Ken and Roberta Williams Working on Colossal Cave Adventure Remake for VR and PC
gameworldobserver.com
gameworldobserver.com
It's a very oldschool fantasy text adventure which, by today's standards, requires a lot of patience, but it created a genre and inspired games like Zork (and by extension Infocom), and Adventure for the 2600, which itself inspired many other games.
Rick Adams has a great website dedicated to it with a lot of history and fun facts (https://rickadams.org/adventure/), and you can play the game directly on the site.
Very exciting to see the Sierra crew taking this on. It seems like a bizarre thing to adapt but I'm a big fan of them and the original.
I came into the whole thing comparatively late (sometime in the late 2000s, I guess?), but Colossal Cave is still a huge part of my childhood. Expansions, ports, remixes, and re-imaginings are already a tradition for the game: even the version most people are familiar with is Don Woods's expansion of Will Crowther's original code. I'm psyched to see the Williams's contribution to the canon!
Get Inform Begginers Guide and Inform's Designers Manual. Both are free PDF files.
You'll need Inform6 and the Inform 6 library (easy).
I enjoyed the original game.
Imagine what they’ll do with the 3D version…
Playing the game as reading a choose your own adventure book outside of a Parisian cafe = Done
Playing a PC like version while sitting in a grungy university library basement in front of a Commodore 64 = Done
Same experience but in three dimensions = Mindblowing
I had already played all the Infocom games before discovering Crowther and Woods' Adventure (remember this was pre-internet). It came in the box with a Mockingboard speech synthesizer I got for my Apple in the early 80's. The novelty was that the mocking board text-to-speeched the game, which was neat but unbearable. Not to mention it didn't know how to say "xyzzy" correctly.
On PC, I found it was very easy, though that might have been because I was 20 years older than the first time I played it.
It's a delightful experience in the Quest. Some of the difficulty comes back due to not having any ability to take notes. But being able to walk around and see this world "for real" that I've already spent so much time in was giddying.
I was excited for Return to Zork's attempt at rendering, but was that ever a bummer ("Want some rye?" ...wtf?), as was Inquisitor.
Like I said, I found RealMyst easier than original Myst. Being able to move in 3D space made levers more obvious, not hidden in background detail. I also tended to get lost in original Myst and had difficulty getting back and forth between puzzles while backtracking (especially a problem in Riven). RealMyst with free movement taps into my spatial awareness much better.
'realMyst' is an earlier 3D remake: https://store.steampowered.com/app/244430/realMyst_Masterpie...
Indeed: Cyan created a whole lot of variants/remakes of Myst.
...And original Myst probably 25 years ago.
But without the depth perception that VR gives you. That's why it's "flat."
It's an idiom in the VR community, especially since a lot of games support both VR and non-VR. But always saying "non-VR-mode" or "normal mode" (which mode is 'normal'? VR or not?) is kind of awkward.
It started as "flat", people started joking about it being "pancake" and it just stuck.
... but simplifies in a good way. I'm not a fan of the sort of artificial challenge that a viewpoint more limited than my avatar should have in a game induces, and I considered that complexity in the original more bug than feature.
Have you played Obduction? If not I can highly recommend it. I'm also looking forward to their new game Firmament. I'm so glad Cyan is back making games.
Why not? They've published lots of substandard games in the past.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3n8ea/how-sierra-and-a-disg...
A longer review in March 1994 stated that the game had succeeded "at so many levels", that its realism and "seemingly endless amounts of" police procedure offered "larger implications about our society and its struggle against the drug machine". The reviewer noted that treating NPCs with the same "lack of consideration" players do so in other games "seems incredibly damning—and heartrending—because it's true to life. We treat each other, the game implies, in our attempts merely to cope with the problems with which we are faced, like NPCs". The magazine concluded that "Open Season tells that story magnificently".
1. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=...
They founded Sierra On-Line in 1979, which published pretty stellar titles until its sale in 1996 (and subsequent mismanagement and outright corporate fraud by the acquirer).
Here are a list of the things they published, among which some were developed inhouse, among which some were developed by one or both of the Williams.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment...
PS: And on a personal note, I can't imagine my teenage years without Sierra. From King's Quest to Dynamix to Valve's Half-Life to Relic's Homeworld to Gearbox's initial Half-Life console ports, they survived far longer in an industry where so many don't... while putting out amazing stuff over decades.
Or to put it another way, when they first started writing and publishing games, there was no Internet (in the modern sense) and Intel had just released the 10 MHz 8086 built on a 3000 nm (3 µm) node.
