Interactive movies might work better at home than at a crowded party—and the movie studios were actually counting on consumers wanting to avoid crowds and stay on their own couch. Around the same time it debuted the Martian experience, 20th Century Fox announced a partnership with Oculus VR to release more than a hundred titles from its library to a virtual reality cinema called Oculus Video. The idea was to offer viewers a big-screen experience without leaving their homes; by putting on a Rift or Gear headset, users could sit in a simulated theater and watch films like Die Hard, Office Space, and Alien.
While much of Hollywood planned for VR to become the next big thing in filmed and scripted entertainment, other entrepreneurs bet that VR would upend the way people watch live events. “Several years ago I began tracking VR, and I recognized this is not just a parlor trick,” said Peter Guber, chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment and co-owner of four professional sports teams, including the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers. “It’s a new technology to connect audiences and artists so that people who can’t make it to the arena can still feel like they’re in a front-row seat.”
I’d spoken to Guber six months before Sundance, after he joined the advisory board for virtual reality start-up NextVR, which was building a platform to allow users of any VR headset to tune into live events and watch the action through 360-degree cameras located onstage or on the sidelines. “We did a test where we [had VR cameras] at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area at a Warriors game,” Guber said, “and when we streamed it back to New York so that we could see how it worked and how effective it was, it was so beautiful. VR puts you in the front-row seat. On the glass in a hockey game, or on the red carpet at an awards show, or in the front row of a basketball court . . . you’re sitting there virtually, and looking at what you want. It’s the closest thing to physically being in the stadium.”
NextVR had already streamed a handful of live virtual reality events, including basketball games, soccer matches, and live concerts by bands like Coldplay, but was competing with similar VR start-ups and old-school media giants to lock down VR content agreements with sports leagues and record labels. “There’s deals to be made and legal requirements that have to be met, but VR isn’t coming, it’s already here,” Guber said.
I’d been skeptical about that statement when I talked to Guber, but the scene at Sundance convinced me he was right. I could already watch a 3-D movie built for VR, enjoy a 2-D classic in a virtual theater, or experience a live sporting event from the side of the field—all without ever leaving my couch. And when I looked around the VR Bar, I didn’t see people playing with a new toy; I saw people embracing a new medium, getting lost in it, and doing it as naturally as they’d turn on a TV.
And I saw them leaning forward. Film and television are lean-back mediums, passive experiences you consume as you relax and sink into a chair or a couch. But the people consuming VR were alert and active, feeling their way around this new world, active participants in their stories. They were fully engaged and completely immersed.
I suspect that television and film aren’t going to go away. New media doesn’t always replace what came before it—we still listen to radio and we still go to the theater, after all. But the experience of VR is so compelling that it’s hard to imagine it won’t become our go-to medium. Right now it’s an emerging art form, a new frontier, a train off in the distance . . . but it’s coming closer. And when it arrives, we’re going to look at flat-screen media in the same way we look at black-and-white silent movies.
Chapter 9
THIS IS REAL
It was a cold and cloudy day in San Francisco, but Palmer Luckey was dressed for the beach, as always, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, sandals, and cargo shorts. The few dozen reporters crowded around him wore jackets and hooded sweatshirts, even though we were indoors.
“Hi, everybody! I’m Palmer, the founder of Oculus,” he said, as if we didn’t know. “Thank you all for being here. I think we’re showing forty-one games here today, thirty of which are going to be launching on March twenty-eighth with the Rift.”
It was March 14, 2016, and the final consumer version of the Oculus Rift was due to be released in just two weeks. Oculus had organized this demo day to show off the hardware to members of the media, allow them to meet some developers who were making virtual reality experiences, and give everyone a chance to experience the launch version of the Rift for themselves.
“I’m glad that you guys all came,” Luckey continued. “It’s pretty cool going from a few years ago, when I was lucky to get any press to talk to me and we were out there trying to convince developers this was the future, to now when we have tons of development in VR and tons of journalists here trying it out.”
The day was set up so that each reporter had up to a dozen short sessions scheduled, each one with a different VR developer and a demo of their soon-to-be-released VR game. I started off with Chronos, a fantasy role-playing adventure rendered in third-person 3-D, making me an invisible observer watching my animated character hack and slash his way through a monster-filled dungeon crawl. After that, I moved on to a first-person experience, a futuristic shoot-’em-up called Damaged Core, where I saw through the hero’s eyes as I blasted alien robots with twin laser guns. And then I tried The Climb, a first-person rock-climbing game that simulates the scramble up a series of sheer cliff walls.
I was doomed from the very first rock. The Climb wasn’t unusually realistic—the computer-generated mountain environments looked handsome but artificial, and when I gazed where my body should be, I saw only a pair of cartoonish disembodied hands. But after I pressed a few buttons on the controller to grasp a crack in the cliff face and start to pull myself up, I made the mistake of looking down. Even though it was obvious that I wasn’t actually hanging on to the side of a mountain, some primitive part of my brain concluded I was actually a few thousand feet up. My stomach lurched, my skin went clammy, and I immediately felt like I was going to throw up.
