Virtual Reality War – Part 3 November 20, 2024

Welcome back to the Virtual Reality War, where we discuss the history behind one of the most recent wars in the current tech landscape, Virtual Reality. As we ended the last part, we discovered that Sony had made a big impact with the Playstation VR add-on for the PS4, and Oculus had made a huge impact with the Rift series of headsets on the PC. Video streaming sites such as YouTube were already allowing users to upload a wide range of 3D, 180, and 360 degree videos online, perfect for streaming to a VR headset. Meanwhile, tech companies such as Samsung were releasing standalone VR products such as the Gear VR, but they were not seeing major adoption outside of major Theme Park venues. As we entered 2020, the first generation of the Virtual Reality War was wrapping up.

After the release of products like the Samsung Gear VR, the public became interested in standalone VR headsets. Let’s be real, even back in the early days of VR, a virtual reality headset had traditionally been only two very small screens and stereo headset with some head position tracking equipment. It was essentially just a 3D screen, controller and headphones in one! To save space, lower cost, make upgrades easier, and cut down on heat, all graphical and computational work would be handled outside of the headset. All the headset needed to do was receive the video/audio signals, and output the head tracking and controller button inputs. In short, a LOT of space was needed for VR equipment. This kind of setup was fine for enclosed systems people were renting time to use as dedicated venues, but with home VR games offering more freedom of movement, having one or more bulky wires between your headset and your PC or PS4 could be a tripping or choking hazard! Thankfully, modern smartphones and tablets made since the late 2000s proved that powerful, low energy CPUs could be made small enough to fit in your pocket, and devices like the Samsung Gear VR proved they could certainly be small enough to fit into a VR headset. Consumer demand was brewing for a dedicated VR headset to be released that did not require tethering to a PC, smartphone or console. Let’s put a pin in that for a second, as Oculus had some plans brewing for this demand. There were a few false starts and minor product releases during this time which would not have very long shelf lives in the retail space. The first we’re going to talk about is something called the Oculus Go.

The Oculus Go was a completely standalone VR headset. It was small and light, and only included a single controller which acted almost more as a remote than as a game controller. It was designed very similar to a smartphone, with the caveat that you could not make phone calls with it. However, you could download dedicated applications to it, such as YouTube or Netflix, and stream pre-recorded content to watch in VR. At a price of $199US for a 32GB model and $249US for a 64GB model, it was cheaper than a smartphone and could do many of the same high-demand functions as a low-cost tablet. The Oculus Go turned out to be a decent Christmas novelty gift, but not much more than that. In fact, I remember my brother-in-law bought a Go for his father one Christmas morning many years ago, and actually let me try it out. I was impressed by the Jurassic World tech demo, and the fact that it had a native YouTube application capable of playing 180-and-360 degree videos, but as someone who already owned a PlayStation VR, other than the fact that I had full freedom of movement, I felt no incentive to get a Go. Support for it would not last very long, and the product is now considered obsolete.

Meanwhile, PC gamers found a lot to be happy about with the new VR equipment that was coming onto the market. The problem was a lot of them still harbored resentment for Facebook and the walled garden they had forced Oculus into adding for their Rift headsets. However, there was a company out there that most gamers could agree was worth giving money to, and that was Valve. Yes, the same company that created Half-Life and Portal ALSO offered one of the most comprehensive online game marketplaces on the web, Steam. Steam ruled the digital PC game marketplace since Half-Life 2 launched exclusively for it back in 2004. Many competitors, even some backed by major game publishers, had come and gone over the years to try to overtake its crown, but by the late 2010s, Steam was the definitive PC gaming hub, and its software could be found on nearly every gaming PC. It turned out Valve had been eying the success of the PCVR market for some time, before the late 2010s wrapped, they announced they would be shipping out a new VR product! It would be made compatible with HTC Vive hardware and include its own wireless motion controllers. It would be referred to as the Valve Index and would be compatible with all PCVR games released through Steam (provided the customer had a PC capable of running the VR game). It would cost a whopping $1499 US but would include everything a PCVR gamer would need in the box (except for the PC).

