Defying Reality

by David M. Ewalt

  Finally, once the system was powered up and operational, the Vive’s setup software required that I repeatedly walk around the room with one of the controllers, tracing out the borders of my “play area,” or the space where the Vive would place its out-of-bounds-indicating Chaperone walls. Once again, my dog became a victim of the age of VR; I had no choice but to drag her bed into the hallway in order to give myself room to move around. At least with the headset on, I wouldn’t be able to see her aggrieved hound-eyes.

  All the work was worth it once I actually got the Vive running and began to explore a collection of VR games developed by Valve Corporation called The Lab. Designed as a showcase for the system’s capabilities, the software presented a series of mini-games set up around a laboratory setting from Valve’s beloved and popular Portal franchise. In one game, I played the part of an archer standing on the battlements of a castle under siege from a rampaging horde; the controller in my left hand appeared in VR as a simple wooden bow, and my right hand transformed into a red feather-fletched arrow. When I moved my hands in the real world, the weapons did the same in the game, and I instinctively knew what to do: pantomime the motions of nocking an arrow, pull it back, and let my shot go. The thrill when I hit my target was like an electric shock. Even though I’d done it before, being able to manipulate objects made VR vastly more immersive, interesting, and fun.

  After exploring The Lab for a while—and repeatedly untwisting myself from the long, heavy cables that trailed from the back of the Vive headset to my PC—I fired up one of the system’s launch titles, a puzzle game called Fantastic Contraption. Originally developed in 2008 as a web-based browser game, Fantastic Contraption required players to build simple machines using a tool kit of items like rods, wheels, and motors with the objective of getting the machine to roll a few feet to a goal. As a two-dimensional web game, it was intriguing but forgettable; reinvented for an immersive virtual environment, it had me immediately hooked.

  In the simulation, I saw a pastel-colored cartoon-style world, something like a miniature golf course floating in a blue sky, where I was meant to build machines to traverse the unique terrain of each puzzle. I couldn’t see my own body when I looked down at myself, but the two Vive controllers were floating in space, and a brief audio tutorial showed me how to use them to build a contraption: grabbing parts from a toolbox, pulling and stretching those objects to the preferred size and shape, and then snapping them together to form axles, frames, and entire vehicles.

  Like the archery game in The Lab, Fantastic Contraption initially drew me in with its control system; it felt like I was actually picking up and putting together physical objects, not just waving my hands around in the air. But the game really won me over when I remembered I could actually move around in the virtual space. I could put my contraption down on the ground, walk around it, examine different sides, even walk back and forth on the course itself, checking out the obstacles between the starting line and finish point.

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  The room-scale experience was impressive, and I loved having controllers that actually tracked my hands. But in the weeks after the two big VR headsets launched, I found myself using the Vive less and less. It was a pain moving away furniture (and herding away curious dogs) every time I wanted to roam around in one of the Vive’s virtual worlds. If I had a room in my house totally dedicated to VR, maybe that wouldn’t be such a big deal. But even in that case, I suspected that the heavy, dragging cables would continue to be an annoying problem.

  Instead, I returned to the comparatively limited experience of the Oculus Rift. Aside from my continuing addiction to the tabletop appeal of Defense Grid 2, I found that I’d reach for the Rift for short bursts of VR as a diversion, or after I read about something new that might be fun. The headset was light and comfortable and sat on a shelf right next to my desk. If I saw a news story about, for instance, a new VR film that had been released, I could reach over, pop the headset on my head, find the video in Oculus Home, and finish the entire experience in just a few minutes without ever getting up from my chair. The Rift experience was easy, polished, and comfortable. It was a home entertainment device, while the Vive still felt like an exciting but complicated piece of laboratory tech.

  Still, it was clear that the Rift owed a lot to the Vive. There had been a huge jump in quality between the Rift’s first and second development kits—a period that coincided with Valve’s attempts to work with Oculus, and the eventual move of Michael Abrash and Atman Binstock from Seattle to Silicon Valley. For instance, early versions of the Rift relied on internal sensors for tracking the motion of a headset, while Valve was already using computer vision and external cameras.

  A few months after the consumer versions of both headsets were released, Alan Yates, one of the Valve engineers responsible for developing the company’s tracking system, argued the point in a post on Reddit. “Every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve’s research program,” he wrote. “Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and [lens] design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the ‘Valve Room’ at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it.”

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  Any controversy over who invented what did little to discourage investors and entrepreneurs from trying to make their own mark in VR. According to an analysis by market research firm Digi-Capital, venture capitalists invested almost $1.2 billion in virtual and augmented reality businesses in the first quarter of 2016 alone.

