@Grey_Eyed_Elf said:
@blueberry_bandit said:
@Grey_Eyed_Elf said:
@PSP107: There are two types... Evolutionary innovations and then revolutionary innovation, most gamer's here use the latter but the examples they give are all evolutionary.
Gaming going from 2D to 3D is a example revolutionary innovation, almost everything else since then is evolutionary when it comes to graphics and hardware power even control methods can be regarded as evolutionary.
Since the jump to 3D nothing for gaming has changed that would be regarded as a revolutionary jump. Its just been a slow incremental jump with each generation with small evolutionary pushes in the way we interact with the games such as VR or 3D.
VR is a revolutionary jump, not an evolution. As VR matures, it will actually be a far bigger jump than 2D graphics to 3D graphics.
Think about what 2D -> 3D did. It gave us countless new genres, the ability to finally explore a 3D environment with physics and interactions that are similar to the real world. It brought in the idea of 1st person, 3rd person, top-down, etc.
VR also gives us countless new genres to play with, many of which have not yet been realized because of how young the tech is. 3D environments can now be explored with perception of depth and scale that mimics the real world. It can trick your brain, something a 2D display is mostly incapable of. Physics and interactions are taken a step beyond, by giving you the freedom to do what you want with your hands. But then there's also the social side. For the first time ever, you can be in a virtual space with someone and feel like they are there with you, and have a human interaction close to what you'd expect in real life, something that will only get exponentially more real over the years.
That doesn't even account for what the eventual future of VR holds, with haptic suits, gloves, eye-tracking, body-tracking, facial tracking, and in a much more distant future, full immersion virtual reality.
Like you said 3D was universally adopted by the industry and gave us new genres of games.
VR on the other hand hasn't added anything new to the games, its so far more evolutionary than revolutionary. The technology is just a combination of head/movement tracking and motion controls into one technology and the actual headsets are just tiny screens... Which is just a evolution of technologies that already existed and combined into one and the actual software?... its still 3D gaming.
Everything you have stated is the promise of what VR COULD do, but it hasn't yet. Also what genres did VR create?... So far VR is a tech demo of individual technologies which already existed and its a EVOLUTION of those technologies. We already have 3D worlds to explore, games already have object interactions with motion controls which implement physics... Combining the technologies doesn't make it a revolutionary jump. Its a evolution of technologies we already have, it was the next logical step. A revolution would be a Inception/total recall like experience with total immersion.
Flight simulators and car simulators with full real life controls that mimic the vehicles interaction with the environment giving you feedback is a far more revolutionary jump than VR in terms of technology because it adds something new... Feedback to the environment. In VR when you pick something up you are still using a control there is nothing new there, no feedback to your interaction with the game other than the visual interactions.
2D Graphics and 3D graphics are still represented by pixels on a screen. The graphics pipeline is different, but not completely unrecognizable. VR may use the same display technology (for now, but lightfields will probably be adapted in the 2020s as Magic Leap One, which is an AR headset, has a lightfield display that looks promising). Basically, you can look at 2D -> 3D and 3D - > VR and always notice some form of continuation.
Echo Arena, The Climb, and Rec Room are examples of games that show VR can be a fundamentally different experience than traditional gaming. You can never have the same intense, zero-gravity experience of Echo Arena in a traditional game. You can never scale mountains with true freedom using our own hands, potentially bringing out that inner fear of heights that you may or may not have. You can't have a social experience as real and as connected as Rec Room, or BigScreen as another example through traditional gaming.
I can't really name what genres VR has created, because they're not really defined well enough yet. It takes time for a genre to form; just look at FPS games, the genre existed in a nameless form for quite a while even before Doom Clone was the main name for it. But that's just my point, people called them Doom clones, until there were enough of them that stood out on their own that it formed a genre. So we have new genres that are simply undefined, they are not fleshed out enough, but the actual experience of a new genre is there. Ergo: A new genre is a new experience. When you're playing Echo Arena, that is a brand new gaming experience never done before. What do we call it? I don't know, Zero-Gravity E-Sports? Probably not, but that will be tailored further down the line as more games try to imitate the success of Echo Arena or get inspired by it.
A lot of what you're saying can be applied to 2D -> 3D. Physics existed in 2D. World interactions existed in 2D. So did characters, story, and emotion. You're basically cherry picking here. 3D expanded upon those so greatly that it brought about enormous changes, enough to be considered revolutionary and fundamentally different.
VR does the same already, but my point is that it will do more, a lot more as time passes. And not even much time. Eye-tracking and body-tracking are expected to be standard technologies in 4 or 5 years, and facial tracking is even simpler, so I would expect that too. I forgot to mention that you technically already have world-scale VR using VR backpacks, though standalone headsets like the Santa Cruz should give us world-scale VR upon release. If you can walk across an entire field outside and have that mapped 1:1 in-game, how is that not fundamentally different? Heck, forget about hacks like VR backpacks, just look at The Void experience. It's so beyond anything gaming has done before.
Your last sentence doesn't make it seem like you've tried VR, at least on PC. Oculus Touch / Vive Wands motion controllers give you detailed haptic feedback, to the point where you can feel the pull of string on a bow, and it's quite convincing. You make a point about actual flight simulator cockpits and such, but to counteract that, I'll reiterate that you should look at The Void. And technically, flight simulator cockpits would have to incorporate VR at some point alone the line as the tech progresses if it wants to give the most realistic possible experience.
To summarise: VR is already a transformative experience, if you're playing the right games on the right setup. Very near-future tech (< 5 years) will cause VR to expand greatly in it's capabilities to make this even more true.
Log in to comment