Virtual Reality War Part 1 May 23, 2024

We’re dipping back into gaming history and beginning a brand new series on the History of Virtual Reality (VR). While VR is still considered a niche component of a greater video game landscape, a small war has been brewing for over half a decade focused around several companies who claim to have the BEST Virtual Reality device. Along the next several parts of this series, we’re going to talk about the history of VR, and offer our perspective on which companies have been offering the best VR device! So buckle in, ladies and gentlemen, because this war is going to get very complicated.

As many of you who may be children in the mid-1990s, you may remember a time in arcades known as the “Virtual Reality” craze. A company called Virtuality had created a fleet of real-time 3D stereoscopic VR pods exclusively for commercial use at venues like arcades and theme parks. For five dollars you can rent a grand total of five minutes in an entirely digital space. For some people, using Virtuality’s VR equipment was an INCREDIBLE look into the future, but others had a lot of problems with it. The Virtuality headsets were big and bulky. This was unavoidable, as gyroscopes were not as small as they are today, so a special magnetic array around the pod was used for real-time head tracking. Nothing can cause motion sickness faster than an inconsistent or stuttering framerate, so the developers had to implement caps to ensure stutter could not happen. Due to computer processing limitations of the time, the resolution on the headsets could not exceed 640×480, and the frame rates of the games would typically cap out at around twenty frames per second. Regardless of the low resolution and framerate, VR games still required exceptionally high-end custom PCs, averaging around $20,000 US, to run their lineup of custom games.

Despite the costs and hardware limitations of the time, the technology WORKED. Virtuality headsets were featured in major Hollywood films like First Kid, Ghost in the Machine, and Hackers. Experienced gamers that were able to adapt to the gameplay quickly would find themselves having an enjoyable experience they just could not get at home! Inversely, the non-technically inclined or less experienced players did not enjoy it. In the mid-90s, VR was something that no players would have previous familiarity with, and five minutes was just not enough time for a human being to learn how to play a VR game. Many first-time players were unable to adapt to the medium’s controls in such a brief gameplay time.

I would be remiss to neglect to mention Nintendo’s Virtual Boy during this time, however I would remind you that we did discuss it briefly during our Console Wars series. The Virtual Boy had an awful launch with a game library that failed to take proper advantage of the hardware that Nintendo had designed. Within a year of its release, due to poor sales, Nintendo pulled the plug on the Virtual Boy, and its failure was considered a permanent nail in Virtual Reality’s coffin.

By the late 90s, mass audiences walked away from VR as a fad, and viewed the whole medium as a negative. Virtuality eventually ceased production of new or improved VR pods, and there have been reports the company tossed a lot of unsold units in the trash. That’s where the medium remained for at least the next twenty years. However, computing performance improved exponentially during that time. High end PCs capable of high-resolution high-performance games were very affordable in the early 2010s. Hollywood was releasing a new generation of 3D films to entice audiences to watch movies at the cinemas (at a premium price), and for a brief time they were very popular. 3DTVs were starting to get offered for sale, but due to a lot of very bad executive decisions, the complexities of actually watching a 3D movie at home on one of those 3DTVs ensured 3D home theater viewing was not widely adopted. VR seemed the perfect alternative solution for 3D films and games, but it had been defunct…until…

In 2012, Oculus came forward using a new mass-investment website called Kickstarter. They promised that if they received a mass monetary investment from gamers across the world they could produce a modern Virtual Reality headset that could work in conjunction with a modern PC. Their VR headset would be called The Rift. Gamers, like always, were skeptical of the company’s claims, but based upon a lot of goodwill, and a major need to see a full revival of the medium, gamers began to sign up for Kickstarter to prepare to send investment money to Oculus. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter launched on August 12th, 2012 and in no time at all, not only had Oculus had their Kickstarter request funded, it was so funded MAJOR technology companies began to take notice. Perhaps VR wasn’t as dead as everyone originally believed it was?

Influenced by the success of the Oculus Kickstarter, Sony was also interested in offering their own Virtual Reality hardware. As one of the biggest technology companies in the world with the highest selling video-game console of three out of the last four gaming generations, Sony believed they could release a VR headset that would use their PlayStation 4 console to generate all of the game’s graphics, similar to how Oculus was using the PC for all the game’s graphics processing. The problem was the PS4 was not originally designed to take advantage of a VR headset, and so any headset designed for it would need to take advantage of the PS4’s existing ports and hardware limitations. To make the PSVR work, Sony needed to use the PS4’s existing 3D camera to act as a method of external head tracking, so all PSVR users would need to have a camera. The PS3’s PlayStation Move controllers excelled at real-time 3D hand position tracking, so Sony decided to re-release the Move as a PSVR-native controller. PS3 owners with Move experience felt right at home with the familiar controllers. The working name for Sony’s VR headset was Project Morpheus, and while Sony promised that it would run a lot of the same third-party VR games that you would be able to play on the Oculus with your PC, it would offer an exclusive library of first and third-party titles.