  Meanwhile, VR began to appear in pop culture to a degree that hadn’t been seen since the early 1990s. In April, television’s top-rated show, The Big Bang Theory, began an episode with main character Sheldon Cooper taking a virtual walk through a forest using a Zeiss VR One headset.

  After years of caution and skepticism, some of the biggest companies in the entertainment business had finally started to get serious about making content for VR. Disney Studios released Disney Movies VR, an app for both the Rift and Vive headsets that let users visit simulated environments from its movies and theme parks, as well as watch 3-D clips from movies including The Jungle Book, Captain America, and Star Wars. The broadcast network NBC announced it was teaming up with Samsung to simulcast the 2016 Rio Olympic Games in VR. And the cultural giant The Simpsons celebrated its six hundredth episode by turning its regular show-opening “couch gag” into an immersive 3-D Planet of the Apes parody for Google Cardboard, called “Planet of the Couches.”

  VR was winning awards too. In May, the Cirque du Soleil virtual reality experience I’d enjoyed on my way to Las Vegas won an Emmy Award for its creators, Cirque du Soleil Média and Felix & Paul Studios. And in June, the New York Times VR documentary The Displaced won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions film festival.

  It seemed like everyone was trying VR. In October, in an appearance at Oculus’s annual Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg boasted to the crowd that when world leaders stopped by Facebook’s headquarters to meet with him and find out more about the massively influential company, he’d jump at the chance to show them virtual reality for the first time.

  “Depending on what kind of a leader it is and what their culture is, maybe we’ll play a first-person shooter,” Zuckerberg said. “By the time the headset is done and we take the headset off, they’re just amazed, and they don’t want to leave.

  “I actually had this one situation where the wife of a prime minister was yelling at her husband that he had to leave, go catch the plane home, and he was just sitting there saying, ‘I was told there was a dinosaur. I demand to see the dinosaur,’” Zuckerberg said.

  Even the classic pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons made the leap off the tabletop into the virtual world
. On November 16, AltspaceVR announced a partnership with D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast (a subsidiary of Hasbro) to bring officially licensed D&D assets to a tavern-themed VR game room. Users could gather around a 3-D table and control individual avatars representing each player. They could build a map using dungeon-, wilderness-, and city-themed terrain tiles; record their characters on official D&D character sheets; and move around figurines representing various D&D player classes, as well as monsters like dragons and gelatinous cubes.

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  The market heated up even more on October 13, 2016, when Sony shipped the results of its Project Morpheus—a $399 headset called PlayStation VR. Priced in a sweet spot between the high-end Vive and Rift and a plethora of low-end phone-based viewers, the PSVR was Sony’s bid to take over the entire middle of the market by sneaking into homes through the living room.

  To be fair, the device wasn’t inexpensive—it sold as a peripheral to the $399 PlayStation 4 video game console and required a $59 PlayStation camera and one or two $25 PlayStation Move controllers. But Sony wasn’t marketing the device to new users who needed to buy all that from scratch. At the time, the company had sold almost 50 million PlayStation 4 consoles worldwide, and it was counting on those video game enthusiasts to embrace the PSVR as a mainstream competitor in the virtual reality race.

  The design of the PSVR reflected Sony’s ambitions to make it that year’s cool must-have toy. The headset was made of white and black plastic, and the exterior was dotted with a constellation of LEDs that glowed blue when the headset was in use—a striking futuristic look that made it stand out in a living room and made anyone who wore it look like an extra from Tron. The display was attached to a hard plastic shell that fit over the user’s head like a construction helmet, instead of using ski mask–style straps like competing products. This change made the headset slightly less immersive, since it wasn’t held flush against your face, but a lot more comfortable to wear for long periods of playing video games.

  The headset also used less-expensive components. Instead of two screens producing a resolution of 1080 by 1200 pixels for each eye like the Rift and the Vive, the PSVR had one screen with a resolution of 1080 by 960. As a result, PlayStationVR experiences were less vivid and realistic than what competitors could offer. And while the video game system’s Move controllers offered an option for hand tracking, the flashlight-sized wands weren’t as versatile or intuitive as the Vive controllers or Oculus Touch.

  All considered, the PSVR offered an experience best categorized as “good but not great”—comfortable and fun, but definitely less impressive than what you might experience using one of its PC cousins. For the money, though, it was an excellent option, and a reasonable holiday wish list item, at least for gamers within the existing PlayStation ecosystem, or with very generous loved ones.

