Defying Reality
Page 13
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It’s hard to resist pretending to be Hunter S. Thompson when you’re a reporter chasing a story to Las Vegas. Then you realize you’re on an air-conditioned monorail to gadget central, not a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. The Consumer Electronics Show takes over the city. The billboards promote Chinese contract manufacturing companies instead of casino stage shows, and when a stranger hands you a flyer, it’s as likely to say “visit us at booth 79450” as “girls, girls, girls.”
Since 1967, the Consumer Technology Association’s annual trade show had become the go-to event for companies trying to sell their new products to retailers and the media. In previous years, exhibitors debuted groundbreaking consumer technologies, including videocassette recorders, camcorders, compact disc players, and high-definition TVs. This year, VR was the must-see technology.
Official CES marketing materials breathlessly explained that because of “the fast growth of virtual reality,” organizers had increased the square footage of the Gaming and Virtual Reality Marketplace by 77 percent over the year before, and more than forty exhibitors would be there, including Oculus, Sony, and HTC. Before the show even started, news outlets like The Guardian and USA Today were already proclaiming CES 2016 “the year of VR.”
Even members of the world’s oldest profession were in on the hype. A few days before the show began, I received a press release from Sheri’s Ranch, one of Nevada’s legal brothels, announcing that while they enjoyed an annual surge in business from CES attendees, management was “bracing against” the growth of virtual reality because the convenience of simulated sexual satisfaction “threatens the Ranch’s customer flow.” Fortunately, the release went on to explain, “courtesan” Red Diamonds remained confident that “virtual reality couldn’t teach a man what I could teach him.”
Of course, CES hype doesn’t always bear fruit. In 1995, Newsweek magazine wrote that “virtual reality is finally coming to the living room” after trying four different headsets at the show; unfortunately, the most successful of them was Nintendo’s ill-fated Virtual Boy, and that was discontinued in the United States after less than six months. Then there was the CES I’d attended back in 2009, when 3-D televisions were supposed to, yes, finally come into the living room: I have fond memories of Sony chief executive Howard Stringer’s keynote address and his bringing actor Tom Hanks onstage to show off the company’s wonky-looking plastic 3-D glasses. Hanks wisely kept himself above the hype with a naughty-child routine, reading marketing text off the teleprompter in a comical monotone and sniping at the product. “Oh, look, they’re so cool and hip . . . I think these are the best glasses Sony’s ever made,” he deadpanned. By 2015, just 9 percent of US households owned TVs with 3-D capability, and by January 2017 all the major manufacturers had dropped the feature from their new models.
But even if virtual reality didn’t have a winning record in Vegas, at least this time around it looked like a high roller. My first stop at the show was a gilded ballroom at the Wynn Las Vegas luxury resort, where HTC and Valve were laying down their cards and showing off a new prototype of their codeveloped Vive system. (Convention-goers who couldn’t get past the velvet rope were left to fight for a space in line at the Vive Truck, a massive eighteen-wheeler outfitted with eight demo bays that spent four days parked near the convention center.)
The second (and final) Vive development kit, called the Vive Pre, was never supposed to exist. Soon after HTC announced the headset at GDC, they indicated that a commercial version would ship in the fourth quarter of 2015—an ambitious timeline that would give the device a nice head start on the Oculus Rift. But then months passed with no official launch date. Devotees started to worry that something was wrong with the system. On December 8, their fears seemed to be confirmed. In a news post on Facebook, HTC announced that it would start shipping a new development kit in January 2016, and then follow up with a commercial version in April—a few days after the Rift hit the market. The comments on the post read as if HTC had canceled Christmas—“very sad and confused”; “I fear the Vive project has seriously run off the rails”; “words cannot contain my disappointment.”
A week later, HTC CEO Cher Wang tried to put out the fire by promising that the delay was due to “a very, very big technological breakthrough”—an innovation so big that releasing the first Vive without it would be unfair to early adopters. “We shouldn’t make our users swap their systems later just so we could meet the December shipping date,” she said. But standing in a Vegas ballroom, holding the Pre in my hands, I wasn’t buying her explanation. The new headset was smaller and lighter, but aside from that, the only change I could see was a small round lens embedded in the front of the device.
At that point, I might have made a sarcastic comment to the HTC employee assigned to give me a demo about how adding a camera was such a small thing it couldn’t possibly be worth a six-month delay. He responded by demonstrating both how the new addition works and why I am an idiot.
Here’s an obvious but important truth about virtual reality. In order to convince someone that they’re present in a virtual world, you have to separate them from the real one. Fortunately, the limitations of our current technology actually help achieve this. We need to put an LED screen in front of the user’s eyes, and that keeps the user from seeing what’s in front of them. The screen and the tracking hardware are relatively big and heavy, so we need to enclose them in a bulky headset, and that blocks the user’s peripheral vision. Headphones deliver convincing stereo sound, but they also have to sit on or in a user’s ears, silencing the world around them.
