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Virtual Reality is Pushing Gaming Into Another 'Golden Age': Xbox Co-founder (cnbc.com)
From a CNBC report:The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever and now gaming is entering "another golden age," according to Otto Berkes (a pioneer of the gaming industry), driven by virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). "One of the aspects of VR that has incredible potential is interaction and communication -- interacting with characters that are both artificial and virtual, being able to blur distance and geography, you can be anywhere and literally in any time," Berkes told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. "We're entering another golden age of interactive content development."
This age is of DLCs
"The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever"
The PS2 comes in at number 1. The xbox comes in a distant 17 and is beaten by the xbox 360 which doesn't even come into the top 5.
I agree. VR is the "next big thing". That doesn't mean it will stay around permanently afterwards but it stands a good chance this time round (after the 80's VRML debacle which was basically a large, expensive flop).
But the kit is still too expensive.
And I was hoping the new Nintendo console came with VR at least as an option at launch.
And the smartphone / Google Cardboard thing is cool, but it's not really VR.
You need HTC Vive's level of hardware in the couple-of-hundred price range to make it work properly.
Very primitive with lots of promise. It's going to be awhile before development costs are going to be low enough to get down to mass market price points.
Right now it's still a singing frog. Nobody cares if it sings well, it's just incredible it sings.
I have a HTC Vive. I've had one for like... many months by now. I've tried it all. It sucks. I have no idea what people are talking about, but it's just... shit. After the first 5 minutes of "WOW", that is. There's just nothing interesting to run on it.
And AI is a pathetic joke, hardly any different from the "Alice" bot of the 1950s. Again, I have no idea what they are talking about. It's as if we are using completely different Internets and/or live in parallel dimensions. I can't relate to anything these "important people" claim in the "news".
It's just another fad. Anyone that has tried the current offerings will know they're little more than expensive toys, gimmicks, products looking for a killer game. The lag is terrible, too. Those that scream otherwise as in denial due to fanboyism, or they're part of those pushing the crap, or they're simply lying about how much experience they have.
Why I am I so down on this shit? I've spent the last 30+ months writing code for it, and I'm having to eat my own dog food. And like eating dog food, I'm fscking sick of being told it's wonderful, when it clearly isn't.
We don't have fucking AI, and we aren't even close. Stop calling every algorithm AI you fucking garbage sales people.
The quotation in the CNBC report here is just a little bit disingenuous. "The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever" is 50% true; with an estimated 155m units sold, the PS2 does indeed sit at the top of the pile for home-consoles (though the Nintendo DS handheld roughly level-pegs it). The Xbox, however, with sales in around the 24 million range, is very much in "also ran" territory.
It wasn't a failure by any means. It was a toe in the door for Microsoft and it did eventually beat out the Gamecube in the battle for second-place on units sold among the 6th generation consoles. But attempting to lend credibility to an argument by claiming that views are from one of the creators of "one of the most successful consoles ever" when said console was the original Xbox is simply misleading.
And as for the content of TFA... the case for VR in gaming is not yet proven. Sales of consumer VR units are ok but not spectacular and are showing some signs of diminishing now the launch-hype is over. Perhaps more importantly, there has yet to be a game that really makes the case for VR as anything other than a tech demo. A range of factors, including problems with using the headsets for an extended period and, most importantly, control problems mean that nobody has yet produced a really great VR game (Elite: Dangerous is almost certainly the most successful, but that's a fairly niche product). For the most part, VR experiences to date have fallen into one of three categories:
a) the pretty but shallow glorified tech-demo
b) the cut-down version of an existing game (e.g. Driveclub VR)
c) The existing pre-VR game which has had VR support added
Last generation's fad, motion controls, eventually faltered after people realised that they just weren't as good as regular controls for actually playing games. Nobody was ever going to be chosing to play through a Dragon Age or a Call of Duty using motion controls and, after the novelty wore off, people went back to their controllers or mouse/keyboard combos. If VR is to avoid the same trap, its best hope comes from my category c) above; but so far, that's only been made to even remotely work in the driving and space-combat genres, both of which are niche.
More like a golden age for porn.
So, can we start getting games with good gameplay again?
Once you put your VR glasses on, you're disconnected from the world and immersed in a virtual application. That's all it has. It's a glorified 360Â screen; the things you can do are mostly the same as in a flat screen, only more nauseating and from a closer perspective.
AR on the other hand, overlays a virtual world on top of the real one, using information from the context where you are placed. It's Google Maps on steroids. Remember those old promotional "alternate reality" games for Halo 2 or Lost? New gaming could take that shape, only working in real time. Now that people have learned about Pokemon Go, which is not even proper AR, the concept can be marketed to the masses.
Oh, and it has social implications too. Read the "Vision Machine" comic if you haven't already. It's a classic, one of those Sci-fi stories that are a thinly veiled description of our current world.
http://www.visionmachine.net/
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Where is Kinect these days? All these new interactive interfaces have great gimmick value, but peak input interfaces was reached in the 70's and 80's with the controller or mouse/keyboard.
I tried VR in a shop, spent 30 seconds on it and had a little fun, but can't see how that will stick around. It's just too awkward to be used for anything other than gimmicks.
Golden ages are driven by great games, not by technology. The technology merely needs to be good enough to allow the games to be realized.