By the time they left the company, the web and JavaScript existed, and Intel had just released the Klamath 300 MHz Pentium II on a 350 nm node.
Crazy times.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Kings_Quest_I_-_Quest_for_...
Discussion of how it's done with DOSBox compiled to Wasm:
I played ADVENT for many hours, back in the day (on the boss's time). The only characters I remember are a dwarf, a pirate, a dragon, a bird, a giant, and a giant clam. OK, I suppose the bear and the troll might count as characters.
None of these count as "interesting characters" - a chap that always says "Fee Fi Fo Foo" isn't particularly interesting, and none of the others has any dialogue.
I think this is what got me into computers and is basically responsible for me choosing my major and later my career..
I want to strap on my VR helmet and be in a dark bedroom with only the glow of the CRT for light at 3 AM in the morning MUDing with someone on the otherside of the world who I'd been trying to set up a scene with for weeks for IC reasons.
IC = ?
IC is in character.
I can explain this better with an example I believe. While playing as a jeweler in Minas Tirith in a MUD I had need to consult with an armorer PC to receive some in-character training on basic armorsmithing as Gondor was, at that point in the plot, in desperate need of arms and armor quickly so all of the PCs who had any sort of forge capable of metalwork were trying to make an effort of supporting the war effort. While there were lots of weaponsmiths in EST the one armorer I knew well and enjoyed playing with happened to be a Chinese player who occasionally overlapped with EST. I ended up staying up late one Saturday night and having a very fun scene with them, but there were serious logistical complications and a bunch of DMs sent back and forth to make sure we were both available.
The one time we "worked together" was when I got a summer internship at another defense contractor, programming in FORTRAN 77 on VAX/VMS. Coming from C & UNIX at the university, VMS and FORTRAN was quite different. She taught me the basics of the language over a weekend. I never really adjusted to the column layout stuff.
I recall we would use used punch cards for scrap paper when I was a kid. Pretty much every note or list she wrote was on a used punch card.
https://grack.com/demos/adventure/
It's the 1984 variant version[1] but close enough. It's also retro styled as well!
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure#Later_...
Glad someone posted it. The source is available here: https://github.com/mmastrac/adventure
When people think of VR they think of the Matrix but that will never be because of the laws of physics. Latency is the big problem (unless such a network is very localized in the real world) but visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light. Another big visual problem: focus.
Yet another problem: controls. In the real world you just think and act. In VR you have these controls to direct movement. That's never going to feel natural so you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic.
There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be.
Part of what made these old adventure games so compelling (IMHO) was the format: text. Games like Myst added images and can have an appeal all of their own but it's different to the text adventure game. The same goes for video (meaning rendered 3D graphics). I have doubts that this magic (which has a heavy dose of nostalgia) will translate to VR.
For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice.
Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.
6DOF is the absolute bare minimum and I feel we should have reserved the term "VR" specifically for 6DOF devices. The immersion just isn't there without positional tracking.
And positional tracking with the controllers is another huge factor. So - I would argue you've never really tried "real VR".
Consider where the joint is that moves your head. When you rotate your head, you're not rotating through an axis in the center of your head; you're pivoting a spline describing your neck. That's a very complicated motion and it can't be faked by just turning the view without moving the view also (and if you try to simulate it without full 6DOF tracking, you'll have to model the user's neck length and curvature profile, and that'll get very messy, with disorientation consequences when you get it wrong).
Even if you're one of the types that can't quite get into VR or wearing the headset, I'd recommend trying out some TrackIR, or for free you can try Opentrack + AI track and just use your standard webcam.
Everyone dismisses 3DOF VR but that is realistically the only form of VR that is widely consumer friendly. If I can't stand or sit more or less in a single place, I'm simply not going to use an app despite having a headset that supports it.
I'm similarly space constrained a lot of the time but 6dof is still my bare minimum requirement.
Head movements of 1 or 2 cm matter for immersion. It's not about running round a large play space.
Seated VR needs to be 6dof as well
Yes. It's worth it. It's such a significant difference that I just have zero interest in 3dof headsets for anything other than 360 video (and I've got very little interest in 360 video)
With 3dof, the minute you lean or move your head by a small amount, the whole illusion is shattered and you are reminded that you're just watching a stereoscopic skydome that's glued to your head. It's also why lag and low refresh rates are an immersion killer for 6dof.
Plus - even seated experiences allow a lot of mobility. You can lean towards things to examine them closer. You can duck to either side. "Seated" doesn't mean "immobile apart from your head"
I know you are making a hyperbole, but that is just absolutely ridiculous.
Graphics is not the problem. It's the interface.