I pulled the Rift headset off and squeaked out a half thank-you, half apology to the developer, and then I lurched over to a nearby lounge area and collapsed onto an overstuffed couch. Waves of nausea washed over me as I lay there, eyes closed, taking deep breaths, waiting for the vertigo to wear off.
After a few minutes, I felt stable enough to open my eyes again, and when I did, I noticed Luckey sprawled on the couch opposite me, feet up on the cushions, watching me come back to my senses.
“What got you?” he asked.
“The Climb.”
“Oh man, that’s crazy good,” he said. “What are you, afraid of heights?”
“No.”
“I see,” he said, and grinned.
* * *
—
A few weeks later, Palmer Luckey took his own trip to the mountains. On March 26, two days before the consumer version of the Rift hit stores, Luckey traveled to Anchorage, Alaska, to personally deliver a headset to Ross Martin, a VR enthusiast who was the first customer to preorder the hardware when it went on sale three months earlier.
“I got an e-mail that was very nondescript and low-key, and it just said that ‘hey, we want to ship your Rift to you on Saturday, we want to deliver it to you, please call us to confirm some details,’” Martin told the gaming news website Polygon. “I had no idea Palmer would show up.”
When he did, Luckey live-streamed the entire visit to Facebook. In the archived video, Luckey has a slightly glazed, jet-lagged look about him, but he wears a big grin—and his customary Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, of course. He chats with Martin and watches him unbox his Rift headset, wearing an undisguised expression of pride.
“This is incredible,” Luckey says. “I’ve been working on this thing for so long, and you’re the first person to actually get one, so it’s kind of like me taking all that hard work, and handing it off to you, so you have to make sure to have fun with
it.”
After less than five minutes of small talk, Luckey made a quick exit. “Now I need to get home as fast as I can so that I can keep working on the launch,” he said.
It was a comically short visit for about twenty cumulative hours of travel time, but Luckey said he felt it was something he had to do. “I was pretty adamant,” he told Polygon. “I said, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve been working on Oculus since 2012. I’ll be damned if some random delivery guy is going to get the satisfaction of delivering the first Rift. That’s mine.’ I figured I could take a day out of the launch process for a quick vacation.”
On his way home, Luckey posted a travel update on his Twitter account. “Hiking through Alaska in the winter wearing flip-flops was a mistake,” it said.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, in New York City, it was late at night and my dog wanted to go for a walk, but she had to wait, because I was in outer space. My fighter squadron was on an escort mission through enemy territory, and I had to stay alert. Peering out the window to my left, I saw one of the capital ships we’d been assigned to protect—a massive vessel that filled my entire field of vision. Turning to the right, I saw the rest of the fleet and, beyond those ships, countless stars. I was admiring the view when the radio blared with the excited voices of allied pilots. I looked up, and an enemy fighter overtook me from behind, its cannons silhouetted against the stars.
It was easy to lose yourself in the immersive fantasy created by the Oculus Rift, which began shipping on March 28, 2016, and started arriving at homes and offices in over twenty countries a few days later. It was only when a zero-gravity dogfight was interrupted by the poking nose of an anxious dog that I realized virtual reality was finally real.
At first glance, the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift didn’t look much different from the VR hardware I’d seen before: a pair of goggles with a molded plastic head strap and built-in headphones. I plugged it into my computer, pulled it down over my eyes, and peered through the lenses at a 1080-pixel high-resolution AMOLED screen. But unlike previous headsets, this Rift looked and felt like high-end consumer electronics, not a science experiment gone wrong. It was covered with a fine woven mesh that made it feel soft and inviting; it was lightweight while still seeming substantial; and it adjusted to sit on my head without pressing uncomfortably into my face. The external tracking camera that plugged into the computer and watched my head movements was stylish too. The whole system felt like something I could be proud to display in my living room, not want to hide under a desk.
The setup process was equally well designed. The Rift headset shipped in a cleverly designed box with the tracker, a custom remote control, and a Microsoft Xbox game controller. New users were directed to open up a link in a web browser to download the required software, and it walked them through installation, fitting, and customization of the system. Even though I was certain that almost all the initial users of the Rift were VR enthusiasts and gadget fiends, the software felt like it was designed to be accessible to anyone. After watching a short VR movie, users were introduced to an equally easy-to-navigate control interface, presented as a virtual living room called Oculus Home.
From Home, users could launch into a variety of virtual worlds. The Rift launched with more than thirty games available in its store, and they ran the gamut from high-energy space combat to platform jumpers, puzzles, and pinball. Crucially, Oculus Home allowed users to sort these games by comfort level, so if someone was new to VR, they could choose a “comfortable” experience with little movement and a stationary camera, and not be overwhelmed by an “intense” game—like The Climb—that might make them lose their lunch.
When I told people that I had ordered a Rift, invariably the first question they asked was something along the lines of “Doesn’t that make you sick?” But the reality was that the hardware design did away with many of the problems that cause motion simulator sickness. For one thing, the headset had such a wide field of view that when I wore it, there was no obvious end to the display; it convinced my brain that I was present in the virtual environment, not looking at a screen. The Rift’s positional tracking system also worked seamlessly. When I turned my head, it followed the movement and smoothly displayed new parts of the environment, without rendering problems or lag. The image looked normal, so the experience felt normal.
