Half-Life 2 Writer on VR Games: We're At Pong Level, Only Scratching the Surface

An anonymous reader writes: Valve's Chet Faliszek has been in the video game industry for a long time, and his writing has been instrumental for games like Half-life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Valve is now developing a virtual reality headset, and Faliszek was on hand at a VR-centric conference where he spoke about how the technology is coming along. He said, "None of us know what the hell we are doing. We're still just scratching the surface of VR. We still haven't found out what VR is, and that's fine. We've been making movies in pretty much the same way for 100 years, TV for 60 years and videogames for 40. VR has only really been [in development] for about a year, so we're at Pong level." One of the obstacles holding VR devices back right now is getting the hardware up to snuff. Faliszek says, "There's one thing you can't do and that's make people sick. It has to run at 90 frames per second. Any lower and people feel sick. Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."

Comments

only a year?

[Gravis Zero]

VR has only really been [in development] for about a year

wikipedia lied to me!

Re:only a year?

[aliquis]

Yeah, isn't this the pong level?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Though we may still be about there but with better graphics.

Then again maybe that could be said about the gaming industry in general beyond MMOs :D

Re:only a year?

[janoc]

Unfortunately many people think that VR didn't exist before Oculus Rift. Which is, of course, BS. There was good quality VR available before as well but unless you have worked for a large university, the military, NASA or some large aerospace/car company, you were unlikely to encounter it due to the costs of the equipment involved. Industry-grade HMDs still cost $15000, they used to start at $40k but I guess after the cheap Oculus became available, that price point became untenable. `CAVEs and large projection setups that are commonly used for both research and training work can cost millions.

The worse part is that also quite a few people from these companies - Oculus, Valve and others that are jumping on the VR bandwagon now - tend to ignore the decades of existing research. Most people there are businessmen and (briliant) engineers, not researchers (with a few exceptions). They tend to massively reinvent the wheel and to rediscover things known for many years, because they don't know where to look for them. If they didn't, they would know that increasing framerate and decreasing input latencies is not going to fix the motion sickness. Sure, laggy, smeared image in the HMD will make people sick. However, you can and will get sick even at 120fps - it depends much more on what you are rendering than at how you are rendering it. A virtual rollercoaster will make people throw up even at 4k resolution rendered at 250fps with perfect head tracking. It would look awesome, though ...

The problem is mainly the content, not the technology - the content must work with the technology idiosyncrasies (I won't call them limitations - that implies they could be overcome, but sometimes it would require changing the laws of physics or it would cost so much that it just isn't practical), not ignore the specificities of the medium ("let's play COD with an Oculus Rift, that will be awesome!" *BARF*) or expect that the "technology will improve" and motion sickness won't be an issue, no matter what wild camera gyrations, cool fly-throughs and slow motion cut scenes the game designer has put in. It is the same thing as the film directors having to learn how to shoot in 3D - the "film language" (how you convey your message through camera work, lighting, etc) changes quite significantly when you are in 3D and not every film director was/is comfortable with going there. Even the visually stunning Avatar had some issues with stereoscopy here and there. That is why the worst 3D movies were the ones converted from the regular 2D, where the media specificities were ignored.

This is very much where we are still at the begining - virtual reality as an entertainment and story telling medium. It is not a question of technology anymore, it is more about finding sensible ways to do things in VR so that the experience is fun, pleasant and something people will actually like to return to. With careful design work and working with the medium and not against it you can render even at 30fps and nobody will get sick.

In my 15 years of working with VR (involving both large projection setups and HMDs) I have never encountered anyone getting sick because of the frame rate. It was pretty much always because of poorly made content not suitable for the technology being used, poorly implemented navigation that didn't respect the specificities of the medium ("teleporting" camera, forced/constrained camera movement, head bobbing, poorly synchronized/unsynchronized treadmills ...), poor camera work/tracking ("mouselook" in FPS really is wrong for VR - you don't have head bolted rigidly to your shoulders!) and similar issues. Then you have issues like people feeling discomfort/headaches because of eye strain due to poor focus, moire, poorly set up stereo rendering, etc. It often gets incorrectly attributed to "cyber"/motion sickness, but that has nothing to do with it at all. Finally, there are people who will get sick and dizzy even from looking at a static image

Re:only a year?

