VR-capable Frostbite Engine Suggests More AAA VR to Come from EA

That’s the problem. I can’t wait for VR to detach from the gaming industry. VR as a medium has so much more potential beyond frickin’ video games. Until it does it will be tethered to the tropes and standards of gaming development and gamers’ habits.

VR should be taking more cues from reality–since it’s attempting to simulate reality–instead of taking cues from gaming, which has used contrivances for controlling avatars that are unnecessary now that we have VR and true motion controllers.

I wouldn’t even say analog sticks are useful for that. See, at this point we’re looking for ways to incorporate control schemes used for gaming and that’s completely unnecessary. It’s just what we’re used to. It’s like asking someone who uses a smartphone primarily for gaming how we should interact/move in VR. Obviously they’d say sliding a finger along a touch-screen because that’s all they know.

It’s called virtual reality because it’s trying to mimic and simulate reality. In reality I don’t use an analog stick or touch screen for anything else but to interface with computing devices. Unless you’re in VR and in some meta-moment you have to interface with, say, a virtual console to play a video game WITHIN the simulation, then using a gamepad is pointless.

In the real world if I need to flick a light switch, turn a door knob, lift a lid, flip through a magazine, I don’t walk around with a gamepad pressing buttons to make this happen. I reach out with my hands and interact. We have motion controls so gamepads/analog sticks can stay where they belong: to interface with consoles hooked up to flat, 2D TVs.

The gaming industry is great because it provided the development tools for VR, but that’s it. The problem I have is gamers who’ve been using gamepads for 20 years insisting we use them in VR as opposed to our bodies which we’ve been using since time immemorial.

“the great thing about VR is that it takes our sense of reality and fuses it with the digital, which means we don’t have to play by the same rules and the same rules don’t always work like we expect them to.”

Yeah, no. That’s a long-winded excuse for just falling back on a useful method of control for a medium that has zero to do with VR other than the development tools. You’re looking for ways to incorporate tools you’re familiar with that have no place in the medium they’re being forced into, like a square block in a round hole, not for maximum effectiveness, but out of laziness and fear of change.

“in a professional setting, technology should make us faster and more efficient at doing our jobs.”

VR isn’t a job and you’re not in a professional setting. The goal of VR is IMMERSION and the more you rely on contrived methods of control that aren’t natural, the brain will undoubtedly assume the simulation as fake and then there’s no reason for you to even be experiencing it.

“versatility as a tool”

The BODY is the most versatile tool there is; the gamepad/analog stick is a redundancy that gamers are only insisting on BECAUSE IT’S SOMETHING THEY’RE ACCUSTOMED TO and that’s it.

Why in the heck would I need to hold a gamepad to push a button to make my avatar in a first-person VR simulation throw a punch when I HAVE ARMS TO DO THIS? It adds unnecessary redundancies to the entire experience just to retain the relevance of a tool(gamepad) that was made for an entire other frickin’ medium. Why not using TV remote controls for video games while we’re at it?

If VR remains the more-expensive and more cumbersome little brother of console gaming, then it will remain a niche product. VR deserves better than this. It deserves its own tools, its own natural control mechanisms(since the whole point of VR is to engage us in worlds indistinguishable from reality), its own genres and sub-genres that are completely detached and free from gaming. That’s the only way VR will come into its own.

In reality I don’t float around on an invisible plane, my movements controlled by some external device to slide me around; I use my body. I would expect VIRTUAL reality should mimic this instead of mimic something that itself is an analog of reality like video games.

You swing your arms WHEN YOU WALK, dummy. How many people do you see walking with their arms pinned to their sides?

Idiots.

When you have a gun and flashlight in your hands or any two handed object this system falls apart.

You can walk and shoot in real life, it requires both hands to be on the gun eyes down the sight. You can get a pretty good pace going while aiming.

The PS aim is as good as it gets right now. I wish the camera could pick up your arm and hand movements one to one which will come. As far as locomotion idk if running in place with out seeing the floor is safe. It will also require you to adjust the hmd too often.

I’ve never tried the arm swinging mechanic, so I can’t really say if it feels natural to me or not. But I don’t like to move too much this early in vr.

Exactly. Gamepads/controllers were made largely to control characters viewed in a third-person perspective on a flat, 2D screen, like a puppeteer controlling a marionette. The idea that we use those same control schemes to move OURSELVES in a first-person perspective in a virtual reality environment is redundant and ludicrous.

In VR there is no puppeteer because WE are our avatars; we don’t control them through indirect means.

I can see where you’re coming from. I’ve played quite a few FPS games over the years and can certainly understand the desire not to have dislocative movement mechanics feature in their VR analogues. In a few years — assuming VR achieves a lasting hold on the public consciousness this time around — we should start seeing “infinite locomotion” solutions that are both functional and affordable for the average consumer. At that point we can achieve the best of both worlds: fully-coupled kinaesthetic movement within a tracked RL space, plus free-ranging traversal of VR terrain without teleportation… unless, as you say, the genre or plot of the game justifies it. ;-)