I am highly susceptible to motion sickness, both in the virtual world and the real one. I can’t go on motion-simulator rides at amusement parks. Watching a movie with excessive shaky-camera movements will sometimes make me ill. I can’t even play first-person video games on a TV in my living room without eventually getting queasy. But when I stuck to “comfortable” experiences with the Oculus Rift, I never had any kind of nausea. My brain believed it was real, so it wasn’t a problem.
Maybe that’s why some of my favorite experiences at launch were a little old-school. The game I became addicted to first was Hidden Path Entertainment’s Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition, a tower defense game—a real-time strategy genre that’s most popular on mobile devices but which worked brilliantly in VR. While wearing the Rift headset, I could see the game as if it were playing out on a miniature battlefield floating in space in front of me. I felt like I was playing a tabletop war game, but instead of pushing around inanimate tin soldiers, there were fully animated units that actually moved and fired their guns.
Another standout launch title was Lucky’s Tale, a game developed by Playful Corp and published by Oculus VR, which came bundled for free with every Rift. It was a charming cartoon-style platform adventure, and it played a lot like a Mario game would if you could actually enter the Mushroom Kingdom—the playable environment was all around you, and the heroic cartoon fox navigated hazards that appeared to have real depth and weight.
And then there were more action-oriented VR experiences, which, even though I was still a bit too prone to motion sickness to fully appreciate, were just too cool to avoid. CCP Games’ EVE: Valkyrie was the space combat game that had my dog begging for relief—it came bundled with every preordered Rift, and it was ridiculously fun, with gorgeous graphics and frenetic action. It was also rated “intense,” and I found I could play it for only a few minutes before feeling queasy, but it was so exciting I kept returning and trying to build up my tolerance.
These amazing experiences didn’t come cheap, and that was the biggest strike against the Rift. The headset and accompanying peripherals retailed for $599, and they required a pretty fast computer to work. Customers could expect to lay out at least $1,500 for a new PC plus the headset and software, and as much as $3,000 for something closer to top-of-the-line.
And for all that money, the Rift experience wasn’t perfect. The headset fit comfortably on my head, but the shape of it left a gap near my nose where outside light could bleed in. And while motion sickness could be controlled and avoided, eyestrain remained an issue—I had to take the headset off every half hour or so to give my eyes a rest. And even though there were some very fun games available to play at launch, the platform was still new, so the Rift’s software catalog was thin at best.
The Rift also suffered from the lack of motion-tracked, built-for-VR controllers. At launch, the system and all its games had to be navigated with an included remote control or Xbox control pad. They worked, but VR begs for controllers that replace your hands. More often than not, the first thing people did when they put on a Rift was hold their hands out in front of the headset, and it was a letdown when they saw nothing there. Oculus had already solved this problem with their Touch controllers, but they weren’t set for a commercial release until the second half of 2016. Without them, the Rift felt incomplete.
Some critics dinged Oculus because the Rift didn’t support room-scale VR, the main selling point for the HTC Vive. But at launch, I didn’t miss that on the Rift—partly because I didn’t want to get out of my chair, but mostly because the majority of VR experiences didn
’t really need room-scale support. I was used to consuming the majority of my entertainment while basically stationary—on a couch or in my computer chair—and I didn’t see that changing anytime soon.
But even though it couldn’t do everything, the Rift was shockingly complete and polished, especially for a first-generation product. Oculus managed to produce a device that could thrill gamers and VR enthusiasts, but was also ready for the mainstream. While it was so new and expensive I couldn’t recommend it to the average consumer, I still couldn’t wait to show it off to everyone who came to my house, old or young, geek or luddite. And I suspected in time—as Oculus refined the product, and as more game designers, filmmakers, and artists created content designed for VR—a future version of the hardware would break into living rooms everywhere. I didn’t know if that would happen in a year or a decade. But I knew when it happened we’d remember the Rift as the device that kicked off the age of VR.
* * *
—
On April 5, just eight days after the Rift was released, the HTC Vive hit stores. Compared to the Rift’s high-end feel and elegant design, the Vive was an example of utilitarian geek chic. The headset resembled a prop from a 1950s alien invasion movie, and the wireless controllers looked like lightsabers that belonged to a Sith Lord. The setup process wasn’t particularly streamlined, either. The Vive arrived in a case nearly twice the size of the Rift and with far more components inside—the headset, the controllers, two base station sensors, and a link box to plug all that into before connecting to my computer. There were cables everywhere and, alarmingly, five different power cords—I had to unplug half of the electronics in my living room in order to free up enough outlets just to get the Vive powered on. And because the Vive was designed for room-scale VR, its two sensors had to be positioned close to the ceiling, in opposite corners, in order to get an overlapping, unobstructed view of the room. Fortunately, the system came with wall mounts and very long cables, but setting up the sensors took me another hour of pulling cables behind furniture and drilling holes in my walls.
Defying Reality Page 17