My point is not that you cannot make fun games in VR. you can, and beat saber is very fun. But you can only have so many beat sabers.
Whatever limits vr creates there are people who can work within those limits.
The problem is so fewer developers are making indie vr because it is locked down and expensive.
It's not going to be for everyone. Games today aren't either. Some people just don't like gaming, reading, VR, sitcoms, etc.
But when people think vr, and they look at the movies, they're thinking about games where you are a person in a place that feels alive.
The game itself, sadly, doesn't hold my attention for very long, but I think the VR UI is nearly ideal for it.
Maybe that's the real future of VR? I enjoyed Half Life Alyx as it was a really polished feeling VR shooter but trying to move in that game was always a janky experience - I think VR exploration when things are peaceful is interesting and fun but, since you're never going to be able to freely navigate a scene by walking around alone it'll always be quite immersion breaking. I'd be more excited to see something like a mech warrior game with a navigable bridge than a COD style shooter - if you design the setting around having a fixed limited environment you can freely move around in in VR that you then move around in a larger environment... I think that's the sweet spot for VR for the foreseeable future.
Which isn't to say all games have to be designed strictly around VR's strengths, there are games that exist in both formats, and sometimes it comes out better than the original version (Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Super Hot). Other times it's just ok because the game design doesn't translate as well to VR (Skyrim, Borderlands).
If what you're hoping for is mainstream AAA titles to get adapted into VR and achieve millions of sales, then yes I think you'll be disappointed. But Beat Saber isn't the only opportunity to be thoughtful about how VR interfaces work. I doubt I'd have ever bought a minigolf game to play on a TV, but Walkabout Mini Golf is relaxing and a lot of fun. On the shooter side of things, you have games like Half-Life: Alyx or Hyper Dash. Puzzling Places lets you assemble 3D puzzles of scanned real world environments. Tea For God takes a limited play area and carefully designs a continuous level that feels boundless as you walk freely though it.
We're not going to have Matrix-like VR interactions any time soon where you swing a sword and your hands are physically stopped when your opponent blocks it. But I wouldn't look at that and say "No way this goes anywhere, the pinnacle of game design is the limitless interface of two thumb sticks, four buttons, a D-pad, and a pair of bumpers/triggers."
This is true, but it’s also true that most things don’t claim to be major paradigm shifts and “the future”. Designing VR around these limits won’t satisfy people who have been promised ready player one. It’s a gimmick with some good potential, but it’s just a gimmick.
Beatsaber is like the Tetris of VR. It won't change anything, while it's a good game and it's addictive.
Y'all standing at the station for a train that might never come
And I'm not even going to say "you missed it". You can get on the train any time you want. It's here and it's pretty cool.
And don't even get me started on how awful virtual workspaces are.
Boneworks is a game that does the opposite, but is similarly disappointing. You get fast walking speed with the analog stick allowing you to be very agile. Presuming you don’t get nausea… this is by far your most useful asset in a fight. The real world movement is basically nothing and a lot of the fighting is better done as a sort of jousting with your weapon held in front of you and your move stick held forward.
A big part of it is how damned inconvenient the whole thing is. I need all these long high-quality USB3 cables for the headset and sensors, a beefy video card, and most importantly an otherwise empty room to play it in safely.
The Quest, the most convenient system, only kinda deals with the first two problems and does nothing for the third.
I don't know about you guys, but I can't just have the servants clear out the tertiary ball room whenever I want to play a game. In the normal sized bedroom I've allocated for VR I have managed to slam into walls on more than one occasion when moving quickly trying to hit something or dodge something.
I would definitely say the whole thing is still pretty far into "gimmick" territory for the vast majority of gamers.
Putting a small mat on the ground gives you a reference to where you are in your room, if need be maybe you just make sure you never stray from the mat. One of the reasons I got an "inside out" style headset is so I don't have to worry about all the cables and base stations, with the tradeoff that the hand tracking isn't quite as robust. Much less faffing about.
I hope it will improving as I can see this working well for portable dev work once everything gets smaller and more powerful. I mean I am there now but there is no software (at least last I checked) to work in environments where I can just have 5-6 screens with browsers open without my laptop connected. If that and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and I no longer need a laptop for 90% of my work. And then just make it smaller for improvement:.
That isn't a problem. People don't want to use technology to exactly replicate the real world - they use tech to replicate the real world up to a point, and then they diverge into things that can't happen in the real world. People don't care if the black isn't quite right. After all, people watch films and TV a lot, and they have the same problem.
There are lots of reasons why VR might fail to become mainstream in the long term but graphics isn't one of them.