All this isolation makes it a whole lot easier to convince a VR user that he or she has left the real world and gone elsewhere. But it also means that the illusion of presence depends on maintaining isolation. I have found this works something like biological night vision. The longer I’m in a VR environment, the more I grow used to it and forget about where I really am . . . but if I have to pop the headset off, even for a second, when I return to the VR, it seems artificial again. My tendency to perceive the virtual as real can be regained only through another prolonged exposure.
Think about how many times while reading this you’ve glanced from the page, maybe to check the time or have a sip of water. Now imagine if every time you did that, you had to go back to the beginning of this section or chapter and start over. That’s like what happens when you have to take off your virtual reality headset. It makes it hard to get back where you were.
So what are we supposed to do when we want to take a drink?
Enter what I like to call the Vive’s “where’s my beer?” button. When you’re inside any virtual environment, you can double-press a button on the Vive’s controller, and that unassuming new camera lens on the front of the Pre headset records the world in front of you and sends it to the computer for processing. The Vive then displays, in bright blue outlines, a live view of the real world presented as a virtual one; it looks something like the neon-highlighted world of Tron, or perhaps the scene at the end of The Matrix where we see Neo’s point of view of a world made of glowing code.
The practical result of all this is that it lets you see the world around you without taking off your headset. But the brilliance of the system is that it’s not simply giving you a peephole—it’s mediating between the virtual and physical worlds, displaying your real environment as if it were an artificial one. You can interact with it, but it doesn’t remove you from the VR experience. Essentially, you don’t lose your night vision.
This isn’t the first time someone has put a camera in a VR headset. Oculus flirted with the idea in some of its Rift prototypes, and Samsung’s Gear VR has a “passthrough camera” mode you can turn on to look through your phone’s rear lens—perhaps because you’re using it on a plane and want to know whether the guy in the window seat is giving you the stink eye. But using that feature just dumps you out of
whatever you’re doing and turns on a video feed. It doesn’t do anything to protect you from the shock.
The Pre’s camera also helps to address a problem specific to VR systems like the Vive that are built for walk-around, room-scale experiences. What happens when a user steps outside of the play area? Forget about breaking immersion—wandering players risk breaking their neck if they walk into a wall or trip over an unseen obstacle.
The first Vive prototype I tried out, back at GDC, addressed this problem with the Chaperone system that reminded me of a Star Trek holodeck. As you approached the edge of the play area, it faded in a wall-like grid in front of you, warning you not to proceed. Now, with the Pre’s front-facing camera, the Chaperone system went even further. Come close to a border and the same grid appears, but beyond it, there’s a fainter, less detailed version of the “where’s my beer?” Neo-vision. The virtual world doesn’t disappear, but in the distance, it intersects with the physical world, and faint lines trace out the edges of real-world objects.
The practical result of this is that you’re less likely to stumble over furniture. But it also turned a limitation—the Vive’s finite play area—into an interesting feature. In the new Chaperone system, the grid isn’t a barrier, it’s a transition. Step into it, and your Neo-vision activates, allowing the user to perceive a space where the world is both real and virtual.
To me it suggested a future where VR headsets like the Vive and the Rift merge with smart eyewear like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens, allowing people to live in multiple realities at once, and shift from one to the other as needed. I imagined being in my office, but my trans-reality glasses hiding the cubicle farm and making it appear to me as if I’m on a beach in the Caribbean. My desk is there too, though the live video feed of it appears to be sitting on sand, not cheap carpet. And if my boss approaches, the system quickly fades out the virtual beach, and lets me see the entire real-world office.
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It was a nice thought, but for the time being, I’d have to be content with staying home and pretending to work in a virtual office. After checking out the Chaperone system, I played a new game in development for the Vive, Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator. It’s a tongue-in-cheek farce set in the year 2050, after robots have taken over all human labor; the premise is that a particularly sympathetic robot created a simulator so bored humans could learn what it was once like “to job,” and relive the glory days of work by pretending to be a gourmet chef, office drone, convenience store clerk, or automotive repairman.
It turns out that the robots got it wrong. When I put the Pre headset on and started the game demo, I found myself standing in the middle of a small cubicle at the center of a bright cartoon-style office. The cubicle was covered with standard bits of office detritus, but there was something off about almost all of it; the computer keyboard had only two keys, 0 and 1, and my coffee mug was printed with the legend World’s Most Average Worker.
I was admiring the Make Job Happen motivational poster on the back wall of the cubicle (“Why job tomorrow what you can job today?”) when my supervisor—a floating computer monitor displaying a happy face and wearing a dangling red tie—arrived to give me the day’s first assignment. “Workers would traditionally start their day with an addictive liquid stimulant,” he announced in a mechanical voice. “Time to get the java flowing!”
I turned back to the desk and, in the real world, raised my hands, which were holding the Vive’s motion-tracked controllers; at the same time, a disembodied pair of white gloves rose to float in front of me in the cubicle. HTC had made the controllers smaller and sleeker since the last time I used them, but their function was the same; I reached toward my coffee mug, squeezed a trigger, and “gripped” it, locking the mug to my hand in the game and to my movements in the real world. Then I turned around, stuck the cup under the spout of a small coffee machine, and poked a big red button on the machine with the gloved fingers of my other hand. The cup filled with animated liquid, and without thinking, I knew how to finish the assignment—lifting the cup up to my mouth and tipping it toward me.
