Oculus Rift – the world will never be the same again

GameCentral talks to Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey about how virtual reality is going to change video games and much more besides.

Now that we stop to think about it we’ve probably met quite a few millionaires in our time, but Palmer Luckey is different. The first time we met him in 2013 he was just the guy that invented Oculus Rift, the Kickstarter-funded virtual reality headset. Things were already going well at that point, with the Kickstarter campaign having raised $2.4 million and Oculus Rift the clear market leader for VR on PCs. But that was nothing compared to being bought out by Facebook for $2 billion a few months later.



As far as we could tell he was largely unchanged the second time round, and was still dealing with the press like he had done before and still wandering around in his bare feet (apparently that’s his thing). Although we did get the impression he didn’t really enjoy the meeting and greeting as much as he pretended, and we suspect it was actually for the best that he got called away quite early in our interview with him.

Instead we ended up talking to Oculus VR’s vice president of product, Nate Mitchell, who turned out to not only be extremely knowledgeable but also infectiously enthusiastic and impressively honest. Because although we’ve been very impressed by everything we’ve seen of Oculus Rift (and Sony’s Project Morpheus) we did raise some serious concerns when we saw the latest E3 demos back in June.


But to our surprise Mitchell accepted those criticism and added more of his own; as he clearly outlined where Oculus Rift is now, in terms of technology and the release of a proper consumer version, and where the future of the concept will lead in the years and decades to come…

GC: I’ve spoken to a number of VR developers in the last few years but I’m still very unclear on what the limits are of Oculus Rift, and what kind of games will and won’t work well. I suspect that’s because nobody’s quite sure yet, but in terms of first person shooters, for example, is that something that definitely is never going to work? Because they’re too fast-paced?

PL: Well, we have a developer’s best practices guide that we’ve built with the help of some of our psychologists, and also a lot of developer feedback. And there’s actually a lot of things in traditional first person shooters that we know for certain to be bad. For example, there’s the fact that they tend to be based on extremely high speed motions. And not just that but unrealistic motion and acceleration. So instant accelerations and also acceleration differentials, where you can be moving forward and then instantly be moving backwards. Which could easily be a 30 or 40mph differential.

Also, the gameplay is not based on how you navigate in real life, it’s completely artificial. You’re doing things like running out and running back or strafing side to side… nobody actually locomotes like that in real life. And so, yes… you can make those games work on a technical level, in terms of being able to look around and play the games, but they’re just not based at all on the models that your brain expects from movement.



PL: Okay, but yeah that’s one of the concrete reasons that you don’t see a lot of FPS games just ported straight over. Sorry, it looks like I’ve got to go…

NM: I can add to that, though. Palmer and I have done a number of talks about VR game design and development, and we also talk about… almost seated, stationary experiences being a lot of the really easy well known stuff that we know works well.

For example, we’ve shown a number of things that look like board games, or like Tower Defense games, or even almost like sports games… like, FIFA’s standard camera is you’re sitting in a stand watching a soccer match. That sort of experience translates extremely well to VR, because the person’s not locomoting through a space.

So I think we have a good handle on… ‘Hey, here are a few things that work and here are a few things that don’t work, based on the current hardware’. But I think it goes back to what your original statement was, which is like no-one really knows. And it really is this totally new frontier.

GC: I’m not implying any criticism, it just seems very difficult to get a handle on what’s possible and what isn’t.

NM: It really is the cutting edge. I think part of it is a lot of people try to take… just like the first movies, people try to take existing mediums and squeeze them in, right? It’s like the same thing with first person shooters. When we started the company we thought it was all about first person shooters, but we quickly figured out it was not about first person shooters.


That’s not to say a first person shooter can’t work, it’s just like when you think of Call Of Duty it’s not a good fit. And if you look at how movies have evolved over the last… I don’t even know how long they’ve been evolving.

GC: About 100 years?

NM: I guess so. But I think we’ve finally mastered the medium, right? I think we’ve mastered storytelling for film and we know how to tell a great story.

GC: Well, Michael Bay is trying to make us forget.

NM: [laughs] But we’re at the dawn of an entirely new medium with VR and just like you say… I completely agree, it’s not a criticism. It’s actually one of the things I think is coolest about Oculus, VR, and the entire industry.

GC: Oh definitely. I think the most complex first person game I’ve seen so far is the Alien Isolation demo, and I wonder if that’s because it’s quite slow and stealthy. Because you’d think otherwise the most obvious thing in the world is just to do a quick port of Call Of Duty or Battlefield.