> There's no killer app for VR
We'll end up quibbling about the definition of "killer app" but I think there's dozens killer apps for VR. If you mean "an app that will make it as popular as the smartphone" then you're right. But that's a strangely high bar. If you mean "an app that is compelling enough to sell a reasonably large number of headsets" then that definitely already exists. (but then we can enjoy quibbling about what "reasonably large" means)
I find it hard to talk about VR as some monolithic thing. When I first tried it, I felt the same "wow, this is the future!" feeling most enthusiasts got. The stutters and the weird headaches then made me add "...but not the present".
But my personal issues with it are both surmountable and not shared by everyone. On the hardware side, the depth-of-focus issue must be solved somehow, and graphics processing must improve a lot on both the hardware and software side in order to eliminate any stutters (IMO any frame drop or framerates below 90 are unacceptable, again, my personal issue), image sharpness must match real-world screens at a reasonable distance (at least where I'm looking at) and when it comes to games, unfortunately anything that tries to look realistic still looks like mid-2000s graphics in VR.
Plus the headset must be comfortable to wear for at least 8h at a time, and there needs to be good full-body tracking, although for a virtual workplace that's not so important.
I'd probably spend all of my work and play time in VR if these things were solved, and I could totally see that happening in the next few years, the way things are going.
Unless the only good option is Facebook, in which case, I'll pass.
Which people are these that "think of the Matrix" when they think of VR? I've seen some people talk about it, or more often Sword Art Online. But they are rare. It tends to mark folks as not having really tried VR. I've seen people talk about not even wanting to try VR until it's "full dive". That's dumb. I doubt it's ever going to get there and I also doubt it's even a good idea. See: The Matrix and SAO for depictions of why.
I think "people" know the tech is not magic and have decent expectations on what it entails. What I tend to see are people blown away by how impactful that simple "box with a display and some lenses" concept works at transporting a person to a new world.
I don't think anyone really cares about black levels that much, not to the degree that it becomes any kind of deciding factor on purchases. Focus... are you sure you're not Ronny Abovitz? Literally the only person I've seen ranting about focus. Again, nobody cares. It'd certainly be nice, but it's just not that important of a feature.
Your comment on latency is confusing. Which latency? Motion-to-photon latency? Hasn't been a problem in years. Network latency? We're not talking about a networked game here, and regardless, that's going to be true for any kind of multiplayer experience, VR or otherwise. It's also a largely solved problem and people don't tend to notice network latency in most multiplayer games. The only latency issue I encounter on a regular basis is Oculus Quest 2's hand tracking latency. That's not a fundamental limitation, though, because other hand tracking systems like UltraLeap show that it can be done very well. The Quest's problem is that it's running on what's essentially a 3 year old smartphone SOC.
As for "killer apps", honestly, I have never really believed in the concept. There's nothing on my smartphone that I can't do without it being specifically on my smartphone. But combined, the whole ecosystem is extremely useful. My smartphone also isn't the seamless digital assistant Jobs predicted it would be, but it's still extremely useful. Back in 2008, most people thought smartphones weren't for them, but now most find them extremely useful.
There are problems in the VR industry. Any device that isn't the Quest 2 is too expensive and not featureful enough to warrant the expense. Building software for VR is still extremely primitive (No, Unity doesn't solve it. Come back to me after you ship a Unity VR project that meets Meta's store guidelines if you disagree). Battery life on standalone systems is abysmal. I don't know anyone with a PC-tethered system that hasn't destroyed several cables, ports, keyboards, or even just glass containers.
And there are problems being foisted on VR. The global chip shortage is making it way to hard to scale. Meta's attempts to dominate the market by undercutting the competition is a huge danger to everyone. This coopting of social VR into "metaverse" by crypto grifters is going to kill an entire segment of the app market. Megacorp's inability/unwillingness to moderate user behavior on their platforms is a lot more harmful to people's mental health when it's literally in their faces.
But the biggest one might be people who don't know anything about VR claiming it's "useless" or "dead".
> Focus... Again, nobody cares.
That’s just not true. Having a single fixed focal distance was super jarring when I’ve tried VR. But normal people won’t complain about that. They’ll just say “looks weird.”
Personally, the problem it needs to solve is figuring out how to let me virtually move without physically moving, while not making it awkward and also not getting me motion sick. So far, that problem still feels fundamental.
We get a small amount of skepticism from maybe 25% of the students before they try it for the first time. After putting hundreds of our own students through the system, only 1 has given it a universally negative review, and he generally gave the entire instruction program a negative review anyway. Can't please everyone all the time.