It must have been an odd sight for the HTC employee running me through the demo—a guy with a plastic lunch box strapped to his face trying to drink from a joystick. In the game, the coffee disappeared from the mug, and the supervisor spoke again. “Also, workers would ingest a frosted sugar torus for sustenance.”
You can see where this is going. Job Simulator parodies the working world by distilling it into a series of banal, pointless actions, and the player instinctively and mechanically completes them. I was about ten tasks in and inserting a virtual CD-ROM disk into a virtual computer so I could make a virtual presentation for my virtual boss when I realized the irony. It’s a “what the hell am I doing?” moment that marks a turning point in the game, and seems to usually elicit the same response from players: destructive rebellion. I spent the next few minutes picking up every loose object in the cubicle and either throwing it across the office or smashing it on the floor. The violence peaked when I realized that if I picked up a stapler and shook my hand, I could make it fire staples at my supervisor like a semiautomatic pistol.
It took barely ten minutes in Job Simulator for a simulated office job to become a blur of impotent rage and failed assignments. Maybe the robots actually got it right.
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After the Vive event, I went to bed early, and the next morning I woke up before dawn. I walked up an eerily quiet Las Vegas Strip to an empty CES press room and connected my laptop to one of the few available hardwired connections to the Internet. Then I waited, drank coffee, and compulsively hit the “refresh” button on my browser. It was January 6, 2016, and at eight A.M. Oculus VR’s online store was finally going to start taking preorders for the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift. This was a moment I’d been anticipating since the company’s Kickstarter campaign closed three years earlier, and I wasn’t going to miss placing one of the first orders because I was stuck on dodgy hotel Wi-Fi.
Oculus had announced the presale in a blog post on the company’s website two days earlier but hadn’t divulged many details aside from the place (Oculus.com) and the time (8:00 A.M. on January 6, 2016) where overanxious VR nerds could give the company our money. We still didn’t know what would come in the box, when it would ship, or what it would cost. But as I browsed the Internet while waiting for the store to open, I could see that a horde of people around the world were also counting the seconds to the presale and ready to order, whatever the price.
Naturally, there was plenty of speculation. The Rift development kits sold for $350, but those headsets were nowhere as advanced or polished as the first consumer version (or CV1). At the Oculus Connect conference in September, Palmer Luckey had said that the CV1 would cost more but be priced “roughly in that ballpark.” Did that mean $400? No one was sure. The Rift was the first entry in a whole new category of computer hardware, and since Oculus invented many of the CV1’s components and developed new manufacturing techniques, we couldn’t even make an accurate estimate of the company’s costs. One Goldman Sachs forecast estimated the Rift’s bill of materials cost—the total price for all the components, materials, and supplies required to construct one finished product—was $500, and that didn’t include significant expenses like marketing and software development. Another analyst told me each unit cost Oculus $600. There was no way to be sure.
Whatever it was, it seemed likely the CV1 would be sold at or below cost. One of the unusual things about the video game industry is that new consoles like the PlayStation or Xbox are considered loss leaders and priced as low as possible. A company like Microsoft will gladly take a $100 loss on each unit, because they don’t see that transaction as selling hardware—they’re buying real estate in your living room. Once they’re in the house, then they can make money, on everything from licensing deals to subscription fees to advertising and ga
me sales. There’s no doubt that executives at Oculus (and the people holding the purse strings at Facebook) saw the Rift the same way. Get it out, get it in as many living rooms, workplaces, and engineering labs as possible, and do it before the competition starts staking their own claims.
At eight A.M. Oculus answered the big question with a new post on its website. “We’re excited to announce that Rift is now available to preorder for $599,” the post read, “and it will ship to 20 countries/regions starting March 28.” Every headset would ship in a custom carrying case along with a tracking sensor, an Xbox One controller, and a new peripheral, the Oculus Remote—basically a six-button TV remote control. And every purchase would be bundled with two free games, the cartoon-styled platform adventure Lucky’s Tale, and the multiplayer space dogfighting simulator EVE: Valkyrie.
I didn’t even finish reading the post before I started clicking through the online store. Shopping cart: Oculus Rift, Qty: 1. I clicked “checkout,” filled out my shipping address, clicked “continue.” At this point the surge of customers pounding Oculus’s website caused the next page to slow for a second while loading, and I noticed a little voice in the back of my head. “Five ninety-nine?” it said. I ignored it, typed in my credit card information, hit “continue” again. The site hung for a few seconds this time. “Five ninety-nine? That’s not in the ballpark of $350,” the voice squeaked. “That’s barely the same game!” Sorry, voice of caution. Shipping address, payment method, order details, all okay. Shipping: $30.00. Estimated total: $629. Sure, fine. “Agree & Complete Order.” Click. Awesome. I felt like a kid who just mailed his annual letter to Santa.