Eesh. I've burnt myself out. Couldn't get up until 1pm today, just could not do it, and when I did my entire brain felt like some kind of horrendous fat slab of ham that had been left out rotting in the sun all day. So I took some paracetamol and codeine and disappeared into virtual reality.
A beer rep brought us a goodie bag of pins and bar blades and whatnot yesterday, including this Google Cardboard-style VR headset into which you slot your phone. The idea was to scan a QR code and use the headset to go on a virtual tour of the company's brewery -- but as a long-term gamer and technology enthusiast I saw it as my responsibility to liberate the device and investigate what the world of VR has to offer.
Here are the loose impressions that my fat ham head was able to discern thus far:
Google Cardboard Demos:
So here's the premise. You download the Google Cardboard app onto your phone, launch it, then slip your phone into the headset, which is just a cardboard case with two magnifying lenses glued inside. Compatible apps and videos split your phone screen into two images, identical but for showing the scene from subtly different perspectives, which tricks your brain when looking through the lenses into combing the images into one 3D picture. Then add tracking of your head's movements by the app, and automatic adjustment of the in-game camera accordingly, and it's as if you were in the world in the headset, looking out on a virtual landscape existing around you.
The demos that come installed with the Cardboard app are very limited, but provide a pleasing introduction to the form. There's a polygonal arctic tundra environment in which you can chill with a fox and fly with some seagulls and watch a whale breaking the sea's surface and crashing back down. There's a narrated tour of the Palace of Versailles. And then you can load Google Earth -- which, let me tell you, when you get to be a boundless celestial god swooping around your home planet just as the codeine in your system begins to kick in, becomes quite the ride.
I flew around New York like Spider-Man, some mountains somewhere by accident, then went to my mum's house and looked down from the air at the limits of my childhood adventures spread below me: the path to my friend's where we'd sit on the Sega dreaming of secret missions, the back garden with the tyre swing and the drop down to the woods in which we'd play soldiers, the quiet suburban road that stood in for loading bays, football pitches, Dunya grounds. I remembered the campaigns, the victories, the feuds and the tears; saw us as children soaring with our arms out as the afternoon stretched before us... It was strange, the enclosure of the glasses, the transportation to another place set my imagination alight. It was nice.
Lanterns:
A pleasant little retreat to a Japanese lakefront, on which you stand and look around at trees, hills, sky, water, listen to the lapping of the stream, watch joyous paper lanterns bob downriver and float off serenely into the air. Nothing much to it, but it's quiet, calming and lovely. Meditative is the word used most often when describing such pieces, and this one lives up to the term.
Minos Skyfighter VR:
But I mean who doesn't want to fly in a spaceship blasting enemy ships with your lasers? Everyone wants that. Sadly, despite looking fantastic, this game is a bit naff. The only interaction on the headset is a button on top that clicks a pressure pad onto the screen, so all apps have to be designed to control with a single screen press. In this one your viewpoint is locked to the front of the windshield, so looking around steers the ship, which means you can't peer about your cockpit to look at the gearstick and furry dice and all. It sounds insignificant, but that stuff really adds to the sense of actually being in the simulated location.
Might function better with a wireless controller, but I couldn't get mine to work so who knows? The game itself is a series of basic dogfights -- feedback is flat and effects are basic and there's a limp, weightless feel to it all: crash into an enemy vessel and you both just pause there, trapped together in space, until some momentum squeezes you free.
Androids Dream:
My favourite thing in VR so far. A short tour of a Blade Runner-inspired cityscape, it opens with you reclining in the passenger seat of a cruising hover car, looking out at flaming gas vents, grandiose ziggurats and towering neon billboards as a Vangelis-like score builds around you and dials flicker and thrum inside the cockpit. Unlike Minos, here your craft is ostensibly piloted by an Edward James Olmosy dude beside you, leaving you free to glance about inside the car. If you're sitting on a chair while you play, and you look down at your virtual legs in the car's seat, the sensation really is uncanny. There's a real presence to it all, you want to reach out and touch the controls, the chipped windscreen, your pilot's immaculate moustache. The whole thing lasts about two minutes, and I've sat through it ten times so far. Could only be bettered by the pilot being more animated: if he turned to you as you turned to him and nodded and asked if you know what a turtle is -- man, I'd be so happy I'd wee.
Conclusions:
Yeah, it's a tricky one, VR. For the full experience you need to invest thousands in a true headset, a juggernaut PC to run it off, sensor bars, motion controllers... and it all needs setting up, configuring, just so you can spend an evening twisting yourself in cables in your bedroom bumping into your bookcase. The costs are too prohibitive for this high-end experience to make it mainstream, meaning there's not enough demand for it to be worth the studios investing in serious applications, and you're left with a whole bunch of ridiculously expensive tech demos and virtual tours.
Then down at the other end here you've got the cardboard headsets that anyone can afford, powered by phones that we all have already, with no set up, no fumbling with wires -- except a cheap pair of cardboard glasses are uncomfortable to wear (I've cut and bruised my nose badly from strapping the thing to my face all today), the lenses are low-quality, you get light spilling in round all the edges, and the phones that process the data are underpowered, meaning low-poly, poorly-textured cheap and cheerful applications, fun as a gimmick but with little lasting appeal.
And yet you try on a virtual reality headset yourself, even one made of cardboard, and you're instantly transported. You're in another world. It really exists, not as a flat picture on a screen but a tangible reality built around you, close enough to reach out and touch.
Give it a few years, perhaps, when we've got feather-light headsets made of nano-fabrics with 16k displays in each eyepiece, running wirelessly and powered by chips in our skulls, altruistically issued to everyone by a benevolent tech giant, and perhaps we'll all be meeting up on glorious alien beaches for simulated cocktails as imaginary fireworks explode across purple heavens... while the outside world crumbles around us from the pollution produced by the manufacture of all this outlandish technology.
Or maybe that has already happened and we're living right now in a virtual reality. That would explain why I constantly require recalibration after extended periods of motion, why I sometimes watch myself take actions as if I was controlled by a third-party uncertain of the conventions of this life, and why my limbs never quite seem to sync with the movements of the rest of my body.
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