The first time I used a VR set was in the store of a mall. It was a few years ago. Staffs were doing some cool demos on something that looks like a boxing stage, but to my surprise they didn’t attract many passers-by to stop and take a look. I was determined to satisfy my curiosity, and expected quite a lot from the charged VR game experience. I was, however, disappointed in a lot of ways: the headset was heavy, the vision blurry, and the game environment sketchy. It was over after less than five minutes, and I remember walking away thinking this can’t be all of it. There is so much potential in this immersive form of experience—why isn’t people putting in more effort to make the vision better? Wouldn’t that attract a lot more players?
I of course didn’t know much about the technical challenges VR faces by then, and when I picked up the VR set in 418 I wasn’t expecting much. But once I logged in to the game home my old impressions on the sketchy visuals were completely renewed: it was so convincing that I might be actually standing in a Japanese styled wooden piled room on the mountain side. The sky was clear, non-ending and blue, there were birds flying by and sounds of wind sweeping up the dry leaves. The only distracting thing is that when I looked down at myself there was nothing there: no hands, no feet or downer body whatsoever. I cannot see my fingers when I touch the controllers too. One result is that I was not sure exactly where I was standing. It also made figuring out the usage of the controllers very difficult. Because the space where I could move was limited and the room in the VR world was large, I couldn’t physically move myself to every places but sometimes had to use the controller to “teleport” myself around. Although I could use my hands in the process and was standing, the whole experience seemed still more of a mental one instead of one that takes place in the real world.
I got caught up in a game called “down the rabbit hole”. At first I was a little disappointed that there is still an avatar moving around and I couldn’t be in the game set in a first-person perspective. This makes the VR set something more like an advanced game set with an incredibly large screen and fancy controllers than a real world simulator. But the effect was somehow exclusively suitable to this game, as when I control the little girl traveling across the different rooms in the rabbit hole deeper and deeper down, it reflects the book’s idea of becoming incredibly small and incredibly big. But clearly this defect can not fit in every game’s design.
My greatest takeaways for the two experiences is that the visual effects of VR games nowadays has reached a quite acceptable height, anyhow physical sensations cannot be out-ruled if our aim is to create a realistic world. The headset I used is still quite heavy and clumsy, and after an hour’s use I was tired standing and holding two controllers in midair—although the interesting game set and plots surely alleviate the pain. The visual effects was amazing at first sight, but after the first thrill I found myself to get used to the realistic sights quickly and simply “expect it to be real”. Then again the fun depends more on the design of the game but not the form. It is clearly better than the traditional gaming experience, but to make it any more equal to real life VR still have a long way to go.