[Twinbee]

Even if you are right about latency and framerate not causing sickness, you're forgetting these are qualities we should be having anyway.

120fps looks FAR better than 60fps. And low latency games feel a lot snappier than high latency games. If that ALSO helps sickness to any extent, then that's just icing on the cake.

Re:only a year?

[ArsonSmith]

I call BS on a large part of this. I have had slight movements at low frame rate that has made me almost hurl immediately, yet a game like Windlands which is like a spiderman simulater with swinging from tree to tree I was able to play with large sooping motions for hours without getting sick.

Anecdotes aside, this seems to be echoed pretty heavily in the Oculus share forums and VR related sub-reddits.

Re:Nonsense

[Anubis IV]

You do realize that your argument suggesting the current stuff isn't worthy of being called VR and that the old stuff was plain "AWFUL" is just proving his thesis that VR is still in its infancy and that we still don't know what the hell we're doing with it, right?

Re:Nonsense

[jordanjay29]

This is just like going to the "talkies" and realizing your favorite silent movie actor has a squeaky voice and completely ruins the picture. We're just trying to plaster 2D video games into 3D systems and hoping it works out alright, instead of building games from the ground up for VR.

Re:Nonsense

[kuzb]

>What value do we get with VR that we don't get with regular TV or monitors?

Immersion. This is not the same as privacy, and anyone who has tried recent VR will tell you there's a big difference.

Re:I'd be happy with fullhd per eye + 60fps

[ArsonSmith]

VR is not going to be just a hard core gaming medium. I thought the same thing at first as well. That was until I picked up a GearVR for my note 4. That was when I realized that there was a lot more than just games. And there isn't even any real content yet. Just lots of 5-10 minute demo level items that I find myself watching over and over.

Really?

[SJ]

Stop screwing around with VR and finish Half-Life 3 already!

Re:Pong was bigger in its day

[pslytely psycho]

A friend of mine who worked on a tavern cleaning crew called me and told me to come to work with him one night. When we got to the tavern, he showed me this big box with a TV screen and two large knobs. Pong was completely unlike anything anyone had seen before. During business hours there would be a continuous line waiting to play it.

It may seem quaint now, but at the time it was truly revolutionary, as was Space Invaders and Asteroids which soon followed. To us, they were much cooler than the pin-ball machines we played at the time, after all they were something completely new.

Yes I was born in B.C. (Before Cellphones) and my kids were born in A.D. (After Direct TV).

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[drinkypoo]

The resolution is fairly secondary to lag. If there is perceptible lag then VR sickness tends to follow.

Re: Nonsense

[BlueTrin]

No it is not proving anything, proving is not done by jumping loops. It could be that VR is simply a bad concept.

Re:Tell that to 3D movies as well.

[SuricouRaven]

It causes illness for good reason. A mismatch between visual field angle and vestibular angle doesn't occur very often in a natural environment - the only place you'll find it is on a boat and when wearing head-mounted displays. Before those, it always indicated something impairing the vestibular system, which likely implied a poison. There's evolved response based on this: 'Visual/vestibular mismatch, probable poison detected, initiate purge of stomach contents before any more is absorbed and make a note not to eat the green berries.'

Three deadly issues for VR

[DoctorBonzo]

1) Glasses. If you don't wear them, you don't care, but if you do, you pretty much can't deal with head-mounted VR wear. I've tried a lot of VR devices over the decades and *none* of them are glasses-friendly, including Oculus.

2) Field of view. Ninety degrees isn't enough for immersion. True enough, you can move your head for depth 'feel', but you're still looking through a window.

3) Lag. There's been enough said about this. It will improve over time, though, if there's enough of an audience.

Re:Nonsense

[Immerman]

No, that's "substance". A.k.a. cognitive immersion. A completely orthogonal attribute to sensory immersion.