The Oculus Rift headset gives you peripheral vision inside game worlds, but could also herald an era of unique gaming peripherals like 360-degree treadmills and precise motion trackers. "If you’re in a spaceship, you’re going to want to be sitting down with a joystick," Roberts said, "or we could detect your hands using Leap." After the panel, Oculus VP Nate Mitchell told me about a time Roberts assigned different game controls to different objects on his desk, and used motion trackers to engage with each object. "The next stage of peripherals will be tracking your position in 3D space," Roberts said. But what about tracking the space inside your brain? "The first thing that came to my mind was neural interfaces," Bleszinski said. "One of my fantasy scenarios is a flight game where your altitude changes depending on how relaxed you are."

"It doesn’t make sense to use a gamepad or mouse when creating a realistic experience [with VR]," founder Palmer Luckey said. "A keyboard and mouse are superhuman interfaces that let you do things you could never do in real life." He alluded to the fact that in first-person shooters, it’s easy to assign weapons and macros to keyboard keys, whereas in real life switching weapons isn’t so simple. One particularly unrealistic aspect of using Rift is moving or strafing — "In a first-person-shooter, you’re really moving around at 35 miles per hour and that makes you sick [while wearing the Rift]… We’ll have to rethink that," said Bettner.

One possible solution is an omnidirectional treadmill that moves under your feet and predicts your movements. "With a little bit of prediction and misdirection you can make people feel like they’re in an infinite space," Luckey said. "It feels like they’re walking forever." Gamer fatigue is very clearly another obstacle to such an approach, but when ultra-realism is the goal, it might not be such a bad thing. "We might see paintball games where you play three to five minute rounds," Bleszinski said, "or Myst-like games where you’re slowly exploring a mysterious island." The key, according to Bleszinski, is pacing — which differs from platform to platform. He imagines a future where arcades see a resurgence as places where you’ll pay to explore new kinds of peripherals, like treadmills, or even rooms (holodecks?) you can inhabit both physically and virtually. "Maybe we’ll see laser tag where you have people running around in a virtual space [with walls, rooms, and obstacles]," Luckey said. "You’ll wire yourself in for a few bucks an hour."