The Future of Gaming

The Future of Gaming

I'm sure most of you here have heard of Palmer Luckey's Oculus Rift: the first major advance in Virtual Reality gaming in quite some time. (Since Nintendo's Virtual Boy in 1995, in fact) Being recently bought by Facebook in the past year for $2 billion, some have predicted that Oculus has even better potential to be accepted as it's focus may no longer solely be for gaming. The Oculus may eventually be introduced as a casual viewing medium for the world of social media or even for simply viewing your phone and other electronic devices. Sony has also thrown their hat into the ring with their introduction of Project Morpheus on March 14th of last year. An article detailing some of their hardware and capabilities thus far in comparison can be found here. We're one step closer to true VR with the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus. I believe the next step would be developing a way to eliminate the actual motion input and replace it with technology that could interpret our nerve signals and translate them into the Virtual World. For instance, if you decided you wanted to move your arm, your brain would begin to send that signal to your arm but the signal would be intercepted by the VR gear and those nerve signals would then be translated into the Virtual world, which would, in turn move your arm in that world while your body outside the virtual world would remain motionless. It's something not all that different from REM sleeping and lucid dreaming in which your brain puts your body under 'sleep paralysis' which prohibits the movement of your body during REM (Rapid Eye Movement), a stage of sleep in which your dreams are the most vivid and realistic. Lucid dreaming is when you acknowledge that, while under 'sleep paralysis', you are present in a dream but can control the dream freely due to technically being awake. In the end, if we can accomplish a similar goal with our bodies and minds alone, it's just a matter of time before true VR arrives and when it does, it can be used for far more than just viewing pleasure and convenience. One example being: use in the medical field. You can read more about that here.

What do you all think about VR and how it will shape the future of gaming and the world?

VR In its current state will be just a trend.

Virtual Reality will have a very long and expensive road to travel before its application in gaming will be substantial.

For now, the best it can hope to be is becoming a niche device that is applied mostly for experience than interactivity.

That's why most of the stuff that's readily available for it today are mostly situational tech demos. i.e riding a roller coaster, standing on unstable skyscrapers, speeding down a highway etc. basically, general shovelware. It will be tough playing normal games on the thing without having to waste money on additional peripherals ...which in turn defeats the purpose of virtual reality. I'd rather sit down and stare at my tv while I play a game with my controller than to sit down and have the thing on my head and play with my controller as I move my head back and forth, left and right to observe the gamespace.

And that's just the technical side.

They still have to address the issue of people who have to wear prescription glasses.

No Mark! No one wants your darn sh*tty helmet lol

But think about all the waifus D:

Like the Dr from Archer lol