Learning to walk

Back when the Oculus Rift was little more than a prototype and a Kickstarter campaign, it was all but granted that we’d be using it for first-person shooters. Oculus had captured the attention of FPS pioneer John Carmack (who would eventually join the company) and every copy of the development kit was set to come with a Rift-optimized copy of Doom 3. As the first units shipped, though, it became clear that just walking, let alone running and gunning, was one of the hardest things to get right.

For all the Holodeck-style promise of VR, trekking through a virtual world is often an intensely uncomfortable experience. Over the course of playing Rift demos, I’d sometimes look down to find that I was apparently either crawling through the level or sinking halfway through the floor: because of the narrow vertical field of view on monitors, says Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, game cameras tend to be placed low to make other characters look more natural. "If you were rendering yourself at the correct height — if you're 6 feet tall and you're talking to someone 6 feet tall — their head would be in the center of your screen, there'd be a bunch of sky on top of them, and you'd only see their chest," he says. In VR, "either you're too short and you know it, because you feel too close to the ground, or if you push that camera up to a reasonable height, it turns out that a lot of doorways are about to decapitate you. Entire games are built around these things. You can't just go in and say ‘make the door bigger.’"

Trekking through a virtual world is often an intensely uncomfortable experience

Even if the camera was right, any game that let me walk faster than a leisurely stroll was almost unbearable for more than half an hour. In some ways, Half-Life 2 is fantastic on the Rift — the mild vertigo induced by seeing the ground 20 feet below me in VR made its early rooftop chase more fun than most of the firefights. But every time I turned or strafed, I got a little sicker. Three levels in, I had to stop and spend the next 20 minutes recuperating. Part of the problem is that, as Valve has readily admitted, porting games to VR is a messy and frustrating process. "[In] Half-Life 2, the staircases in that game are nauseating. And that's something so simple: I’m just moving up a flight of stairs," says Devin Reimer of indie studio Owlchemy Labs, which ported Dejobaan Games’ skydiving title AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome to the Rift. "But the way that it's implemented in that game, because it is sort of just virtual reality support patched on top, you end up running into things like that."

The developers I talked to promised I’d develop "VR legs" with time, and though I haven’t tried it, a new version of the headset is supposed to make things much better: its high resolution and reduced latency will get rid of the dizzying motion blur you see when you turn too fast, and Oculus is working on implementing real positional head tracking, which will make your head motions match up to what you see on the screen. For better or worse, though, shooters as we know them — with their nimble, omnidirectional avatars — are probably never going to work on the Rift. "When was the last time you ever moved backwards quickly in real life? It sends your brain almost into a panic mode," says Luckey. "When you're talking about a game like Team Fortress 2 where you're just booking it at 20, 30, 40 miles [per hour] backwards, that's a really disorienting experience and it doesn't feel good in VR at all."