Most of our students end up using the system multiple times. They always have the option to not use it at all, or use it from a 2D PC display. Nobody has opted-out completely, and only 1 person has opted-out of VR.
About 10% have mentioned a slight feeling of dizziness after their first session, with only about 10% of those people saying the feeling returned after subsequent sessions on later dates. We've had only 1 person who flat out couldn't use the system because of simsickness. It comes out to about 0.3% of our students, which turns out is less than the proportion of people who experience moderate to severe discomfort from watching FPS video games or action movies in a theater. I've tried to encourage the instructors to limit the first session to 20 minutes to get that 10% number down even further, but most of the students haven't minded the dizziness enough to stop and end up keep going for 1hr+ sessions.
When people provide feedback, they tell us they want more to do, higher display resolution, easier setup, and more intuitive controls. Noone has ever complained about focus, latency, black levels, headset weight, etc.
Just wanted you to know that I found your insight valuable and I must admit I'm surprised so few people had any issues with motion sickness/sim sickness. Have you don't anything specific to tackle that within the software you've developed?
Yes, I've done a lot.
It started with establishing various guidelines. Core values: why we are doing this, what we want to get out of it (extremely useful to have when you get into disagreements about feature design. You can point back to the core values that people agreed were core). Design: what should be done, what should NEVER be done. Testing: not just what needed to be tested, how to test it, what kinds of tests needed to be ran (technical, load, users, etc), but also who needed to do the testing (adaptation is a problem! New-to-VR users are a non-renewable resource!), and what they needed to be informed of before the test (equal parts informed concent and psychological priming). We found that if we primed users with the expectation they would feel dizzy the first time, but typically not the second, they would report higher levels of satisfaction and be more willing to perform additional sessions.
As I said, I'm the only VR developer here. I have one other software developer working for me, but she works on some of the database management, and only started relatively recently in the project life. And that's it. The company is not a software company. Establishing that testing guideline also made it possible for a lot more people in the company to engage in the project.
From a software development perspective, it involves being really honest with yourself about the strengths and weaknesses of your content. Our app incorporates a "guided tour" metaphor for instructors to take students around Google Street View imagery and practice their language skills. Google Street View is monoscopic photospheres with no depth information at all. It's not the best format for immersion, but it hits a lot of other goals for us, such as being culturally relevant, as well as being a vast source of content that we can easily combine and use without spending lots of money on 3D modelling.
Photosphere imagery causes a LOT of simsickness. If I had to list to list the top 3 causes of simsickness, it'd be low frame-rate, mismatch between motion cues in the visual and vestibular systems, and lack of depth cues. Photospheres hurt on two of those levels: you can't move inside of them and there are no stereo depth cues. But we get around it in multiple ways. First, we encourage the students to stay in their seats for the whole experience. Second, we focus on outdoor areas, so that most visual detail is beyond the range of stereo depth perception. We have also intentionally left all of our user interface elements visible at all times, so that you have 3D foreground elements to focus on. There's a wireframe floor grid that keeps most people from feeling like they're about to fall.
Incidentally, I think the photospheres help us in a demographic that typically fairs poorly in VR: women. Or I should say, people with a higher proportion of estrogen compared to testosterone (There are High-T woman and High-E men, the balance of each changes as we age, and it can change if, for example, you're undergoing hormone therapy). Apparently, the relative balance of hormones in the body can have a big impact on the visual cues our brains use to recognize depth. High-T people judge depth based on motion. High-E people judge depth based on shadowing and relative object size. Because we are using photos instead of 3D models, our "lighting" is 100% accurate. So where many projects will show a marked difference in simsickness between men and women, ours has not.
So despite starting in a tough spot with our source data, we actually end up doing a really good job in the simsickness department. Like I said before, only one person noped-out completely. I think it's pretty safe to say she would have become violently ill if she stayed in. I interviewed her afterward and she admitted she was extremely prone to motion sickness in cars and boats and had difficulty watching action movies in theaters. We had one other person complain about persistent feelings of dizziness, but it turned out we had had a significant performance regression, which we fixed and she was all better after that.
And I put a lot of effort into performance optimization. I had to be honest with myself and admit that the super-accurate audio spatialization system I was using was costing way too much compute for too little impact. The much simpler, though inferior, built-in spatialization was good enough and meant we could hit a much higher performance cap. Someone might look at my code and say I suffer from Not Implemented Here syndrome. I say most other people's code doesn't hit the performance targets we have. I know, because I tried, and had to replace it.
It also takes saying "NO" to some feature requests. I had to put my foot down on a request to let the instructor teleport students to new locations. I pointed to design guidelines: "Users in VR headsets SHALL NOT be virtually moved without their own direct, affirmative interaction".