Meanwhile, social media website Facebook took a lot of interest in Oculus and ended up buying the company outright following the successful Kickstarter. How did this purchase affect the gamers who funded the Oculus project through Kickstarter? Technically, their early investment through Kickstarter should have given them SOME rights into the company they had invested actual money in. Shouldn’t they have been entitled to a financial payout from the Facebook purchase? Shockingly, the answer was no, they were not. It turned out that while Kickstarter prided itself as an “investment platform”, any “investors” through the site were entitled to no actual financial or creative decisions in the company. Facebook did promise they would honor Oculus’s Kickstarter rewards, and investors who had put down money for a headset would still be getting their orders fulfilled. Their plan was to use the Rift as a bedrock for launching a whole-new medium for social interaction. Most of the Kickstarter investors were quite unhappy about this result, as many of them hated Facebook as a company and were not users of their website. Regardless, they had no outlet for this disagreement and to this day, I refuse to ever fund a Kickstarter project on principle because of these events.

As the mid-2010s progressed, Sony was preparing to release Project Morpheus, now officially referred to as the PlayStation VR. At the same time they were also preparing to launch the highly-anticipated PS4 Pro, which was an enhanced 4K PS4. While the PSVR could work with either the PS4 or PS4 Pro, the downside was that the PSVR’s expansion box could not work with a new feature that Sony’s other divisions were beginning to push, High-Dynamic Range color (HDR). HDR provided a much wider color palate than traditional HDTVs offered, and many have considered it to be an essential component to the success of a new line of 4K Ultra High-Definition (UHD) televisions. The PSVR itself could not support HDR, but Sony did promise their second generation PSVR would restore the ability to pass HDR content to supported 4KTVs.

Given the fact that Oculus offered early Rift prototypes to Kickstarter backers, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact launch window for the commercial version of the Rift. However, the first Rift orders shipped out to the Kickstarter investors would get very positive initial impressions. The Rift required a high-end PC to function, and early adopters were given access to a VR enhanced version of the Doom 3 BFG Edition. Doom 3 held the gold standard for PC game graphics when it launched in 2004, and its terrifying atmospheric environments were a perfect showcase for the new medium of VR. Also, since Rift was designed to work with PC, most players were happy to develop and share VR-enhancement mods for their favorite games.

Sony launched the PSVR in 2016 with a deep lineup of early exclusive games such as Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Batman: Arkham VR and Psychonauts: In the Rhombus of Ruin. As predicted, the PSVR was a great VR solution for the time for gamers who lacked the ability to afford a high-end PC. While some of the games that initially launched as PSVR exclusive, such as Batman: Arkham VR and Psychonauts: In the Rhombus of Ruin, that exclusivity would not last and both games were re-released on several PCVR digital platforms. But most important to remember, while the graphics and performance on the PS4 could not surpass what was theoretically possible with Oculus Rift on a PC, the PSVR’s owners just did not care. Console owners have known for decades that their consoles may not be able to produce graphics as good as what they could get on PC, but they could at least be guaranteed a lower entry point, and hardware optimizations. By 2016 nearly every gamer already had a PS4 in their homes, some PlayStation Move Controllers, and a PS Camera, getting a PSVR was not a difficult sell for many interested in rejoining the VR medium. Also, since PS4 supported 3D Blu-Ray Disc playback, players without a 3DTV could watch 3D films fine just using their PSVR. The only major problems as the lack of the HDR pass through support, so many 4KTV (UHDTV) owners decided to hold off until Sony released their second hardware revision.

So as we wrap this story, its the end of 2016, two major competitors have released their own VR headsets, each with their own focus, their own perks, and their own die-hard supporters. Because of that, we feel it is still too early to bring in a winner, so we are declaring this first step into the VR Console War a tie! As we enter the next part, a new competitor will enter the VR space…and it will bring with it the support of the biggest online digital marketplace on the planet. What will happen next? Stay tuned to the next part and find out.