Steam would also offer PC VR games for sale on their digital marketplace. The killer app for the Valve Index would be a long-anticipated Half-Life title, Half-Life Alyx. Gamers had been clamoring for SOME kind of follow up to Half-Life since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended in a horrifying cliffhanger in 2007. Half-Life Alyx was set between the events of the first and second Half-Life game, and served as a prequel to the second game, further fleshing out the fan-favorite character of Alyx Vance. It was also built from the ground up to take advantage of the VR perspective and motion control scheme, and since it required a gaming PC to play, could push the boundaries on what was possible with graphics and game performance. It was the perfect showpiece for what was NOW possible with VR.

The Valve Index hit the market and a major subset of PC gamers who refused to buy the Rift purchased it in droves. Once preorders for the Valve Index began on Steam, it immediately entered Steam’s Top 10 sales lists. I can’t imagine I’m the only person who was shocked at the irony that a digital software publishing company would release a physical product, but I very well may be. Valve had a lot to be proud of. To this day, Half-Life Alyx is considered to be one of the finest Virtual Reality games ever made. Four years later, most people still consider it the best looking VR game ever made. It also has never been ported to any other VR platform, making Steam a must-have application for new PCVR players.

Oculus answered this entry with two surprising announcements. A new Rift headset would be coming out, and a new standalone VR product, would be coming out alongside it, called the Quest. The Quest launched on the same timeframe as the next generation Rift but offered no backwards compatibility with Rift-specific Software. It could play its own standalone games that could be downloaded straight to the headset from Quest’s marketplace, and Oculus did promise that any software purchased for the Rift that was also released on the Quest could be played on both platforms if the user owned both headsets. The release of the Quest should probably be considered the major cutoff point for the second Virtual Reality War, and if that is the case, the winners of the war may just be considered another toss up. Now it was clear that the PCVR market was splintered, with Rift and Index users digging into their respective fiefdoms. Adding the Quest platform with its own standalone exclusive titles should not be considered part of the Rift’s ecosystem in the same way that the Super Nintendo could not play original Nintendo cartridges.

The Rift store would offer some impressive exclusive titles such as the previously mentioned Wilson’s Heart, and newer sci-fi cult classics like Lone Echo and Lone Echo II. Valve’s Steam would offer PCVR ports of many (formerly) Playstation VR exclusives such as Batman: Arkham VR and Psychonauts: In the Rhombus of Ruin (which I still consider one of my favorite VR games of all time). However, Valve and Oculus’s PCVR rivalry would be short lived, as Oculus was not planning on developing for the Rift hardware much longer. With the success of standalone VR products such as the Quest and Go, Oculus’s parent company could see that the path of the Quest would be the future of VR, not the Rift. One year after the release of the Quest, Oculus would answer gamers’ demands, and announced the Quest 2.

The Quest 2 should probably go down in history as the most important Virtual Reality product of the modern age. It would be compatible with all Quest games, and natively run games specifically designed for the Quest 2. Heck, unlike the Quest 1, the Quest 2 would even allow PC gamers to stream their Rift games from their PC with the use of either a Link Cable or dedicated wireless router, and some players had success streaming Steam’s VR games to it as well. Games coming to the Quest 2 would include an incredible port of the PSVR’s Iron Man VR, as well as VR-native ports of the Capcom classic Resident Evil 4. Unfortunately, the Quest 2’s quality was not perfect, its passthrough cameras were only capable of producing a 2D black and white video feed and while it did not require external sensors to track player movement, it could lose track of its controllers if they were out of the headset’s tracking field. At the time, these limitations were considered to be minor inconveniences to keep costs of the Quest 2 down, and within no time, the Quest 2 was becoming heavily adopted by young people worldwide as their gaming platform of choice!

What was Sony doing during this time? Well, they were mostly focused on the PS5, and it was doing them quite well. The PS5’s sales were completely decimating Microsoft’s newest Xbox console, and despite few exclusive titles, nearly every gamer wanted to buy a PS5. The problem was that there was no easy way to get the PS4’s VR headset working with a PS5, you would need to obtain an adapter and use the PS4’s older 3D camera if you wanted to play PSVR games on your PS5. Sony did promise a PS5 native VR headset was on its way, which they called PlayStation VR 2, but sadly, there would be NO backwards compatibility between PSVR and PSVR2 games. This was due to some hardware differences between the PS5’s new camera and the more complex PSVR2 touch controllers. It was also not ready and would not launch until Feb 2023, giving other platforms plenty of time to release new games.