Sometimes that "NO" is to avoid doing something that will harm users. Sometimes it's to avoid wasting time tasks that don't fit with our core values, time that could be spent in better ways. For example, we were able to quickly discard using AI as part of the student interaction because of one of our core values: to support our existing, best-in-class, instructor-led training, not replace it. Spending time on AI chatter bots to make the same, shitty, canned-called-response-convo app that every other company is making in the space would distract from... literally anything. Literally anything would be a better use of my time :)
How we've incorporated VR into our operations is a big part of why I don't really believe in this whole "but VR doesn't have a killer app" argument, especially when it comes from people who also talk about not liking the idea of being in VR for several hours at a time. We are not out to replace our instructor-led training with an VR/AI/ML/WTF/BBQ chatter bot system. We use VR as an enhancement of our existing offerings.
Incidentally, that makes it a lot easier from a business perspective, too. People already buy our services and we're not trying to get them to buy a new one. Our VR tools make us more competitive in our market. We get to establish VR as a norm in in-person language training, and we get to set the tone for what that means.
Anyway, this is getting a lot longer than I expected it to. I could talk at length about why VR is so important to language learning. But I should probably get back to working on it, instead.
One cool thing I’m looking forward to is house scale be games. I’m perfectly fine with the constraints those impose due to being able to just walk around
FoV is also a big deal that a lot of people tend to overlook, most of the commercial offerings only have around 100° whereas humans have about a 200° FOv. It's like I'm constantly playing a submarine periscope simulator.
Smart phones are portable web browsers. That's the killer app. That's immensely useful. VR is non portable, at least in the sense that you're gonna look like a huge asshole loading up your quest on the subway. That's a pretty difficult barrier.
If you took away my smartphone today, I'd be pretty upset. It'd leave a whole of convenience in my life. But I'd ultimately adapt and continue living largely the same way I'm living now.
If you took away my PC today, my career would be over. I'd have to find a whole new way to live.
"Killer app" discussions tend to devolve into essentialism arguments. What's essential to one person is a frivoloty to others. But I don't think any of that matters. Game consoles are clearly not essential, yet they're big business. Some people gotta have a huge TV in their living room with cable and all the streaming services, others are fine just watching DVDs, still others are fine with no TV. Yet nobody is arguing that game consoles or TVs shouldn't exist just because they aren't universally appealing. So why VR? What is it about VR that evokes these responses "it's dead/dying/should die?"
VR isn't dead, but it has no killer apps. It has no obvious path to be the next smart phone. Video game consoles have plenty of killer apps. It's the games.
VR games aren't that great, and the claim seems to be that they're going to be the next big social platform / computer tech rather than a game console alternative.
I own an index to play phasmophobia and beat saber. I'm very pessimistic about the tech's ability to become mainstream.
Mass adoption of VR headsets is not the goal of the industry I don't think, it has a niche use case that only it can achieve and that is plenty enough. It's just one tool.
If ever there were to be a technology that replaces smartphones it might be AR, but I doubt that too.
Maybe this results in having a distorted vision of what VR represents for people out there. Just like everyone else who works on a specific business for a long time.
What is it with our culture that expertise is viewed as a conflict of interest? Flat-eathers scoff at astronomers. A teacher tells some parents their kid is having trouble in a subject and the parents blow up. There's a small band of entitled truckers out here making folks late to pick up their kids from school because they think they know better about vaccines than doctors.
A user only knows their own, subjective experience. As a developer, I collect feedback from many users.
I'm the lead developer on a project targeted at everyday people. I survey and interview these people about problems they have with our software and the hardware. I have real insight into the things people complain about and praise most often.
I didn't come in here and say "VR good. You dumb." The problems GP listed indicate a profound lack of good-faith experience with the technology.
However, I believe that if headsets can be made less bulky, it will become ubiquitous. I don't know what the experience will be like, it certainly won't be matrix-y, but I can absolutely see a generation of 20 somethings expecting goggles at some point in the future, maybe 10 years from now.
It might actually be Zuck's vision of sanitized cartoony avatars zipping around with no legs because look at how much money kids spend on VBUCKS to look slightly different in Fortnight. The Fortnight generation's kids will be hooked on VR if the goggles are cheap/small enough.
I do however miss the $200/200€ WMR headsets that we had for a while, that felt like a more reasonable entry point for a PC gaming headset. There is currently no replacement for those. Quest2 not only adds price, but also weight due to battery and SoC, which you don't really want or need when using it only on PC.