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  Expectations were high going into the PSVR’s launch. Earlier in the year, market research firm SuperData Research estimated Sony would sell 2.6 million units between its October debut and the end of 2016—a massive number that was likely to dwarf even the combined sales of the high-end competitors. While neither HTC nor Oculus would say how many headsets they’d sold so far, the best estimate available indicated that the two companies had moved just 300,000 units combined in the six months since their launches, and would likely reach only about 775,000 by the end of the year. That’s a respectable figure for very expensive computer hardware in a brand-new market, but hardly a blip on the radar of the top products in the consumer electronics market. In comparison, at the time, Apple was estimated to sell more than 667,000 iPhones every single day. (To be fair, the huge popularity of smartphones did help drive much stronger sales of entry-level phone-based VR viewers; the same report estimated that Samsung would sell 2.3 million $99 Gear VR viewers by the end of 2016.) If the PSVR managed to sell anything close to the millions of units that SuperData predicted, it would give Sony a huge lead and go a long way toward making VR a mainstream technology.

  Meanwhile, Oculus was still the best-known and most-buzzed-about brand in the market, but cracks were starting to show in the organization, and its reputation was beginning to tarnish. In September, news website The Daily Beast revealed that during the final months of the hotly contested 2016 US presidential elections, self-described libertarian Palmer Luckey had funded a pro–Donald Trump political organization called Nimble America that was dedicated to “shitposting” on the Internet and spreading anti–Hillary Clinton memes—including a billboard outside of Pittsburgh that featured a portrait of the Democratic Party candidate alongside the words Too Big to Jail.

  The news came to light after a member of the group made a post announcing their existence to a pro-Trump discussion group on Reddit (“We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it’s time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not,” it teased). Then a few hours later, a user named NimbleRichMan made a follow-up post promising to match donations to the nonprofit group for the next forty-eight hours.

  “You and I are the same. We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors,” NimbleRichMan wrote. “I reached out to the leaders of this community because I am doing everything I can to help make America great again. I have already donated significant funds to Nimble America, and will continue to do so . . . am I bragging? Will people be offended? Yes, but those people already hate Donald. They cannot stand to see successful people who are proud of their success.”

  The posts struck some readers as a scam, an example of an anonymous group trying to capitalize on growing alt-right sentiment to make a quick dollar. So when The Daily Beast contacted Luckey to ask if he was NimbleRichMan, he confirmed to the reporters that the group was real and he was its main financial backer.

  “I’ve got plenty of money,” Luckey told the site. “I thought it sounded like a real jolly good time.”

  After The Daily Beast broke the story, it quickly became international news—the idea that a twenty-four-year-old tech titan worth $700 million was attempting to sway the presidential race using Internet trolls made Trump fans gleeful and most everyone else disgusted. Thousands of people posted on Facebook and Twitter that Luckey’s behavior was turning them off from ever buying a Rift, and a handful of video game developers promised to stop making new games for the platform.

  The next day, Luckey posted a statement on his Facebook page apologizing for the stunt, but denying that he was NimbleRichMan at all:

  I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners. The recent news stories about me do not accurately represent my views.

  Here’s more background: I contributed $10,000 to Nimble America because I thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters through the use of several billboards. I am a libertarian who has publicly supported Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in the past, and I plan on voting for Gary in this election as well.

  I am committed to the principles of fair play and equal treatment. I did not write the “NimbleRichMan” posts, nor did I delete the account. Reports that I am a founder or employee of Nimble America are false. I don’t have any plans to donate beyond what I have already given to Nimble America.

  Still, my actions were my own and do not represent Oculus. I’m sorry for the impact my actions are having on the community.

  In the hours after the statement went up, a few of Luckey’s colleagues posted their own messages of support—or at least attempts at damage control. Oculus head of content Jason Rubin said he took Luckey at his word and “would not work in a place that I thought condoned, or spread hate.” CEO Brendan Iribe promised that “everyone at Oculus is free to support th
e issues or causes that matter to them, whether or not we agree with those views,” and reminded the public that “it is important to remember that Palmer acted independently in a personal capacity, and was in no way representing the company.”

  None of it did much to calm down the furor. In the days that followed, both news outlets and tech websites ferociously debated whether Luckey had done anything wrong, and even if he had, whether it was any of the public’s business. A few prominent critics—including author and tech evangelist Robert Scoble—argued that Mark Zuckerberg should fire Luckey.

  No such thing happened, but as Oculus entered the critical holiday gift-buying season, its formerly omnipresent, darling-of-the-press founder was suddenly conspicuously absent from corporate messaging and events. He didn’t even show up at the third annual Oculus Connect convention in October, a decision that Oculus VP of product, Nate Mitchell, said he’d made on his own. “Palmer decided not to attend OC3 because he didn’t want to be a distraction,” Mitchell said.

  The Nimble America story faded away in the overheated news cycle of the weeks leading up to the presidential election. But inside Oculus’ owner, Facebook, executives began to tighten their control on the once largely independent subsidiary.