The stunted development of Virtual Reality

 Arrested 

There was a time when virtual reality was set to take hold as the bold new face of home entertainment. An experience that would defy the fidelity of all other forms of entertainment, and even that of life itself, as you forsook your human chains and set off into the sunset to soar as a virtual deity of your own despotic reality. A time when the only gleam of land on the horizon of entertainment technology was formed of 3 dimensional objects so full that you could almost feel them drift against the tips of your fingers. That time was in the 1990's. And the result was one of the biggest video game platform flops by a proven gaming titan of all time, because I'm not about to drag up the Ouya sales figures for comparison. The Virtual Boy: a console so utterly bad that it ended up pushing back Virtual Reality several decades. Man... they just don't make 'em like that anymore, now do they?

Since then the Virtual Reality scene has a enjoyed a few minor glow-ups. From the proper full head immersion experiences of the arcade booths to the high quality, and high price, home copies to the VR headset of today which is now the last resort of 'Meta'; a prohibitively overpriced and overspec headset designed and marketed purely for corporations to keep in touch with their employees. Hey, at least the VR market is getting absurd amounts of money sunk into it's ongoing development. But with the rapidity of how the gaming market has grown around VR, to the point where we may actually be within touching distance of the pinnacle of visual fidelity for this age- why does it feel like VR has sort of plateaued early and bowed out of the race?

At the beginning the only real gripe holding back the proliferation and domination of Virtual Reality was a small problem called "Nothing to play". Practically everything the various VR headsets ran were simply just 'experience pieces' that pretty rounded up to glorified tech demos without the added push to become a fully fledged product beside that short coming that the original Mirror's Edge had. As of today that is no longer the case. Entire gaming development companies exist exclusively to develop unique content that is built to work with, and some of the titans of the industry have produced actual gold for some of these headsets that should be absolute system sellers. Why 'Half Life Alyx' wasn't just called 'Half Life 3' is utterly beyond me, because it nails the concept of 'transformative gameplay systems' which is fundamental to the brand of Half Life. The Boneworks games are delightfully thoughtful and fun jaunts through creative murder halls and there's a Skyrim VR mode which has a mod that allows you to drag NPC's alongside you by the head. Which is simply... I mean that's a system selling feature right there!

But with all those roads forward taken to the growth of the VR market, to this day the actual percentage of players on Steam alone that actually owns a VR headset is something close to 2%. (Or at least that was the average figure as of cira 2021- but considering there's been no significant inroads to the tech made in the past two years, I'm willing to bet that estimate hasn't gone up since.) Now to be fair, 2% of Steam's audience is actually massive in real figures; but it's not the new in thing despite all of these great moves that should eek out the situation that way. It's not like Google Stadia which was made up of overpriced ports- most great VR titles are exclusive to the headset owning market, which means there's some genuinely incredible games out there which most gamers simply haven't played in any form. It's gotten to the point where some VR games are porting themselves backwards into being 'flatscreen' compatible! (Like 'Five Nights at Freddies: Help Wanted') So what is the missing ingredient?

Insanely, given how this was always the problem and really should have been worked on by now, the issue is still accessibility- even after all of these years! Some of these are the sorts of problems that can feasibly be worked on, others not quite. For one, those headsets are expensive and far outside the range of the typical gamer. Specialists are the only one's with the money to put down for that sort of specialised hardware. Then you have the spacing issues that come with VR headsets; not everyone has large and uncluttered rooms to flail around in to wild abandon. And then lastly, most frustratingly, you have the biological roadblock- motion sickness. Some people just can't handle the total immersion of the VR landscape; and what do you do then? What indeed?

The problem with accessible pricing seems to have hit something of a wall within our classical understanding of depreciation. There was a time when the top-of-the-line was merely a statement of time, and given a few years the average man could feasibly afford hardware that was once space age, as is the progress of improvement in tech. Tech itself, however, appears to be trying to clamp down on that cycle by ensuring the powerful stays expensive and the new just becomes more expensive, establishing a firmly inelastic backbone to the higher echelons of entertainment hardware. Right now the most affordable possible piece of VR hardware is the PSVR, and even that costs about as much as the console right now; which is required in order to run it. We need a distinct effort to re-establish depreciating pricing for the good of tech itself.

As for the biological issues, there have actually been supposed head-way made on that front. I've heard anecdotal recounts of people who find certain games less headache inducing than some others, which they chalk down to the way those outliers handle movement. From teleportation to simulated walking and the abundance of headbob, the secret to unlocking the barriers around accessibility might be as simple as providing the right customisation options to the right users. Just as colourblind options are such a staple of modern gaming that they're literally the first thing Hogwarts Legacy throws into your face, VR accessibility could fill that gap preventing wide spread adoption with a little bit of thoughtful engineering. Such methods are, unfortunately, still hypothetical for now.

The VR space is not as much of a dud as it was in it's initial spur, but by the same merit it lacks the panache and prestige that many seem to believe it's worth. Keeping the trajectory it has, there's no doubt that VR is never going to get anywhere significant within the gaming medium, which will make it less appealing for creatives and new creators to jump abroad the development train. I think this starts in the business room, maybe better cost-cutting parts deals, loss leading affordable devices, anything to help establish those environment-surrounding goggles as that immutable living room standard this industry needs it to be. Then, we'll truly start to see what the world of total immersion VR is fully capable of.