I'm not saying all those games are perfect or even good, only that the immersion, presence, impact was such that I can't go back to many 2D monitor based games. Sure there are exceptions, it's not always about graphics or etc, but I'd much rather play GTA5 than GTA3, not because GTA3 is bad, it was great, but because based on the type of game it is it's just better with modern tech. The same is true for many well made games in VR.
So will VR get to iPhone level? No idea. But I hope it gets close to PS4/PS5/Switch levels
---
Let me add, my point in PDA progression is that we don't know what it will take for VR to explode. PDAs didn't explode until 3 things happened (1) switching from resistive (stylus required) to capacitive (finger) displays, (2) requiring a data connections, all previous PDAs it was an expensive option that few opted into but iPhone effectively required it since it was a replacement for your phone and so it forced users to see the benefit (3) an OS designed for fingers/phones first.
In VR it could be we need smaller eyeglass like devices instead of bulky phone display devices: https://www.gmw3.com/2021/01/new-design-appears-at-ces-2021-... It could be we need the device to read your hands+fingers instead of requiring controllers. It could be we need to wait for the VR to be like that in Black Mirror, Season 5, episode 1, Striking Vipers. That's still "VR".
Or maybe it's going to take a company like Apple to really figure out VR. As you pointed out, it took them two swings at the pocket computing problem over 15 years to really nail it. Maybe the VR headset trajectory will be similar - semi-successful product in a year or two and then 15 years from now, something really great.
I mostly believe the first thing I said is true - the VR market is pretty big and is only a failure if you were expecting iPhone-like success.
AR, on the other hand, is going to blow up but probably not with anything head-mounted. For example, my car projects information onto my windshield when I drive. I think that qualifies as an AR device.
Apparently HL: Alyx may be that kind of thing. Problem is, it's just one game, and it took years and lots of efforts to make for probably very little return on investment.
I will note that technology-wise, the hardware is better than it's ever been and I think it has a fighting chance this time previous iterations lacked. For all their simplicity, mouse and keyboard have a level of accuracy and precision that VR does not. This is partially due to their simplicity (keys are binary devices, and a mouse can track position to near-perfection with optical flow modeling, or even the old wheel solution from days of yore). In contrast, VR not only has traditionally had lower-resolution on the tracking signal, it's tracking far, far more degrees of freedom (at least six, but if you want to accurately represent the user's kinematics the number explodes). Plus, the biological sensor fusion we humans use to determine our position in the world demands accuracy from the virtual hardware because we can be very sensitive to input error (and we feel it as nausea, disorientation, or vertigo).
The sensor fusion of modern cheap accelerometer tech with the absolute tracking of either lighthouses or whole-room flow imaging has had amazing consequences, but it's not yet perfect and I don't know if a critical mass of users will demand perfection or not. We'll find out. But, I've never seen better hardware taking a stab at the market before.
I live in too small a space, and this requires a dedicated game room or having to re-arrange furniture, set up the external sensors (not true for Oculus but true for this), and then recalibrating. That, plus the heavy headset and massive cables.
The controllers are amazing through, they track all your fingers without being attached to your fingers.
It has a future, it's still a little rough around the edges. However, apartment dwellers might be limited in their interest.
I don't know if it will find a true mass-market product fit: annual unit sales are still in the millions, a long way from the billions of the smartphone market. But it's certainly not because the product inherently sucks.
I bet Zuckerberg is ready to swallow at least another $50 billion in losses before giving up on the VR dream. The FB/IG ad machine is sputtering but still pays for that easily.
Put another way: VR has the smell of 3D TVs and movies, and not the next smartphone.
Superficially it's obvious - 3D! immersion!
But practically it's not at all like real 3D (no tactility at all, stupid strap-on goggles with trailing cables, weird mismatches between head movement and perspective, no integration with the real world so you're constantly anxious about bumping into the furniture, and let's not even get started on avatars etc).
So far it's just too clumsy to be a convincing substitute. It's basically only really credible as a game accessory - like a joystick, but better.
I can't see VR becoming phone-popular until two way direct neural interfaces become a polished technology. And when that happens a lot of other developments become possible at the same time.
Or a much shorter recap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g
The big problem VR has to overcome is getting resolution parity with monitors. At the moment VR is still extremely low resolution, even headsets in the 2000x2000 realm are, due to the image being stretch across ~100° FOV, only the equivalent of an old 800x600 monitor. That's not good enough for a lot of uses. It works fine for VR games, but barely works for 2D movies and even less so for text. Given that the majority of content out there is made for larger resolutions, that's the biggest stumbling block for VR as it means people have to get out of VR and use another display device.
