Virtual reality is the latest fad in gaming. Glenn Aquilina seeks to trace the origins of how these head-mounted displays came to be, where they are at now, and where they are going.
One of the most important aspects of videogame development to consider is the element of immersion. That is, the ability of a videogame to make the player feel emotionally invested in said videogame’s characters, plot, and world. Jamie Madigan, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, has become an expert in the field of videogame psychology. In his article on immersion Madigan writes on "Multiple channels of sensory information’. Basically what this entails is that the more senses a videogame assaults and the more detailed they are, the closer a videogame will be to reality and the more immersed the player will become.
However, the fact that one has to sit in front of a monitor or television screen will always break that aura of immersion. But, what if one could play a videogame as if it were reality? To turn one’s head and actually have the player in the game do the same? It is with this idea that Virtual Reality Headsets came to be. Players may become even more immersed in a videogame world than ever before.
Though Virtual Reality technology has existed for years, its use was largely military or for training air pilots due to the high cost of the apparatus involved. However, Palmer Luckey is credited as being the man to have repurposed the technology for the consumer market, specifically the videogame market. Luckey founded Oculus VR to develop the idea of creating a new head-mounted virtual-reality display that was both inexpensive for gamers and more effective than what was currently on the market at the time.
Coincidentally co-founder of Id Software John Carmack had been doing his own research and came across Luckey’s developments. After sampling an early unit, Carmack favoured Luckey’s prototype and just before the June 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Id Software announced that their future updated version of Doom 3, which would be known as the BFG Edition, would be compatible with head-mounted display units.
The Oculus developer kit was an initial version financed by a Kickstarter campaign which was launched on 1 August 2012. Oculus VR sought to get the initial Oculus Rift into the hands of developers to begin integration of the device into their games. Oculus announced that the "dev kit’ version of the Oculus Rift would be given as a reward to backers who pledged $300 or more on Kickstarter. There was also a limited run of 100 unassembled Rift prototype kits for pledges over $275 that would ship a month earlier. Within four hours of the announcement, Oculus secured its intended amount of $250,000 and in less than 36 hours, the campaign had surpassed $1 million in funding, eventually ending with $2,437,429. This shows the extent to which people gravitated towards the notion proposed by this technology.
On 18 March, Sony also unveiled their prototype virtual reality headset named Project Morpheus at the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC). Head of the PlayStation division at Sony Shuhei Yoshida exclaimed at the unveiling of Project Morpheus that Virtual reality “may well shape the future of games”. Such a statement is what has piqued the interest of gamers around the world especially coming from an industry veteran such as Yoshida. But even bigger news would come a week later.
On 25 March news broke that Facebook had acquired Oculus VR, the company which had been working on the Oculus Rift. A Facebook press release stated that, “While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology, and Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas.” This gives a clear sign to the legitimacy of the technology for a media juggernaut such as Facebook to endorse the technology and also gives a clear sign to where the technology is heading beyond the realm of gaming.
