body couldn't feel a thing that's where VR is at right now it can genuinely trick you into thinking you're somewhere else but disrupting the illusion is easy that doesn't mean there aren't some fantastic things to do eval Curie is a space fighting simulator that makes you feel like you're really inside a cockpit horror games are a natural fit when something jumps at you it practically jumps into you people have created virtual dioramas of places like Jerry Seinfeld's apartment and relaxing virtual vacations like a flight over Iceland the near-term future of virtual reality looks a lot like these experiments developers will figure out what works on present-day headsets and Sony oculus and Facebook will keep trying to build hardware that raises the bar the rift is a black box and project Morpheus is an ergonomic Tron headset but under the shells they're not so different both put you in an immersive world that leans on your brain to fill in the gaps they're a bit blurry a bit confining and in the rifts case a bit heavy reading anything at all is painful we still don't really know how to interact with them do you use a standard controller a motion control setup a giant treadmill but Facebook and Sony are betting that these are all solvable problems for now the rift and project Morpheus are still gaming devices first and foremost neither is a consumer product and sony says it won't release one until 2015 oculus hasn't set a date but it just started selling the second version of its development kit in the next year we'll probably see marginal hardware improvements and much bigger software ones oculus doesn't want people to have to take off the headset to start a game and creating a usable interface is a vital step towards making VR practical outside Sony and oculus a small group of companies are creating experimental rift controllers and a competitor is trying to beat the curve by making a mobile headset all of which takes us to Mark Zuckerberg huge bet on virtual reality as a platform of the future one investor even likened it to Google buying Android right now it feels impossible for now it probably is social interaction in particular is a core part of Facebook's plan and that's not one of the rifts strong points but Facebook is willing to wait a decade for the bet to pay off and that's enough time for VR to either quietly fade away quietly replace the Internet as we know it or at least quietly become a new information channel like mobile phones and gaming consoles the 1990s give us one VR hype cycle and if we want VR to succeed we shouldn't buy into another you're not going to get addicted or forget about sex and it'll be a long time until you can throw away your keyboard the better we understand what the oculus rift and project Morpheus can and can't do the better we'll be able to experiment with things they might be able to do and to create things that people will actually use right now and most importantly we'll be able to examine what we want out of virtual reality and whether Sony and Facebook are the ones to provide it