A new war was upon us, but what about the previous war? Between the heavy splintering of VR users amongst the Rift, Index and PSVR users, we’re going to declare last generation’s Virtual Reality War a tie. However, this stalemate was not to last. What happened with the PSVR2 and the Oculus Quest 2? That’s a story for next time!

Virtual Reality War – Part 2 June 4, 2024

Welcome back to Virtual Reality War, where we look into the history of Virtual Reality, and share our insight behind the scenes. As we begin the second part of the series, two major Virtual Reality companies have entered the gaming space, Oculus with the Rift and Sony with their PlayStation VR (PSVR). Unlike previous console wars we’ve talked about, the VR war started out with the major players on great terms with each other. The Rift and the PSVR each had their own method for functioning (one required a gaming PC and the other requiring a PS4) and either headset had their own dedicated fanbases that did not seem to overlap or conflict. At this moment in time, we’ve considered the VR War to be at a wash, but a winner, as well as new competitors, may be soon to emerge.

At launch, the PSVR had dedicated exclusives but within no time, multiplatform VR games began getting released. While it was easy to acknowledge games played on the Rift had a graphical advantage, most PSVR owners knew it was due to the fact the Rift required a high-end PC to work, and the Rift users with those high-end PCs were happy to see their expensive computers push graphics to a new level. In short, players were happy. Even more, the future for both platforms looked bright, as it was clear more games and new features were on the horizon.

Oculus was getting ready to innovate, with innovations in motion controllers being nearly perfected since the days of the Nintendo Wii, there was a demand for wireless hand controllers on PC. The PSVR shipped with dedicated PS Move controllers that were already capable of motion control, but many PC gamers had not taken the motion-control plunge just yet. That changed when Oculus announced the first Oculus Rift Touch Controllers. At a price of $200 US at launch, these stand-alone Bluetooth-Compatible controllers allowed PC gamers to interact in the VR space. The cult-classic Twisted Pixel game Wilson’s Heart would be the one of the first major games to take advantage of the new Touch Controllers.

Outside of the gaming space, a new generation of enthusiasts were slowly discovering the possibilities VR offered. VR was also becoming a new form of general entertainment, and venues like theme parks were beginning to offer VR as a way to augment their existing rides. They were able to accomplish this by creating dedicated smartphone applications and attaching those phones into a relatively inexpensive pair of goggles. Parks like Six Flags offered a VR experience when riding their roller-coasters, hoping to entice former guests to make return trips. This was a popular promotion for a time, but due to regular technical issues, delays with making sure all guests had their headsets properly attached, and half of the guests choosing to opt out of the experience altogether, VR at theme parks would not last.

Now was the time for a new player to enter the game. Smartphones in the mid 2010s already had great screens, gyroscopes for motion tracking, microphones and speakers. It was perfect to be the heart of a VR headset. In 2015, SAMSUNG created the Gear VR headset to work with several of their selected Galaxy and Note line of smartphones. If you happened to have a compatible SAMSUNG smartphone, you could put it in a Gear VR headset and have a standalone VR experience. However, this method would not see a wide adoption. The wide range of smartphone sizes, shapes and performance capabilities made producing a consistent VR experience for players difficult. Meanwhile, other major smartphone players such as Apple would not natively adopt VR features, cutting out a huge portion of the smartphone owner market out of VR.

Over on the PC, the Oculus Touch Controllers were not an enormous seller. In 2016, most PC players were happy to use their traditional keyboard and mouse controls while in VR, and the price for the controllers were considered too high in comparison to the price of something like the PlayStation Move. Eventually, Oculus lowered the price of the controllers to $100 US. Not all games would take advantage of the new control layout, but once games from the PSVR started getting ported to Rift, motion controls eventually unified with the VR experience.

Once gamers realized that the high-end smartphones of the time were powerful enough to provide decent VR experiences when attached to a comically inexpensive pair of goggles, and be able to play a virtual reality game or watch a VR video on a headset that lacked all external video cables, a very vocal subset of gamers began demanding companies start to produce dedicated VR headsets that could operate independently from a PC or Console. For a brief time, smartphone solutions like the Gear VR were able to fill this niche, but that would not continue for long. What was needed was for a major player in the VR space to release a standalone VR headset. That, dear readers, will be coming in the next part.

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.