I’m standing at the summit of Mount Everest, the tallest peak on the planet. The flag I’m holding is flapping wildly in the stern breeze as I trudge forward and plant it squarely in the middle of a nice, fat lump of snow and ice. I take a moment to stop and survey the scene that only 4000 people in the history of humanity have ever witnessed. I watch as the sun sets slowly over the vast mountain range of the Himalayas and feel an immense sense of peace and achievement. I remove 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:my headset.
Meanwhile, 5000 miles from here, my fellow GR+ team member Louise is staring at a very different scene. She’s in a porn movie. Ok, that sounds bad. She’s ‘experiencing’ a VR demo of the latest adult movie content by Naughty America. A few hundred meters from her, James Jarvis - our Video Lead - is soaring over Paris as a bird of prey in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Ubisoft’s Eagle VR demo, and Leon - our News Editor - is screaming like a hysterical teenager as he’s chased around the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Resident Evil 7 demo by a homicidal hillbilly.
Our experiences couldn’t be more different, but this is exactly why virtual reality is going to succeed where ✱other faddy techs like 3D glasses and plastic peripherals 🤪have failed. VR doesn’t exist in a single, narrow sphere, nor does it limit itself to a single medium in which to grow. Yes, like most other successful technologies it has successfully romanced both the gaming and adult entertainment industries, but it’s also attracted interest from many other sources. Car manufacturers, medical research, travel providers… these are just some of the non-traditional sectors now looking to the potential of VR. And that matters.
Because developing in VR is completely new to everyone, it’s tricks like this that will have a ripple effect for other experiences. Later in🐲 my interview Hardarson reveals that the Solfar team quickly discovered that an individual’s perception of a 3D space is best for the first five minutes of immersion, and after that it starts to degrade. As such, the Everest demo itself is split into smaller chunks - wandering around basecamp 4, Hillary’s Step, the summit itself - all small parts of the whole experience, offering very different types of activities. This is certainly something that’ll be a problem for traditional video games, which are largely designed to be played for much longer sessions. Similarly, movies demand that we sit in a single space for between 90 minutes and three hours.
How this is resolved will likely be a two-stage process. Software developers will need to be smarter with how they use VR, making it more palatable for our brains. On the other side, hardware creators will need to make the actual headsets lighter, more wearable, and more integrated into our everyday lives. A combination of the two will allow us to spend more time, more comfortably inside another world. How long will that take? “If you’re trying to make something that people can use all the time, wear it every day (and out in public), sure then you kind of have to change what fashion is,” explains 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus. “You have to make VR 'fashionable' for people to want to wear it, and that isn’t going to happen in the🐈 near term.”
The initial wave of VR devices are just the very, very basic beginning for this tech. Virtual reality headsets will get 𝓰smaller, smarter, cheaper. And the realities - the worlds themselves - will get much, much more believable too. The Everest demo is a particularly interesting case when it comes to the evolution of thinking around VR. There’s a section I experience where you shimmy along a very narrow ledge, with a vast drop on one side and a large snow-drift on the other. While I’m playing I feel a sense of vertigo, my palms sweat, and I’m scared of falling off. I assume that’s because I’m treating the Everest demo too seriously, so I ask Hardarson what happens when you do actually fall off… His answer is surprising.
“Nobody steps off the ledge – nobody walks into thin air,” he says. “You can do it and walk into thin air, and we were thinking and planning to make you fall but we decided against it. We may add it later, but during the testing nobody does it, so it’s a non-issue. It’s so weird, you just feel it.” Similarly, he tells me about moments where other people have played the demo and actually panicked at what they were experiencing. During a section where you cross a crevasse on a ladder, many people got so scared they ran and ended up slamming into the wall of the demo area. It’s the fight or flight response, and the Everest demo is powerful enough to trigger it. That&ꦦrsquo;s the level of realism we’re already at.
The reason is that this demo was built from the same assets used to create the movie Everest, as Hardarson explains: “The id🎃ea came really when RBX was working on the movie. We were old friends and had plans to do a collaboration on something, and we saꦏw what they were doing with the movie, and we didn’t know at the time that they had actually created Mount Everest in 3D.”
He continues: “They had done it to a level of detail that we had never seen, and didn’t think was possible, but they had only created the mountain in low resolution. So we decided to take it and remake the whole thing in high resolution, because that&r♒squo;s what you need for VR. Why? Because it’s not going to be confined to specific shots like in the movie. So we repurposed it using the same methods and the same photographs and stuff l♍ike that.”
In theory, then, anywhere can be recreated in photorealistic detail, providing you can get a camera to take a few thousand photographs. And given the advances in drone technology, that means… pretty much anywౠhere on the planet and beyond. VR will eventually enable us to see and interact with any of our world’s natural wonders, which puts complaints about ‘costing too much’ and ‘making us look like a bit of a fool’ in perspective. And that’s before game designers start to gamify these spaces, or push further into fantasy realms as the tech begins to c🐈atch up with their imaginations.
Head of PlayStation VR, Shuhei Yoshida, is certainly looking to the future when it comes to VR’s exploration potential. “For🧜 me - I really like travel. I’m getting old, I’m 51 years old - I’m feeling my body getting older. So I want a full VR system for when I get older and I can’t physically travel around. So, for me, I’m working hard for my old age!”
Even Yoshida himself, who has dedicated a large portion of his life to making games, is excited about the wider possibilities of VR. While the tech is heavily associated with gaming, simply thinking of it as ‘just another peripheral’ or ‘another way to play’ is massively underestimating its potential and scope. VR will change video games, for sure, but it’ll succeed in its own right by offering♐ experiences that go way beyond traditional games or any other kind of entertainment, because it has the attention of the whole world. And whether that means you end up at the summit of the highest peak on earth, or in the most sordid eꦰrotic encounter you could imagine, the choice will inevitably be yours. And THAT is the true beauty of VR.
