This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Oculus Rift's consumer model finally hits shelves on March 28 after two years of anticipation - with the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR soon to follow. But is this the next genre of entertainment? Or the next Kinect (all dance, no revolution)?

WIRED gathered the creators of some of the medium's best titles - Crytek's The Climb, Frontier's Elite: Dangerous, Bossa's Surgeon Simulator, ustwo's Land's End and indie developer Triangular Pixels' Unseen Diplomacy - to talk about the possibilities, and the (virtual) worlds of difficulty yet to solve.

Peter Pashley (ustwo), David Braben (Frontier), Frank Vitz (Crytek), Katie Goode (Triangular Pixels), Henrique Olifiers (Bossa Studios) Sam Barker


WIRED: What was the one moment that first convinced you that VR is going to be a transformative medium?

David Braben, CEO, Frontier: My first experience with VR was with Virtuality - the multiplayer visor and joystick gaming machines in video arcades in the 90s. It was blurry, and made your eyes hurt - so it's astonishing how far we've come.

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Peter Pashley, head of development, ustwo: For me, trying the original Gear VR development kit. That was a transformative moment, because it meant that it could be accessible for everyone.

Henrique Olifiers, co-founder, Bossa Studios: The moment I was really convinced was with the Vive.

When I became an actor with my hands in that world, and didn't have to rely on keyboard, mouse or gamepads. Then I became a believer.


Frontier

What are your experiences of what works well with game mechanics and what you can do in VR that you aren't able to do in other platforms?

Katie Goode, creative director, Triangular Pixels: I realised early on that there's difficulty in manoeuvring players. So I could see immediately that games where the enjoyment comes from the journey may not actually work. But then I felt the physicality - I really wanted to make VR feel real. We started working on another game called Unseen Diplomacy, where it's a physical assault course - rolling underneath lasers and crawling on the floor - and that's just because of the Vive

and the ability to do room-scale VR.

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DB: I'm lucky because I've got an iron stomach and don't suffer from some of the [nausea] issues. We've tried a number of different experiences, and what works very well is when your

body position matches the body position that you have with your character. A game such as Elite: Dangerous is virtually perfect, because even your hand positions match. The challenge is going to be when you get up and walk around.


Frank Vitz, creative director of Crytek: It's the disconnect between what your inner ear is telling you

and what you can display through the system. We've been experimenting with these ideas about how you can mark a position, do a quick transition. But the jury is out in terms of how to allow arbitrary movement.

HO: But it's fair to say that it's now down to content, right? The hardware itself is there. People can make games that don't make anyone feel sick.

PP: That's a really important point. We move people around in Land's End and we're gentle with it. We find that around 80 per cent of people can handle it fine, and will be in there for hours. This is partly due to two features: first is to constrain movement in a way that people are comfortable with. Second is content - because Land's End is not incredibly detailed, that lack of detail lets your brain somehow not worry about it that much.

HO: We're shifting our thinking from big levels, to small portions of a level. We hadn't done that before, because that's not especially conducive to using a mouse and a keyboard.

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Triangular Pixels

Many VR narratives are told from a first-person point of view - the medium gives you incredible capabilities to do that. But are we limiting our imaginations?

PP: For VR experiences to be worth putting the headset on, it's got to be something that makes the most of you being somewhere.

HO: The most interesting experience I've had in VR was multiplayer. That is the most powerful experience.

PP: I think that highlights the "uncanny valley" amplification that VR does. Seeing that reality is suddenly so much more powerful than all the fake stuff around you.

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How do you introduce players to the medium, making them understand those limitations?

KG: We've got an interesting experience of that. In Unseen Diplomacy you have to use the Vive controller to undo a screwdriver. We've found people who were gamers struggle with this - they were trying to press the buttons. But the non-gamers knew instantly how to use a screwdriver: they'd pick it up, they'd twist it around.

PP: It's almost the inverse problem - we need to teach game developers not to teach players but to try to just do things that people do naturally.

DB: When a controller first came out for consoles there was resistance. People were looking at their feet. Now they expect to know how to use a controller - so much so that games often don't

even show the buttons for it. The issue that's not being discussed with VR is the ballooning of the play space. How many people are going to have a five-metre space clear of furniture?

PP: That's the 3D TV equivalent of VR - nobody's going to do that. I think VR is going to become a static experience.

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KG: When we started playing with [Oculus Rift] development kits, people didn't know they could move their heads.

PP: At the beginning of Land's End, the first thing it says is, "Please turn around".

FV: Another interesting thing is, as an engine maker, we're trying to support multiple devices. How can we standardise, so that people can enjoy the game through a variety of devices?

ustwo

Peter previously said that he thinks mobile VR is more likely to reach mass adoption. What are the hardware problems left to solve?

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KG: To be frank, Elite: Dangerous is not going to run on Google Cardboard, is it?

DB: That isn't necessarily the case because it could stream from another device. We're in the very early days. And the danger, actually, is if too many people adopt it too quickly they will join during what we all should recognise will be a learning period.

HO: There are already big games out there that should not be played, really. If someone tries them, that is the end of their VR experience forever. Going with gamepads is absolutely not the right way to go. This is a 30-year-old input method. Once you've tried the position controls from the Vive or Oculus there is no going back.

PP: We'll have a separation between very input-light experiences, which use something like the Oculus Remote, and then other - dare I say "enthusiast" - titles, which may need bespoke hardware.

DB: There's a third way we're likely to see, which I'll call "soft AR" - where you can see your hands because it has processed them with a camera or whatever, so you don't need a controller.

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FV: Like the Leap Motion system, for example.

Crytek

What do you think about The Void, the VR amusement park? Are we going to go back to physical arcade spaces?

KG: I love the idea.

PP: I think it might end up like karaoke, where you go somewhere with a group of friends to go through a half-hour experience.

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FV: Theme parks are still the place to explore those experiences.

DB: My fear, as a parent, is kids are already disengaged on their Xboxes or their PlayStations. When they've got headphones and a great lump on the front of their face - from a parent's point of view, you have no idea what they're watching. For it to go mass market we have to think about that. I think Sony have done so - with PlayStation VR, you can also see [what's happening] on the screen.

KG: We had a four-year-old using the Gear. We put her in, and she's asking, "Oh, where's Dad, I can hear you, Dad!" She was so convinced she was there that she started walking off, and there was

a set of stairs - we had to hold her in place. That's scary.

HO: How long do you think mass market will take, in your opinion?

PP: When you look at the US, where The New York Times has just sent out 1.3 million Google Cardboards viewers to their readers - access to mobile VR is getting to the point of mass market.

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FV: A year or two, maybe?

Bossa Studios

The film-maker Chris Milk talks about VR's potential to elicit empathy. What are you most excited about for the future, in terms of new experiences?

HO: Pairing AI with virtual reality. Getting non-player characters which are clever, which understand emotion. Game AI has been on a different path from general use AI for quite some time - they will have to go back to the point of making AI more narrative driven.

FV: If I look at a character, and they know I'm looking at them, I immediately feel like there's a connection.


DB: Eye contact is so important in human interaction, and VR and AR allows us to do that in a powerful way.

KG: I'm really looking forward to the physicality. This is part of the reason we did a virtual physical assault course, where you're literally crawling around.

PP: Empathy - seeing somebody else's world - could be powerful.