NM: VR is really one of those house of cards, where everything needs to be perfect for it to be really a magical experience. I think Alien Isolation, for better or worse, had a number of problems, but every VR experience right now has a lot of issues. Even Lucky’s Tale has its own issues. Everyone is still learning, it’s not a matter of, ‘Oh, this one was good and this one was bad’. I think some of them are better and some are worse, but none of them are perfect yet.


GC: Lucky’s Tale isn’t a great game but the way it uses the headset for a third person experience is amazing. It immediately made me wish Nintendo were involved with you.

NM: [laughs]

GC: I was going to say does that mean all third person games would work as well, but I guess something like Gears Of War would have the same problems as a first person shooter.

NM: It really depends on the game design.

GC: So presumably something like Zelda would be a better fit?

NM: It’d work super well.

GC: Does the camera always have to be moving a little bit, like it was in Lucky’s Tale? Is that one of the tricks?

NM: It… you really have to… I really could talk about this for hours! It’s one of those things where you really have to dig in deeper to the game design. We have that best practices guide, it’s out there. It’s really long, it’s about 70 pages, and it’s not hard and fast rules. It’s like, ‘Here are our best guesses/suggestions based on all the research we’ve done’.

Lucky’s Tale, for example, isn’t just like, ‘Hey, let’s make a third person game and go crazy’. They spent months tweaking the camera, tweaking the way the player moves through the world, changing the speed of things. The levels are designed very, very carefully to be comfortable. You really have to design with VR in mind, if you do that you can have a great experience.

I think that’s the main takeaway, is if you build for VR it’s great. It’s the same thing with like iOS, the absolute best games are all designed for iOS. It’s not Street Fighter, it’s not Grand Theft Auto that are the great experiences, they’re okay – but they’re not the best.

Alien Isolation – imagine this on a VR headset

GC: Will you be curating the games that are available? Because knowing the way the games industry works your software catalogue is going to be immediately flooded with shoddy ports that don’t really work, and that could colour many people’s initial experience.

NM: We haven’t decided yet. We do want to make sure that it’s very easy to have a super high quality, fun experience. I think there’s a number of ways to get there. We haven’t made any final decisions yet. Although we do already do some basic curation on Oculus Share, which is our developer sharing portal. That’s 100 per cent targeted at developers, and it’s super lenient, but we do have some curation there to make sure it’s a good experience; even for our developers.

GC: So what needs to change for every kind of game experience to be possible? Or is it the games that need to change? I knew about the super speed thing before, so is it a case of game worlds and physics needing to become more realistic?

NM: I think making them more realistic would be a massive leap in the right direction, I think humans accommodating over time… just like when kids walk up to TVs and try to touch them…

GC: Will we evolve to use VR better? Is it us that needs to change?!

NM: That is another thing. Everyone pretty much acclimates to VR after like 10, 12, 15 hours – something like that. But still, we try to build experiences internally that target a wider audience, so that everyone can enjoy it. A number of hardware breakthroughs are needed though. It’s not obvious to me what they are yet, it may be that it never works and that’s just the way it is. It may be that we find some major breakthrough that is able to more quickly resolve that vestibular-stimuli conflict, and it ends up solving the problem entirely.

I think one of the main challenges that Palmer often alludes is that to really get to the matrix, like to truly get to The Matrix, it’s probably not technical breakthroughs. It’s more medical breakthroughs and a better understanding of the human brain and how it works. And all Oculus does is try to convince your visual perception that you’re someplace entirely different, through technology. Actually tapping into your spinal and nervous system…

GC: This is great that we’re even discussing this as anything other than science fiction!

NM: I know, right! [laughs]

GC: So do you have any idea what the next step is after a headset? Is it something in your eye or… in your brain?

NM: I don’t know, and it’s so hard to comment. But we’re a long way from anything like that, let’s say that.

GC: I did have one major criticism of the E3 demos…

NM: Oh there are lots of criticisms, don’t worry. We are the harshest critics.

GC: [laughs] Okay then, I was just trying to be diplomatic there.

NM: [laughs]

GC: But the big problem I had with the E3 demos is the resolution of the headset. The stereoscopic effect was great, the positional tracking was amazing, but the resolution is still RoboCop-o-vision. I worry that after all this time you’re trying to go mainstream at what I’m guessing is just a couple of years too early. I can still imagine a much better experience that seems, in my ignorance, to be relatively easy to achieve.

NM: I completely understand. So… I think it’s a couple of different things, because resolution is one of those things that’s a lot of things coming together. For example, the resolution of the panel is one thing. How much multi-sampling and super-sampling and anti-aliasing you’re doing is another major thing.

GC: So it’s a software thing?

NM: Yeah, exactly. Well… it’s software but it’s also the GPU horsepower that can actually support it. That’s another thing. The optics, the diffusers, the diffraction filters, all of those things – they can basically visually improve the resolution without actually improving the resolution significantly.

So when we talk about resolution what we’re really talking about is perceived resolution, and perceived resolution is affected by so many different things that I believe that when you see the consumer product you’ll actually be like, ‘Wow! They actually improved the resolution substantially’. When we actually haven’t necessarily improved the resolution substantially.

I do agree with what you’re saying though, and we are going to continue to see higher resolution panels for the foreseeable future – even up to maybe 16K x 16K down the road. I’m of the mindset that we are at a point, with the consumer v1, that it is good enough to release it. And we wouldn’t release it otherwise, right? I mean we’ve held it back so much already…

So we believe that the consumer v1 will have a perceived resolution that is good enough for the consumer market, absolutely. But you’re absolutely right, we’re counting on GPUs to get much better. We’re counting on CPUs to get much better, and we’re counting on screens to get much better.

GC: So what kind of time frame would you put on that?

NM: That’s not easy to guess. If Moore’s Law holds, over the next decade we should see massive leaps in resolution and GPU horsepower. Knock on wood!

GC: [laughs] The other thing I’m still not clear on is how much these things are going to cost. Are you going to be paying like £600 and then a new version comes out next year like an iPad? Or is there going to be a subscription service or something?

NM: It’s really just too early to say. I can give you some hypotheses. So, the second developer kit is $350 [£218] and we’ve always said we want the consumer version to be somewhere in that same price point. Somewhere between a sort of $200 to $400/$500 range [£124 to £311]. We think it’s import to be in that range because we do want it to be as affordable as possible. And we’ve always tried to make this thing as affordable as possible.

Like with the development kit, we’re not making a lot of money. It’s all about getting it in the hands of as many people, so that there’s going to be more content… and that’s what’s most important. Which is actually not how other people approach their development kits.

I think the truth is though, with the Rift at least, even though you’re spending $350 on the devkit you do need a high-end computer to be able to power it, right? Because of the displays and everything else. And that really becomes the gating factor. Because if everyone can afford the $350 headset but then you need a $2,000, or a $1,000, computer that’s a huge cost. So that is one of the biggest challenges we have, moving into the consumer market. And something we’re worried about.

And I think in the long term that’s going to continue to be a challenge. We want to continually drive down the price, but ultimately you do need a powerful computer as well. And you know, you talk about wanting 8K displays/16K displays – just wait till you need the GPUs to power those things! They’re gonna be expensive… at least in the short term. 10, 20, 15 years from now, it’ll get better.

GC: So how do Facebook see that issue? Because I think the majority now access Facebook through smartphones.

NM: Think of us as being like at the beginning of home computing. Do you remember the dawn of personal computers? It was very, very different from having an iPhone in your pocket. So we’re kind of like at the Apple II stage, and that’s generous. This is like very rudimentary hardware. I think if you can look out into the future and suspend disbelief, and bet on where the industry’s going, you can imagine a Rift in everyone’s pocket. That is the vision.

GC: I can see that. But not a $2,000 PC in everyone’s house.

NM: Oh, you can have a VR experience powered off of this, today. [Waves iPhone around.] Now it’s not the same experience that’s being powered off of this [points to the demo units at the other end of the room] but they’re moving very quickly and at some point those worlds will collide.

This [still holding phone] is actually used, what, 40 per cent for communication, 40 per cent for games, and 20 per cent for music and entertainment. This is very much a communication/gaming device. VR, I think, is going to be very similar. And if you can put a VR headset in everyone’s pocket… it’s the same thing when phones were invented. Everyone was like, ‘That’s so impractical! They’re going to have to go to a house to take a phone call?! It’s ridiculous!’

GC: I love the quote from the head of the British Post Office, when phones where just coming in. And he said something like, ‘Why would we need telephones when we still have small boys to run messages?’

Both: [laughs]

NM: It’s the same sort of thing. We are at the dawn of VR and you really do need to look out at the distant horizon to understand what Oculus and Facebook are trying to do together. And I think when you start to think about that the impact can be so massive. It’s incredible exciting.

GC: It is, it is. And that was fascinating, thank you very much.

NM: No problem at all, thank you for coming.

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