So VR heralds a golden age. Like in the 90s, when VR was the hottests new thing. Then again in the 00s. And now the 10s. I can't wait for VR to be the hottest new thing in the 20s!
Excuse me, I am going to go not enjoy my 3D TV set while waiting for 3D TV to become the hottest new thing in the 20s.
VR may very well become big, but companies are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Right now, you have about 5 different implementations of VR, and they aren't compatible with each other. The one project that is trying to create a common framework for VR is meeting a lot of hostility, especially from the Occulus rift crew
Until they come together and develop a common platform, VR will never really take off because no sane developer will develop for 5 different bits of kit, and consumers won't invest on a potential dead end technology (say, you pick HTC vive and it is subsequently abandoned).
Greed. The video games industry isn't clueless about Steam (and more importantly miltibox/miltiscreen) systems becoming the norm. They've run out of advertising room on traditional mediums and want the viewers full attention back.
Fixed That For You.
Its been a LONG time since Nintendo were front of the pack in terms of hardware. They seem to have pretty much thrown in the towel on that front and are concentrating on the gameplay. Which is laudable, but if all you want is gameplay there are millions of 2nd hand previous gen consoles out there you can buy.
I was given an Occulus Rift headset as a gift. I tried playing it with a few games I have. Here's my honest opinion:
The added immersion that a headset gives is a gimmick, much like 3D is for movies. A crappy game is still a crappy game even if you decide to transport yourself into that world. After a few days, I went back to a classic screen, keyboard, and mouse. It's just easier all around.
Call me back when they discover a way to transport your entire physical existence into a game where you have complete autonomy over your body, just like the world we live in today.
Until then, this is just another gimmick to excuse the fact that most games today that are either rehashes or just plain bad.
I thought the Golden Axe game was returning in VR.
What does cause a renaissance of gaming at this time is crowd-funding. VR is a hype that will die soon (again), because neither the interface technology, nor the content is ready. My guess is that we will see 3-5 more iterations of this before VR is really there to stay. Say 20-40 years.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Exactly right. The golden age of gaming ended when games moved from real media to interminable downloads before one could even start gaming. They sucked all the fun right out of that balloon. It doesn't help that the new consoles are rarely designed with any serious degree of backward compatibility at this point. They love to make you have to start buying all over again. And enough people keep doing that to encourage this awful behavior.
"It's dead, Jim."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's also the age of the paid power-up, "crystal", "coins", weapons, armor, etc.
Money is killing gaming faster than anything else.
And on the VR front: Give me a break. VR games to date haven't even come close to living up to the promise. Where are the titles?
Oh... right... they're coming....
VR sucks.
apparently being in a industry makes you a pioneer, his own bio doesnt put him in microsoft till 1993 and the gaming industry with XBOX
so, ass kissing article says future is what they are trying to sell you, even though its not been selling for quite a while now, news at 11
VR looks very promising, with two caveats that have yet to be addressed:
- In some first person VR environments, only head tracker-controlled movement can help avoid the virtual reality sickness syndrome. In environments where this is not possible (e.g., space shooters, racing), a potential alternative would be to use drugs to suppress the symptoms -- but would it be ethical/acceptable that your kid take drugs to play VR games? Third person VR environments ("top-down") probably would not require this but the VR experience would be more limited.
- A lot more computational power and better rendering algorithms are required than what current hardware can provide for most users. Think 90-120 FPS per eye (thus, 180-240 FPS per device) at retina-level resolution, and algorithms that can generate in real time the required peripheral image distortion due to the short eyeball-to-display distance, and which would also have to track eye movement/focus.
& that "golden age" turned out to be about 2 weeks of ppl playing wii bowling.
I dont think I've ever seen anybody actually use a kinect.. or whatever sony called their version of it.
Galaga rules ok.
It's the age of "Pay-to-win".
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VR will be about as popular as 3D TV and 3D movies.
It's going to be popular for a few years, then people will learn that it doesn't actually make games any more fun and though it's still going to be produced (because by then it's not going to cost much more to do so), it's going to be just another bulletpoint in a long list of features.
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The resolution of current VR headsets suck. Resolution needs to be at a minimum of 5K per eye, and the frames per second have to be no less than 120fps. If they can't get a per-eye resolution of 5K, VR will be just a cool thing you can check out for 5 minutes.
Also, these are the minimal usable spec. Ideally, the resolution needs to be at 10K per eye and FPS/latency at 240 fps.
If you haven't tried it yet download Doom 3 BFG edition and get this mod for it
https://github.com/Codes4Fun/RBDOOM-3-BFG/releases
it turns doom 3 into a roomscale vr game. Your left controller is your flashlight, your right controller is your gun. It works really well, it almost feels like the game was designed to be played this way. Skip the cutscenes though.
The only VR game I've seen that has seemed worthwhile was Emily Wants To Play. VR is perfect for shit like that. Pretty much everything else was stuff that may as well have been on a monitor, but without the novelty factor of VR would've been written off as a complete piece of shit.
Still, porn and horror games is a start.
Yes, that too. Awful stuff.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Come on. First of all, the PS2 was the best selling console ever, with your "limited number" being over 155 million consoles sold. The PS3 "fat" sold many millions more.
Seems to me that you're intentionally minimizing an extremely significant number of consoles. Any number is "limited"; but 150+ million consoles is significant.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.