I think once resolution is solved, that will be the killer-app for VR just by itself. As it means a VR headsets, which can be turned into an AR headset via camera pass through, is able to replace every screen you currently have. That will be the point where people can start ditching their multi-monitor setups and have essentially an empty desk with just a headset. The appeal of getting ever bigger TVs will also vanish when you can have a virtual IMAX screen in your headset.
It will still take some years until VR/AR headset are good enough and comfortable enough to replace TVs and monitors en masse. But I have little doubt that it will happen sooner or later. All the VR gaming stuff is really just a bonus here and I don't think we'll get mass VR adaption just from that.
On my Quest 2, I can pop into a virtual environment with 5 desktops scaled around me in 3D space, a physical keyboard fully rendered into the environment that also tracks my fingers, and a scaleable camera “portal” positioned over the location of my doorway (in physical space) that displays a camera feed of anyone entering the room.
If I’m trying to relax, I can hop into a virtual movie theater on the moon and watch a 3D Blu-ray rip or play most modern AAA pc games.
All of this while sitting in a lounge chair in my living room.
And then, of course, there’s all the 6dof VR games but, after Alyx barely moved the hardware sales needle, I don’t think that sort of thing is what’s needed to drive mass adoption at this point.
VR needs much better screen tech, high performant SoCs, and a “coolness” factor. I wonder if there’s a company known for all three that has repeatedly yoinked entire markets even though they entered “late”?
It’s cool tech, but it seems like it’s boiled down to Second Life + helmet graphics.
Inform6, 7. Then get Anchorhead, Inside Woman, Spider and Web, Vicious Cycles, Slouch Over Bedlam, Curses+Jigsaw and get amazed.
- Handling latency is more akin to client-side prediction behavior, rather than synchronous awaiting on network response for frame-by-frame accuracy. So it's more of a distribution problem of how to replicate and conflict-resolve state most efficiently, rather than round-trip latency.
- Black is not that much of a problem. The brain adapts.
- Focus is a problem with active work on it (using eye tracking) which we'll see improvements on in the near future, but it's worth noting that a fixed focal distance actually helps vision for some people.
- "There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be.": no, optimists would tell you you're wrong. Someone mostly neutral would point to things like VRChat driving a noticeable portion of sales of VR headsets or additional equipment, which is promising in that there is a viable non-Meta social VR app currently in existence. A pessimist would argue that VRChat hasn't achieved a sustainable business model. A contrarian would further add to the pessimist's point that the top sellers in VR tend to be stagnant year over year, suggesting the industry isn't as live (optimist: yet) as many perceive it to be.
- "you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic" - not quite. You might depend on that to present approximate realism, but VR - and we're talking 6dof here, 3dof is far below any threshold of believability/immersion - does not require much approximation of hand position for the brain to very quickly allow a virtual world to feel "real" enough for some fairly deep immersion.
Better-informed critics of VR typically question its broad appeal based on motion sickness, lack of support/indifference/hostility from other game developers or middleware developers, difficulty of authoring plausible VR content in general, inconsistent hardware depressing the quality of software aimed at the "lowest common denominator" device (though this last one has largely evaporated due to the Quest 2 being very cheap and very good), possible risk of effects on children's development of physical balance if they play too much, and so on.
So VR is a niche even within the gaming community and will never replace the monitor except for some circumstances. But it does enable unique experiences that no other platform can.
Where VR excels is in visual immersion, intuitive interaction and spatial awareness. So it excel in games like racing and flight simulators, space sims, and in things like puzzle games where manipulating things with your hands adds a new dimension to the game.
You don't know how
> pick manual
You have the manual
> read manual
You now know how to use a computer
> use computer
Your hands are busy
> drop manual
> use computer
... except funnier
Show me
A classic example would be opening a locked door to which you have a key in, say, a zelda game. On a controller you just go over to it and press A. In VR you may need to sheathe your sword to draw the key and put away your shield to steady the door knob to unlock it and then push open the door and then pick up your weapons again.
The whole "Pick up your weapons again" loop at the end of little interactions is common in many games and is more involved than in traditional games that would abstract it.
Would love to see these (and the Williams) come back in any form.
Doing VR well takes a lot of effort, which would be better spent on story and creating beautiful pixel art - which somehow has a richness that VR can't seem to replicate (yet).
Roberta Williams, the Queen of Graphic Adventure Video Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781307 - March 2022 (no comments yet)
https://twitter.com/colossalcave3d/status/150637770280619622...
It will never work for greybeards like me with Vertigo ;)
>Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
All: Get a Z-Machine interpreter (Frotz/Winfrotz/Lectrote) and "advent.z5" from here: