Wow, October 2016 sure was the month of announcements for mixed reality. The PlayStationVR hit the market, Google Daydream was shown the first time, updates from Oculus and HTC and the three big AR-HMD players have new presentations, rumors and patens floating around in the media. Obviously there are more AR players – but I think we can agree that most media attention is drawn to Microsoft´s Hololens, Meta´s activities and MagicLeap´s unknown hardware.
I`ve relocated to Spain and was offline on the blog for a bit. Time to catch up and take up the loose ends: last week sure was Microsoft´s chance to shine! Time to take a recap look and think about the future of AR integration into computer systems and our lives.
Holographic Operating System for everyone
During their presentation Microsoft showed the “Creator´s update” to better support the creative workflow from A to Z. They showed their new Apple-ish Surface computers with some gadgets like the Dials and focussed on the story of creating some 3D asset with an updated version of all-time classic Paint (now in 3D). PowerPoint, Word, Edge come with full 3D integration and give the user more confusion freedom when creating their presentations. During the well polished presentation all went flawless (hasn´t always been the case with Microsoft shows) and the story worked to show off their updates. Why is it worth to mention? Well, they showed nicely how they see the future of their operating system! Microsoft wants us to easily switch between modes. Be it looking at a 2D screen, using a AR Hololens to place virtual chairs into our living room before buying them or… using the system in virtual reality with new VR hardware devices! Check out the part of the show:
The new VR devices are to be build by 3rd parties like HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus and Acer, starting at a surprisingly low $299. So, Microsoft is stepping forward into VR and giving away the hardware sales to partners once again! The hopefully great thing for us to profit from: Microsoft seems to give away their inside-out tracking from the Hololens system for free! All VR devices will be able to locate themselves with six degrees of freedom without additional lighthouse or other external tracking systems. Considering that John Carmack and Oculus are always just chatting about “how great it would be” to have it done, Microsoft got the job done already.
Microsoft surely tries to establish Windows 10 as the platform for mixed reality. Like the earlier demos like HoloTours presented they want to make the switch easy – from AR to VR to flatland screens… and this is definitely a wise move. I recon the renaissance of their operating system! (Well, okok, it never went away.) Only this way we can dream about throwing our screens and smartphones out of the window one day – to use a Holographic Windows with slim HMDs or other wearables!
To not stop in theory they just stated that all Meta workers will have to wear the Meta helmet glasses for their work day and remove all 2D screens from the office! This should really show their trust in their product and also give everyday guinea pig data to improve on user interaction, comfort design, etc. Hope they get it right, shrink it and give out DEV kits soon enough! After all the competitors are also moving forward.
Leaping into Europe
Yeah, exactly. Magic Leap also keeps up with new rumors – but also with some new facts. All the time people are scanning the web for new openings at Magic Leap or scan for new patents. Well, yeah, there are! Slimmer designs of their prototype seen on patent pictures, open job positions for logistics and distribution, etc. Does it mean they are getting ready to ship their initial DEV kit soon? Rumors were hoping for a presentation at CES 2017 in January. But now Andy Fouché from Magic Leap confirms that they won´t show their prototype there. – But maybe later in 2017? Who knows… CEO Rony Abovitz just recently tweeted:
“We just achieved a number of major product dev milestones; things are full on exciting”
They opened up a new office in Helsinki, Finland (Hei suomi!) where a lot of mobile power (Nokia, etc.) and computer vision talents are around. Their jump over the big pond might start a new phase getting closer to the ultimate computer…. rumors also state that they are also working on their own operating system. Will they be completely independent from established operating systems? For now it feels unlikely (Magic Leap supporting Unity and Unreal running on Windows)…
When do we laugh at flatland computing?
As written during my last post (reviewing the Hololens long-term) I do believe that spatial computing with AR will have major impact on our way we work with computers, data, be creative and interact and communicate with others. There is just no doubt about it anymore (I´d say). But let´s see how quickly all can happen. Still seems that VR is next and AR can and must continue to learn from their failures and success stories. Seems like marketing and media is currently over-hyping the progress that has been made and will come within the next 12 month. Well, let´s see how quickly we step forward.
Having an new (open?) mixed reality platform – but maybe with a completely new operating system codebase below – sure seems the best to win the race as a software and content provider. With the little information we have today it really feels that Microsoft made smart choices the last years and is ahead of the competitors for now. The transition with a blend of old-school 2D Windows 10 applications towards Holographic seems a very valid strategy as of now. Even if some things are still cumbersome (air-typing, bloom´ing around for task switches)… time to work on improvements on the way.
Can´t wait to work entirely in mixed reality – be it with any M-company from Meta, Microsoft, Magic Leap or some unknown upcoming new big player. Happy to choose! But ideally we have an open metaverse that is compatible between hardware and software companies of today and tomorrow… It feels so narrow-minded to close the systems again when we are standing at the edge of a new computing era!
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
The above is a quote from the literary classic Alice in Wonderland. It is one of the most famous conversations from one of the worlds most famous books. It is also an apt way to begin a review of Alice VR, a virtual reality video heavily inspired by Lewis Carrol’s seminal masterpiece. Because, unfortunately, while this game does take a respectable swing towards greatness, the final experience is little more than a beginning and an ending, with not very much in between.
For the our beginning, let’s start with the good. Alice VR is the first game from developer Carbon Studio. For a first attempt, there is quite a bit to be impressed with here. Chief among these points of respectability is the game’s atmosphere.
The story of Alice VR follows you as the recently reawakened crew member of The Red Queen, a massive interstellar vessel. You’ve been removed from suspended animation to address a very serious problem: the ship is out of gas. Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to warp down to the mysterious planet you find yourself orbiting and retrieve more fuel. It’s a simple enough premise but what really sells it are the game’s visuals.
AliceVR was built in Unreal Engine 4 and its use of lighting, shading, and effects are therefore what we’ve come to expect from this top-of-the-line developer tool. When watching the trailers or seeing the screenshots for Alice VR the unique colors and striking graphical fidelity are all apparent and seem very well designed. However, the trouble comes when this artfully done 2D concoction has to make the jump into the 3D immersive landscape of VR.
If Alice VR had remained a 2D game than it would be a very pretty production. However, in VR, where resolution is limited and careful art design is more important than flashy graphics, the polished visuals loose much of their luster. The dark hallways and mine shafts of Alice may be atmospheric and pretty on a monitor, but inside a VR headset they just look fuzzy and slightly out of focus. Carbon Studio has built a beautiful game here, but unfortunately not a beautiful VR game.
VR game designers need to employ several unique tricks and techniques in order to create experiences that work well under the pressure of immersive technology. The freshman designers at Carbon Studio seemingly missed these memos and instead created a game that combats, rather than compliments its medium. This is apparent in the way the game looks inside of VR, but also in the way it plays.
In keeping with the Alice in Wonderland aesthetic Carbon built several marquee mechanics into their game that reflect the world of the book. There are shrinking and growing segments as well as zero gravity, topsy-turvy sections that task you with rotating a room around you in order to solve various puzzles. Alice also uses a free-roaming control scheme that allows you to glide through the world using only the joystick, rather than opting for a teleportation or blink locomotion system. These mechanics would be relatively interesting in 2D, but in VR they became a problem.
VR games are always one step away from being nauseating and so if a game in this world is going to attempt reality distorting, world spinning mechanics such as these, than they need to do so in a very careful way in order to reduce the possibility of motion sickness. Unfortunately for Alice VR, Carbon Studio did little to mitigate the nauseating effects of shrinking, growing, or spinning around a room throughout its game. All of this, combined with the free-gliding locomotion adds up to a game that is difficult to play for longer than half an hour without having to take a break and resettle your faculties.
It should be noted that different people react to motion sickness in VR differently and it may be possible for some to enjoy the game free of nausea. The poorly executed mechanics would also be less destructive if the game that they allowed you to play was interesting and challenging. But this isn’t really the case
Alice VR is a game built around puzzles but most of them seem random in their placement and design and a bit unsatisfying to solve. There were at least one or two walking puzzles that I completed without even realizing I was doing so. The challenges I was aware of felt contrived in their difficulty and elements.
For an example, early on in the game there is a puzzle that asks you to guide a robot from point a to point b on a grid-like floor. You move him one square at a time, but if you move to the wrong square it will flash read and your robot will be moved back to start. Puzzles in games should feel challenging but fair but this just seemed like a “guess and check” copout to apply the illusion of a challenge over something that didn’t even seem like it should be a puzzle in the first place.
I had high hopes for Alice VR. It sincerely attempted to create a unique world filled with mystery and charm. But unfortunately, there are two many design flaws to let that world shine through.
Finals Score:4/10 – Forgettable
The importance of making a good VR game, not just a good game, is demonstrated well in Alice VR. Hopefully, Carbon Studio can continue to take big swings on interesting intellectual properties in the future. With a little more experience they could someday hit one out of the park.
Curious about this score? Check out our review guidelines for more information.
On the night of August 29th, 2016, Dante Buckley started crying.
It wasn’t because he was heartbroken from a devastating breakup, or because he was sad and distraught from horrible events in his life. No, this night, Dante Buckley was crying tears of joy, relief, and excitement. After dropping out of college and focusing on teaching himself how to create a video game from scratch almost entirely by himself, his game, Onward, was finally released on Steam Early Access. The weight had been lifted and he could finally breathe again. A long, arduous road he started down over a year ago had finally reached its first milestone.
But this wasn’t the end of the road — he was just getting started.
The Anatomy of a Surprise Hit
“This is my first-ever interview,” Buckley confessed nervously during a Skype call. “I honestly did not know how big the game would be. I dropped out of college and focused for a full year on game development. I had some funds left that didn’t go towards tuition and I just went heads down and focused. I had a bit of programming background, but not in gaming. I watched YouTube, used resources online, and just built Onward. That’s where the name for the game came from. I wanted to keep moving forward and this was the perfect name for that point in my life.”
Now, two short months later, Onward has over 700 reviews on Steam with a ‘Very Positive’ designation and it’s widely regarded as one of the best VR shooters available on any headset. It’s easily one of the most popular games among Vive gamers on Steam.
Which, in some ways, defies logic. Conventional wisdom says create a fun, accessible game that can be enjoyed by gamers of all types and VR-comfort levels. Make it sickness free. Provide a multitude of movement options. Hold hands and simplify controls. That’s what common knowledge says for a brand new medium, but Onward isn’t like that. It’s a hardcore, simulation-style, multiplayer military shooter that requires motion controls and a roomscale environment.
According to the game analysis website Steam Charts, Onward had over 270 concurrent players at its all-time peak and maintained over 50 players on average throughout the past month — which means you should never have issue finding a game. That may not sound like much, but compare those numbers to other multiplayer VR shooters you may be more familiar with, such as Battle Dome (87 all-time peak,) Hover Junkers (107 all-time peak,) or even the 100% free Rec Room (112 all-time peak) and the popularity is clear.
“It’s my first game and nobody knows who I am and I just really didn’t expect it to be this big,” Buckley admitted. “I started working on the game when I was 18 and I’m 20 now. It’s just so much bigger than I could have expected.”
Much to his surprise, the game was a hit in the budding market of VR gaming. The surprise success adds up to approximately 18,000 sales so far to date. The game costs $25, and with a little quick math, that means the game has made ~$400,000 from Onward, not counting any limited sale periods and not factoring in the revenue split from Steam. For a small game made by a single college dropout, that’s tremendous.
“I definitely grew up playing a lot of first-person shooter games,” Buckley said. “The biggest one for me was probably Halo, back when I was around six on the first Xbox. I used to play the old Call of Duty games on PC too, my dad let me try those. Medal of Honor, Battlefield,Ghost Recon, and Rainbow Six too.”
A Hardcore Shooter Without Compromises
The VR landscape is constantly in flux in its early stages and there is an apparent mad dash to be one of the first in various different genre categories. Buckley knew that people would release shooters, but they weren’t the shooters he wanted. A focus on arcadey, simple experiences was a far cry from he tactical realism the desired.
“I knew there would be a market for it, ” Buckley said. “So I just made this game for myself. I want Onward to be my dream game. This is based on what I want to play and what I’ve played in the past. ”
The game’s entire development was also chronicled in a series of dev blogs on YouTube, the first of which was posted almost a full year ago. That was a crucial part in building the game’s fan base. But he wasn’t just creating Onward, he was creating an entire game development studio. By hiring some freelance commissions and contractors to help with art work and other assets, he took on the job of programming and launching the game, and thus Downpour Interactive was born.
When someone loads into the game for the first time, it can be overwhelming. There is a brief series of tutorial-esque moments and a shooting range to practice on, but it definitely isn’t a game for the feint of heart. He encourages everyone to watch the tutorial video (embedded above) before actually playing the game. It feels like one of those safety training videos they make you watch before going on certain rides at Disneyland.
Due to the type of game that Onward is, you’ll be using the full compliment of both Vive controllers. You can move yourself freely around the environment using the left touchpad, or physically walk, duck, and maneuver in your actual physical room. Reach down and grab your gun, put a magazine in, load the chamber, and configure settings all using actual switches and slots on the physical gun’s model.
You can reach up to your shoulder and talk to teammates on your radio, or grab the grenade at your belt, pull the pin, and toss it at your enemies. You’ve even got a knife at the ready for use in close-quarters combat. All of these things I’ve described are in most other modern military shooters — but they’re not in VR. Using your hands and physically doing all of these things — like ducking behind a wall as an enemy fires at you from 100 yards away — is a visceral feeling unlike anything else I’ve tried inside a headset.
Since the game uses a mixture of roomscale movement and artificial trackpad locomotion, you’d initially assume people would get sick, as that’s the common understanding. But according to Buckley, that’s almost never the case.
“I got lucky with how people don’t really get sick. People that get sick in other games don’t seem to get sick in Onward,” Buckley laughed. “I can make some guesses, but I don’t really know what I did to avoid sickness.”
Essentially, there are three main contributing factors, he surmises. Firstly, there is no yaw rotation, meaning you can’t artificially move your head’s view from side-to-side using the trackpad. That’s often a big contributing factor, so he makes you physically turn your head. Secondly, the touchpad movement actually help as well, as you can adjust your speed and acceleration based on where you place your thumb — or lack of acceleration, as it were — however you want. Finally, by focusing your vision downfield at enemies and points of interest, it creates a subconscious tunnel vision that emulates the narrowing field of view seen in other games, like Eagle Flight.
I’ve never been susceptible to motion sickness either inside or outside of VR, but I can verify that I also don’t experience it in Onward either. Granted, it could also be the hardcore-leaning nature of the experience as well. I assume it’s tough to focus on whether or not you’re nauseous when you’re splayed out, prone on the ground, trying to line up a shot a few hundred yards away.
In fact, I’ll never forget the first time someone opened fire on me — it had that sudden, adrenaline-infused impact of an event that was actually happening. It didn’t feel like a video game as I ducked for cover.
Building VR For The Future
As much as Buckley loves making Onward, he doesn’t want to stop with where he’s at right now. Ultimately, he’s a creator at heart. He has ideas for adding cooperative missions and expanding the competitive modes, as well as other game ideas for the future.
“I don’t think multiplayer is going anywhere for me, but I want to go into singleplayer storytelling soon,” Buckley explained. “I don’t see myself leaving the shooter genre much, but there are other genres I enjoy. I am really interested in telling stories in VR and I just knew that multiplayer was a great place to start and learn. That’s really what the studio name, Downpour Interactive, is all about. I want to make people feel a downpour of emotions when they play my games.”
There is already such a wide variety of content available for VR devices, it’s easy to see the allure of other genres at some point in the future. He’s working on building a team for Onward right now, since it’s still mostly just him by himself pushing out patches and updates.
“It’s been super stressful with lots of Red Bull,” Buckley told me. “Continuous 14+ hour work days. It’s been worth it though — it’s lots of fun and I love it. After Onward, I’ve got at least 5-10 other game ideas I want to work on in the future. It’s been really scary though, putting myself out there so much as the face of this game and the company. Gamers can get a little extreme with their opinions. For the most part though, it’s been super positive and I wouldn’t be where I am without the fans. Their support means everything to me.”
Onward and upward, indeed.
Onward is now available on Steam for $24.99 with official support for the HTC Vive with motion controllers.
After years of previews and teasers, Ubisoft make their long anticipated VR debut on Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR. Eagle Flight has all the hallmarks of being a toe in the water for Ubisoft, but the VR world may feel the ripples for some time to come.
Eagle Flight Details
Official Site Developer: Ubisoft Publisher: Ubisoft Available On: Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: October 18th, 2016
Gameplay
Eagle Flight. As a title for a game, it is wonderfully unambiguous. Eagles fly and eagles hunt. Simple. This isn’t a bombastic experience casting you as the hero of the brave eagle rebellion, fighting against tyranny across a war-torn Paris as Drill Sergeant Tweet O’Sparrow bellows missions at you. There aren’t deep ties to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, from which much of the city layout was apparently cribbed before being heavily customised. Eagles fly and eagles hunt – and that’s pretty much all you will do across a memorable Paris cityscape, devoid of people, that has been reclaimed by nature and escaped zoo animals. Simple, right?
What that title doesn’t convey is all of the influences you can feel layered throughout the experience. There’s a dash of Pilot Wings when diving through rings on courses that trace astonishing routes through the city. There’s a hint of Ace Combat around the aerial encounters with other predators, with the B-52-like wingspan and laboured turning of Vultures mixed with Crows, Bats and (F-16) Falcons that are all assuming archetypal air combat roles. The twitch reactions of Wipeout can be sensed as you thread your way through an underground catacomb race, expertly dodging obstacles on a course you’ve already attempted a dozen times in an effort to shave valuable seconds off your time. There’s even a dash of the free running from Mirror’s Edge, whose gameplay beats can be felt here as you mutter to yourself “…under bridge, into sewer, through spinning fan, out of tunnel, hard right, steep climb, avoid branches, through building…” Moves that you’ve committed to memory in an effort to secure the full complement of three stars from one of 17 Expert Challenges and 23 Story Missions. There’s also a multiplayer mode supporting up to 3 vs. 3 gameplay to satisfy any competitive needs.
I completed the story in around six hours, but at that point had only collected 60 out of a possible 129 stars. I have since logged at least the same number of hours again while exploring the world and attempting to better my performances. I fully intend to dive further into the multiplayer once the player base expands, at which time I’m predicting that people on my friends list will be destroying the times I’ve posted in the races – a situation I will need to remedy with extreme prejudice. With the Expert Challenges locked out until you achieve a set number of stars there’s ample reason to go back and three-star the earlier missions. Given the fun I’ve had, the fun I still intend to have, and the amount of content on offer, the $40 (£30, €40) asking price for the PSVR version seems fair, with Oculus Store prices in the same ballpark.We are leaving the time when the VR release schedule is mainly populated by tech demos and shorter experiences. While this isn’t quite the AAA experience we might have hoped for, it’s in a different league to many of this year’s other releases.
But that is only to speak of the practical: the game modes and the content It misses the emotive side of the game. There are times when you will gracefully bank around wide boulevards before darting through a collapsed wall into a building, threading your way through layers of detritus before bursting through a smashed window on the far side. Peeling upwards, narrowly missing a chimney stack atop a Parisian terrace, with the streets falling away beneath you suddenly you see it reaching high into the sky: the Eiffel Tower, resplendent, with the sun low on the horizon and wrapping the city in an amber haze. This is nothing less than intoxicating, and moments just like it keep happening again and again as you play with a very pleasant musical score enhancing the mood.
It’s hard to be cynical about Eagle Flight when it takes you back so perfectly to childhood dreams of flight. But not the mechanical facsimiles of flight other games deliver: the joy of real flight, with no barrier between your instinct and your reaction. Where you look is where you fly, and a tilt of the head puts you into a turn the severity of which is determined by how far you tilt. It takes a little while to learn and settle into its rhythms, to avoid the temptation to turn your whole body and get entangled in the headset cables, but once you find your groove it is this direct connection between you as the player and you as the eagle that makes this game sing. There is no joystick, there is no delay, there is only instinct and instant reaction. Left and right triggers slow or boost your flight, abilities that come into their own in some of the catacomb challenges where the speeds are extreme – think Wipeout fast – and the twists and turns, dips and rises, demand every ounce of concentration you can muster. To beat the target time you will want to avoid hitting the brakes, as it were, at all costs. This ends up with you almost daring yourself to hold steady, to risk everything to go just a little faster for just a little longer before losing your nerve.
To slow is to falter, to stop is defeat: run into a wall, or even just clip the scenery, and it’s back to the beginning. The underground time trials feature multiple paths, with the best routes often quite hard to ferret out, and always featuring boost zones, narrower tunnels and more violent changes in direction. Some of the layouts are infuriatingly complex, but always thrilling. As most trials are finished in under two minutes – which admittedly can feel like an eternity when you’re so completely focussed – there’s always that tug to have just one more go, to see if you can shave off another second and get that elusive third star. It’s the only time in the single player game where you really feel a palpable fear of failure, as you speed through narrow tunnels making turns that would cause The Flash to think twice, with your potential demise apparent in every curving wall and piece of jutting debris. When you do finally piece together that perfect run, the resulting endorphin rush is intense.
Over the course of the 23 story missions, the game takes you on a sightseeing tour of the city and gradually expands your repertoire of skills as each of the five main areas unlock. Each area is centred on a well known landmark, such as Notre-Dame or the Louvre, making it easy to orient yourself. Early missions introduce you to basic flying and collecting, and when you have your wings (pun intended) combat is introduced. These aerial battles expand in scope as the game progresses, with offensive and defensive abilities triggered by the face buttons on the controller. The combat usually boils down to chasing your targets and trying to lead your fire just enough that your projectile screech attack will catch them. In later missions you come under considerable fire yourself. Even if it sometimes feels a little arbitrary, with the game not making it easy to sense where attacks are coming from, it is nonetheless a great deal of fun. Time trials, escort missions and challenges likewise ramp up in scale, scope and difficulty as the game proceeds. All of this is enjoyable enough, but is also neatly priming you for the multiplayer mode you will eventually gravitate to.
Supporting a maximum of six players from 1 vs. 1 to 3 vs. 3 teams, the multiplayer sees each team attempting to capture the prey and return it to their nest. The highest score when the timer expires wins. It’s a simple premise, but one that ties in neatly to everything that’s great about Eagle Flight. I’ve only had an opportunity to try 1 vs. 1 combat, but I can confirm that this mode adds the sense of danger that is sorely lacking from the single player modes. As you collect the prey and start flying toward your nest, you can sense the opposition player homing in. You dive, in a panic, trying to find safety among the ruined streets below. Closer and closer comes the predator that is now stalking you from above. Screech attacks whizz past, you change direction desperately, now disoriented as well as under attack. You are as much at risk from crashing into the landscape as you are from the enemy. When the tables are turned there is a vicious thrill in being the hunter. Reeling in your target from afar, watching their trajectory and unleashing an attack at just the right moment. Adding more players into the mix would only make this more frenetic.
There is of course the elephant in the room when it comes to VR multiplayer. A smaller install base of hardware than traditional PC or console games enjoy means a naturally smaller player base. It’s not unfair to imagine that it will be tough to even get a game in a few weeks, much less a balanced one. It’s not much fun to be outmatched, and I can imagine that a well organised team could run rampant over weaker opposition which would kill the fun somewhat. So the multiplayer, while good, probably shouldn’t be the major purchasing decision even if it feels like there are a good many hours of potential fun in there. I hope to be proven wrong, and fully intend to be glued to my Rift over the coming weeks to play this.
Returning to the single player portions of the game, the open world has two types of collectibles that have a distinctive sound effect you can hear when you get close. Waterways in each area contain fish that leap into the air as you approach, and you will need to be carrying enough speed to snatch them before they hit the water and disappear again. You will often spy the telltale ripples in the water from a distance, throw yourself into a steep dive, and pull up just in time to snatch the fish from the air. There are also collectible feathers, but thankfully what was a chore in the Assassin’s Creed series is more enjoyable here – though still frustrating when you simply can’t locate the feather that you can hear is nearby. Locating both fish and feather is a tempting diversion when flying between the locations that trigger missions and challenges. You start at altitude, picking off the obvious feathers that are highly visible on rooftops and bell towers, then you swoop lower and start scouring the streets, rivers and forests for likely nooks and crannies. As your confidence in flying increases, and your ability to navigate ever more cramped areas develops, it feels like peeling away layers of the city. You find yourself taking more risks through congested streets where twisted tree trunks snake around buildings – routes that would have felt impassable when you first started playing – and the time you spend scouring the streets is all honing your skills and abilities for the time trials.
The unsung hero that enables all of this ducking and diving through the game at high speed is the world design. While rendered in a very simplistic style, with low polygon counts and limited texturing and lighting, the landscape is eminently readable. The designers have done a good job of engendering trust. When you dart into a building, you are trusting that there is an escape on the other side. When you fly off the beaten track, you trust that your escapade down twisting streets won’t end in a cul-de-sac, and if it does you know you can always just look up and soar to the safety of the open sky. It is only in the rare moments when the level design does let you down, with a piece of unfair collision detection or a blind turn into a massive wall, when you realise how much you’ve taken the excellent design for granted elsewhere.
On the subject of the visuals there is no escaping the fact that we are looking at a game targeting the lowest common denominator which in this case is the PS4 and 970 series GPUs. Add in the choice of Unity as the engine, with its infamously bad multithreading support, and it’s easy to see why the team at Ubisoft have erred on the side of caution, putting performance above all else. As impressive as it is to be able to climb to altitude and take in the whole city from horizon to horizon at a rock-solid frame rate, there is no avoiding the disappointingly primitive hills that ring the play area, the lack of variation in many of the buildings, the poor combat effects and the overly simplistic grass effects and tree foliage. It’s Assassin’s Creed by way of Wind Waker – looking its best from a distance – and as a result I have to admit that much of my time with the game at first was spent lamenting the fact that it wasn’t pushing my GPU to its limit; in fact there are absolutely no settings for graphical configuration in the game. It is what it is, and you can’t nudge any settings higher on more capable GPUs.
Based on how crisp it looks on the Rift I suspect that there is some automatically applied supersampling – with the internal resolution selected based on the capability of the GPU that the game detects – but this is only an assumption, and it could just as easily be the artistic choices that make the game look as sharp as it does. However if my suspicions are correct, and further assuming that lower level GPUs and the PS4 might lack this feature, the eminently readable world design should ensure that the experience was not unduly compromised by a drop in resolution. It may be worth waiting for early user impressions to confirm this. As much as it’s tempting to stop and over-analyse the simplistic visuals, this is a game about flying. When you’re screaming through the world at high speed, you don’t stop to count polygons or contemplate janky animations. As the game cycles between day and night, between sun, rain, fog and clear conditions, and as you fly between a herd of Zebra running over a bridge you start to appreciate the atmosphere it generates. It is a world to experience in perpetual motion. Slow too long, look too hard, and the illusion is broken.
Where the game really suffers is in your lack of influence over the world. There is no hunting of food for survival, there is no fear of being hunted yourself, there is just you, the city, and the missions. If you dwell on it too long it can make the game feel sterile, the lack of any meaningful reaction to your presence an immersion killer, and it’s hard to escape the notion that there was far more potential here in the world and the gameplay than the team have delivered. Instead they fell back on the usual tropes, and if we’re being reductive the game boils down to a chain of missions that are loosely disguised time trials, areas that are artificially locked, a bunch of collectibles and the obligatory multiplayer mode bolted on. What I wouldn’t give to sit in on a design meeting for any sequel!
But being reductive misses the point, and just a few hours in I realised that this had become one of my favourite VR experiences. Eagle Flight reaffirms that there is ample mileage in seated VR experiences – without room scale, and without tracked controllers – to go along with games and experiences that embrace those technologies. I’m extremely envious that for a lot of PlayStation VR gamers, and for people coming later to the Rift party, this could be their first experience of VR. It’s not perfect, it’s not as imaginative as it could have been, but it sidesteps some of VR’s hardest problems and delivers a memorable, exciting, and challenging experience. Eagles fly. Eagles hunt. Join them.
Immersion
The exceptional feeling of immersion in Eagle Flight comes from the control scheme. You are in control of everything – not just where you go, but how you get there. You can climb to altitude and take a direct route. You can get down to the level of the forest canopy and weave between trees. You can get right down to the street level and weave around, through, and under buildings as you like. Skim above the river and you raise plumes of water with your wingtips. No other game lets you indulge your whims in quite this way. When you eventually trigger a time trial, you trade freedom for focus and attempt to apply your skills to the challenge at hand. It’s a great blend of gameplay, and it kept me hooked on the game for long stretches.
Some games fare better than others from being viewed through VR goggles. Eagle Flight has chosen its animal well because staring through the lenses of the Rift, with the Eagle’s beak – my beak – intruding slightly where my nose should be, and feathers intruding slightly from the sides, feels just right. This is all you will ever see of yourself in the game but it’s just enough to remind you what you are, what you’re doing, and to help you forget that there’s a big lump of plastic wedged on your head. At one point I spent a continuous five hours playing the game without leaving VR. The time, if you’ll excuse yet another terrible pun, simply flew by.
While much of the game takes place in the open world, where you can move fairly seamlessly from free roaming to missions, there are some missions and challenges that take place underground and necessitate loading in additional level data. In an apparent effort to hide this data loading, 3D video footage of the upcoming area is used to bookend the event. On PC at least, this is significantly lower fidelity than the realtime rendering and the difference is jarring. Aside from looking bad: one moment you have supreme comfort, and the next any shifting in your seat induces that disconnect common to all 3D video that can be nauseous. It’s the lack of warning as you move between the two modes of rendering that jars the most. Frankly I’d rather have a blank screen, or a static image of the event projected into space in front of me.
There are other times when it’s actually the gaminess of Eagle Flight that intrudes. Playing the story mode, certain areas of the city are out of bounds because they are controlled by the Falcons. Rather than have Falcons hunt you down for trespass, a giant message appears on the screen: “This area is controlled by the Falcons, turn back now!” And then a timer counts down from five, after which you are respawned back in your own territory. A similar message and countdown appears if you attempt to fly out of the city. It’s not subtle, and completely kills the immersion. Likewise the nagging that tilting your head is better than turning it. I KNOW! I KNOW! I’VE BEEN PLAYING FOR FIFTEEN HOURS! I KNOW! Sitting, as I have been, in a swivel chair it’s sometimes hard in all the excitement not to get a little turned around. Having a massive icon and text appear right in the middle of the screen, right in the middle of a time trial or some aerial combat, is ridiculous. It cost me success in more than one challenge, and I resented it every time. Yes it’s my fault that I’m no longer facing forward, but surely there has to be a better solution than this messaging!
Speaking of aerial combat, the screech attack that you perform isn’t the most visually appealing effect – a spherical transparent ball that you project into the world. The combat is basically a game of projectiles, and with every other element of the experience conveying the nature of Eagle life so seamlessly this was always going to be a tough element to graft on. Similarly when you knock a bird out of the sky they seem to just pop out of existence to be replaced by a few feathers rather than plummet to the ground. At these times the game underneath intrudes too far and the immersion suffers.
One element I wasn’t expecting to break immersion was the music – and in the main it’s wonderful – but there are one or two pieces that crop up that use painfully synthetic sounding string ensembles rather than a live orchestra, and it is somewhat distracting after the polish evident in most of the other tracks you will hear that nicely sit in the background, enhancing the atmosphere.
Comfort
By this point, eagle-eyed readers will be wondering why there has been no mention of nausea and simulator sickness. There’s a simple answer for that: there isn’t any to speak of. It is only in extreme, sustained, turns and dives that the telltale lurch in the stomach intrudes, and even in those cases the effect is short lived. I am susceptible to simulator sickness, but in more than 15 hours with the game – including one five hour long continuous stretch – over the last few days I have felt extremely comfortable. You have absolute control over the camera, with your head, and therefore absolute control over how intense you want your journey to be on a moment to moment basis.
The work the team at Ubisoft have done to explore, understand, and eradicate simulator sickness will be the lasting legacy of the game. It may not apply to many other experiences – after all, it is unlikely that this will spawn a new genre of bird simulators – but it does show that a motivated team with enough time to test, learn and iterate can find solutions to these sorts of problems. The vignetting that kicks in as you turn and as you pass too close to objects in the world, whilst being moderately distracting at first, is very effective at managing nausea and even becomes part of how you sense your place in the world. Other techniques such as spawning leaf particles in the sky ahead of you, speed lines, and of course the Eagle’s beak always make sure there’s something closer in to focus on to help you sense motion and your place in the world.
So confident was I in Ubisoft’s achievement that I conducted a human experiment on a VR virgin. While the telltale lurch in the stomach was there during dives and turns, the effect was as short lived for them as it had been for me. I observed my friend all evening, and there wasn’t even a slight hint of motion sickness.
When you crash in the game, and you will crash, the display abruptly fades to black and leaves you with a simple “you died!” message. This isn’t especially comfortable, but is an unavoidable side-effect of the game’s covenant to only ever fly where you’re looking. Were the game to bounce you off things, or otherwise take control of the camera, this would be lost and nausea would kick in. It took a few hours before I made my peace with this screen, which you will be seeing a lot in quick succession when trying to three-star the expert level time trials, and in truth I doubt going from blistering speed to a black screen is ever going to be entirely comfortable.
There is a function that unlocks at the end of the story mode: free look. You can hold down A on the controller to look around without changing heading. This of course opens you up to a small potential for nausea depending on the angles you find yourself flying at, and the fact that you’re no longer looking in the direction of motion. When you release the A button the direction of travel snaps to where you’re now looking. Like the death screen, this is largely unavoidable, but is uncomfortable nonetheless. When hunting down those last few collectibles, or trying to spot an enemy eagle in the multiplayer, I’d happily trade a little comfort for the ability to scan my environment more accurately from on high. It was wise to leave this ability until the player has spent many hours getting used to how the game operates.
As mentioned above, any time when 3D video replaces the real time renderer the game suffers from all the known side effects of consuming VR content that way. The final aspect of the game that impacts player comfort is actually comfort of the physical variety. You will be moving your head around almost constantly, and tilting a lot. In an effort to avoid obstacles that suddenly appear in front of you, you may find yourself instinctively snapping your head up, down or to the side as a last ditch effort to avoid crashing. While I never caused myself injury, I have to admit that I do feel like I’ve done a mild neck and shoulder workout these last few days.
Summary
Eagle Flight brings the unbridled joy of flying to VR. With its sense of speed, stern challenge, and unparalleled levels of control and comfort it’s only the fact that it plays so safely within its own sandbox that stops it getting a perfect score.
This is a line pulled from the original review guide we were sent for Eagle Flight when it first released on the Oculus Rift. The slightly-awkward French translation is fitting coming from the Montreal offices of Ubisoft, but it is also the perfect summation for the game itself. Since then, the eagle flying experience has also released on the PlayStation VR and HTC Vive platforms.
In Eagle Flight you take control of a young eagle with the simple goal of building its nest on the tallest point it can find amidst the overgrown ruins of Paris in the far future. This may sound like a story book premise, but it’s really just a loose narrative thread that allows for some truly remarkable gameplay.
Even though it doesn’t take place in a plane or spaceship, Eagle Flight is one of the most enjoyable entries yet in the increasingly crowded ‘cockpit shooter’ genre of virtual reality games. It earns that title through adrenaline packed dog eagle fights, tightly tuned flight mechanics, and memorable exploration.
Some games are built around interesting stories and others are born from unique mechanics; Eagle Flight falls firmly into the latter category. Flight direction in this game is completely controlled through the movements of your head. The left and right triggers on your gamepad will slow you down and speed you up respectively, but the hook of Eagle Flight is all about using natural motions to determine a flight path. If you’re playing on Vive, the motion controllers are not supported at all — you will be required to use a standard gamepad of some kind, such as an Xbox One controller.
The result of this innovative movement system is a wonderful feeling of both immersion and control. My brain never truly believes that the minor twitches of my thumbs on a gamepad are enough to pilot a massive spaceship or a WWII-era fighter plane. But it embraced wholeheartedly that I had become an eagle and this notion was reinforced with every movement of my head.
The now foliage-covered buildings, alleyways, and canals of Ubisoft Montreal’s take on a futuristic Paris are a delight to explore with this movement system. You feel truly impressive each and every time you thread the needle through a narrow gap or pull out of a steep dive at the exact right moment. The environments themselves are also beautifully designed and its a pleasure just to fly around and explore.
The head tilt steering is not the only innovation that Ubisoft Montreal packed into this package. It also designed a special narrowing mechanic for combating motion sickness. Essentially, the full field of view in your headset is never fully utilized in Eagle Flight. A portion of the screen always remains darkened. As you turn, these shadows will shift dynamically along with your viewpoint. The purpose of this system is to combat motion sickness during gameplay.
The shadows do their job perfectly. Motion sickness is essentially a non-issue for Eagle Flight, which is saying quite a bit for a game that wants to make your brain believe it is flying, even though your body knows that it is not.
All of these carefully crafted mechanics are put to good use in Eagle Flight’s two main game modes: single player and online multiplayer.
The story mode is fairly elementary. You, as a young Eagle, glide around Paris, completing missions and unlocking more of the city. These challenges may test your flight precision or your combat ability but none of them are very hard. You only need a basic, one-star rating to “beat” any of these challenges so difficulty is never really a problem and progression happens almost automatically. There are also “expert challenges” which are a bit tougher and require more stars for you to achieve a victory.
The single-player campaign may be a tad basic, but — much like Call of Duty or other modern games — it is merely the wrapping paper around the true present: online multiplayer.
This mode is essentially capture the flag. Two teams of opposing eagles race to pick up a “prey” that they then must carry safely back to their base to score a point. It sounds simple until you realize the other team will be barreling in to attack you with ultrasonic squawks that can knock the prey out of your beak and force you to respawn before getting back in the game.
These suped up bird calls can be fired like cannonballs. They actually require a good bit of skill to aim and that — combined with all of the dodging and diving you’ll be doing — ads up to a multiplayer experience that nails the sweet spot of being “easy to understand, but difficult to master,” that most online games are striving for.
Capture-the-prey is also Eagle Flight’s only online game mode, which feels a bit disappointing in light of the also sparse single player. It’s fun to play, but after a few rounds you do start to wish there was something else to try with your friends.
The lack of interesting directives is Eagle Flight’s biggest overall problem. The mechanics are innovative, it’s pioneered a very effective movement system that other VR games should absolutely pay attention to, and the combat is well thought out and fun, but the end result is still a title that leaves your plate feeling slightly empty.
Update: Since its original release on the Oculus Rift, Eagle Flight has also released on the PSN Store for PlayStation VR and will be available on HTC Vive via Steam. The game plays virtually identically on all three platforms, as it requires a standard gamepad regardless of your headset of choice. The visual fidelity feels slightly higher on the PC-based headsets, but the PS VR version is fully-featured and capable. Multiplayer is cross-platform across all devices, hopefully alleviating much of the low population problems that plagued the game at launch.
Final Score: 7.5/10 – Good
Eagle Flight is a great game that deserves to be celebrated for its many innovations and unique approach to VR. However, these core ideas would fly a lot higher if there were more ways to utilize them. What is here, however, is a real treat to play and shouldn’t be overlooked by anyone aching with an urge to soar through the skies.
RollerForce attempts to blend gunplay with a rollercoaster. Following on from the atmospheric iOmoon, Headtrip Games’ latest wants to take you on a very different ride on the HTC Vive, with support “coming soon” for Oculus Rift with Touch.
RollerForce Details:
Steam Page Developer:Headtrip Games Publisher: Headtrip Games Available On: Steam Reviewed on: HTC Vive Release Date: Out Now
Gameplay
Rollercoasters were among the first experiences to be brought to life in this new wave of VR and they are a great, if intense, way to sell people on the immersive potential of the platforms. Likewise when motion controllers arrived, a horde of wave-based shooters appeared to demonstrate how much more interesting VR was when you had that sort of direct control over and presence within the world inside the headset. RollerForce seeks to mash these two genres together.
The blurb for this game features the words “SHOOT TO SURVIVE” and that’s an apt summary of the extent of the gameplay on offer. Riding ten tracks, over two visually distinct locations, you have health that will be depleted by fire from mobile enemies that strafe the track and static enemies that act as turrets. To defend yourself you have a gun in each hand, with primary and secondary fire modes. Littered around the world are power-ups that will recover some health if you manage to shoot them. Lose too much health and it’s game over; survive for three laps and you “win.” That’s it – do not come into this game expecting something akin to Rez or Panzer Dragoon Orta. There are no high scores to chase, there are no alternative routes to explore, no attack patterns to memorise, no bosses to vanquish, there’s just you and a limited assortment of bad guys over a succession of increasingly convoluted track layouts. It’ll take you somewhere in the region of 90 minutes to ride them all.
So it’s a slender amount of content, with limited combat and little replay value… but what a ride! On the more extreme tracks you’ll feel your stomach lurch as you’re hauled around corners and into rapid descents, plunging through tunnels and rising high into the sky. There are slower tracks, with fewer twists and turns, that ease you into the experience. If you can make peace with the lack of challenge and scoring, you can relax into the moment and just blast away at enemies randomly – this was what I ended up doing, and while it renders the combat portion somewhat redundant it did at least allow me to get a kick out of the tracks, and to soak up some of the ambience.
Another reason to let the combat take a back seat in the experience is the weapons themselves. They are projectile rather than hitscan weapons, which robs the shooting of the instant feedback that some of the best games give when pulling the trigger. There’s also a random spread on the rounds so you can’t even reliably put two shots in the same place so it feels more like aiming turrets than shooting guns, and as a result the combat is singularly unsatisfying in the hands. When the screen is completely filled by the explosions of recently dispatched enemies, the “spray and pray” tactic was the only reliable way to kill the remaining bad guys who were still attacking. This all combines to give the impression that success is arbitrary: defeat feels unfair and survival feels hollow.
In its best moments, however, RollerForce will see you barreling along with the alien environs expanding out to the horizon revealing the almost impossible twists and turns of the track ahead of you. With each arm outstretched, gaining a bead on different targets, you’ll feel like the lead in a John Woo movie as you pummel the triggers in a desperate bid to make it to the next health power-up. But these moments are fleeting. Were there to be a sequel I’d love to see decent weapons with more varied enemies and coherent attack patterns. Right now it’s a thrilling ride despite the combat, not because of it.
To put this in perspective, it is worth mentioning that the scope of the gameplay and the amount of content is very much in line with the pocket money pricing. There aren’t very many experiences this polished at the five dollar price point and, if the positive Steam user reviews are any indication, other developers would do well to follow this example.
Immersion
I could spend all afternoon just sitting in the menu at the start of the game. Watching the sparks traverse the track is mesmerising, and the music here is excellent as it is throughout the game.
From the abstract geometry of the first world to the oppressive asteroid and lava mix of the second, the sights of RollerForce will put a smile on your face – although after repeated play the lack of variety does grate. Even though the worlds are clearly fantastical, they have a tangible feel and a solid sense of place. The fact that you are floating above the track, rather than riding a vehicle of any sort, only rarely intrudes and reduces the immersion.
Annoyingly the projectiles from the alternate fire mode don’t appear to emit from the gun in your hand – instead spawning into the world somewhere in a radius around and behind your hand, more like missiles launching from an aircraft wing. This is strange, and you feel a real disconnect from the combat as a result. Thankfully, due to a recent patch, the primary fire mode doesn’t suffer from this issue. If you had the game from launch, and gave up due to that problem, it’s worth returning for another look.
Very occasionally, at the end of a lap, the game fades out to the Vive default environment briefly before snapping back to the game world, which is exactly as jarring as it sounds.
Comfort
Make no mistake, RollerForce is an intense experience. I played while seated, and I don’t think I’d be brave enough to play standing up unless I lived in a bouncy castle.
The in-game advice to look forward as much as possible should be heeded by anyone susceptible to simulator sickness. Unfortunately the reality of the game is that you are going to have to look off-centre if you intend to survive. The action takes place all around you, and one of the better elements of the combat is taking aim at a health pickup that’s nestled in the nook of a horseshoe piece of track, picking it off as you go around, or spying an enemy wave coming at you from the side and letting loose with both barrels. These moment comes at the expense of some discomfort, and it meant that I had to limit my time in the game to twenty minute sessions at most. That’s twenty minutes longer than I’d usually be able to play a game like this, so whatever magic is running under the hood here it’s working for me.
Those lucky enough to be immune to simulator sickness will doubtless be able to extract more enjoyment from the game for longer periods.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Update:More information added about the controller prototype being shown at Steam Dev Days.
Valve apparently didn’t want to make its Steam Dev Days conference a PR event, but that isn’t stopping it from making some exciting new announcements, like revealing a new prototype Steam VR controller.
The company debuted a few images of new controllers (above) at a keynote speech today, and a prototype will be available at the show. One of the prototypes allows for a more realistic grasping sensation.
If you check out the prototype at right in the image it seems to be an extremely tiny gadget that wraps around the back of the hand, obscured in the photo by the controller itself. With this in place, you can completely open your hand — letting you easily drop virtual objects the same way you would in the real world. We’re also told the controller senses finger positions.
Valve’s new VR controller will be showcased at #SteamDevDays with a special demo of Call of the Starseed!
We reached out to Cloudhead Games, one of only two companies we’ve confirmed to have sold more than $1 million worth of VR software, to find out more about this demo and the controllers. Here’s what we heard back:
We were one of few developers who employed hands on the Vive, and our code just happened to work with Valve’s new controllers right out of the gate. They basically told us we have pretty hands–it was very flattering. So we made a new sandbox on the beach with a bunch of the pick up items from Call of the Starseed in one spot. Didn’t have to change much at all.
Right now gripping virtual objects with the HTC Vive controllers is awkward, with grip buttons on the side that are hard to reach and don’t make much sense since you are already grasping the controller. Letting developers try out this unnamed hardware prototype likely provides Valve valuable feedback they can use to hone in on even more immersive controllers that are better adapted to grasping and gripping objects.
Aside from that, it’s hard to tell what’s new from the pictures, though the thumbnail second from right certainly looks like a sleeker pair of Vive wands. You can also see a Steam controller on the far left that appears to feature lighthouse tracking.
It also looks like a new version of the lighthouse base station is on the way next year, as seen in the above slide taken by Shawn Whiting.
Pre-orders for Oculus Touch officially went live today. This is a significant moment in the life of Oculus as a company, and it is also a significant moment in the ongoing virtual reality “console wars.” Oculus’ biggest rival is the HTC Vive and debate over the superiority of these two headsets has raged since they launched earlier this year. One of the most important features of the Vive’s systemsis its ability to do “room scale” VR; meaning it allows users to physically walk, turn around, and otherwise explore in a pre-determined box of space.
Since launch, the Rift has not been able to do this — you can easily lose tracking of your headset if you move outside of the sensor’s cone of vision, for example. The architecture of the Oculus constellation tracking system has always seemed to have the potential to achieve room scale in the end. Now, with Touch launching, that potential is being fully realized. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe has gone on record saying that the Rift will be able to do room scale once Touch is out, but it’s a bit more complex than that.
We’ve put together a list of what you’ll need in order to unlock the power of room scale for your Rift. Check it out below:
Step 1: The Controllers
The first thing you’ll need in order to accomplish a room scale Rift setup is Oculus Touch. These hand-tracked controllers are marvels of VR engineering and hold up quite well next to their competitors on the Vive. With Touch, you’ll be able to pick up digital objects, fire virtual guns, wave to virtual friends, etc.
They cost $199 for a pair and you’ll also be getting an extra positional tracking sensor in the box as well. This will put you at two sensors, counting the one that originally came with your Rift. So, as Creed Bratton would say, only one to go.
Step 2: The Sensor
Oculus will soon begin selling their VR tracking sensors as standalone products. Each one will cost $79 and will come with a USB extension cord in the box.
According to Iribe’s presentation, it takes at least three Oculus sensors to obtain a true, occlusion-free, room scale experience. To prove it, a number of demos at the recent Oculus Connect 3 conference were running room scale experiences with a three-sensor setup. In theory though, you could connect as many Oculus sensors as you want to your PC and accomplish a massive tracking area for your VR activities.
Step 3: The Triangle
We suspect room scale on the Rift will work best with a triangle set up for the sensors, as shown by Iribe during his presentation. The first two sensors could fit on your computer desk facing in toward each other slightly. The third sensor will be a bit trickier. Ideally, it needs to go directly behind you as you play and so will likely require a custom wall mount or a conveniently placed bookshelf or table. Oculus has not mentioned whether it will include mounting equipment in the box for the standalone sensors.
Materials and Costs
To achieve a room scale Oculus Rift setup you will need:
1x 3.0 USB port for the sensor that came with the HMD
1x 3.0 USB port for the sensor that came with Oculus Touch
1x 3.0 USB port for the third sensor purchased separately
1x 2.0 USB port for the Xbox wireless controller
1x 2.0 USB port for your keyboard
1x 2.0 USB port for your mouse
Conclusion and Considerations
If you’re a Rift owner, celebrate! The delights of room scale VR will soon be yours to enjoy. However, high USB consumption, mounting that third sensor, and connecting all of the trackers to your PC are certainly hurdles to be overcome.
According to Oculus, if you require more USB ports you can, “purchase and install a compatible PCI Express USB 3.0 Expansion Card. Click here to view a compatible card.”
As far as the physical hassles of wiring the sensors together, that will depend on your personal situations and room setups. It should be noted that the competing Vive headset is considerably easier to set up for room scale VR because the base stations don’t need to be physically connected to the computer. Of course, we’ll have to wait till we get our hands on Touch and three sensors to do extensive tests of different setups and compare those to the Vive.
Let us know how you plan to set up your room scale Rift space in the comments below.
Finally, I have my own Hololens on my desk (well, okay, … my company´s) to try the HMD now full-time. Before I could try the augmented reality headset from Microsoft a couple of times on conferences – but never play around with it for a longer period or even upload my own apps and demos. So, from now on expect some more hands-on reports on the tech and upcoming applications or games!
Today I want to give my first short impressions of a longer use and give an example of a good demo game: the Robo Raid!
First impression
My first impression was that it´s quite comfortable to wear. The weight felt well balanced and I did not get much pressure on the nose. The material feels velvety soft but high class and the overall shipping and transport box looks already product-ready (no, I did not make an unboxing video, sorry).
This impression continued when booting the Hololens up for the first time and setting the device up. Besides a bit annoying air-tapping a WiFi password (don´t use too many special characters…) it went smoothly and was online straight afterwards. The room was scannend and the initial menu using the flower showed up promptly without further after-sales-installations or updates. It was ready within a few minutes and I could start placing holograms inside my living room. No hassle, it just worked. Well done for a dev kit!
Second impression: the overall tracking is surprisingly stable. You do notice a slight drift and jitter, but depending on the scale of your room and the distance to the virtual object it felt rather solid than shaky. With a few exceptions I have a good feeling most of the time that does not smash my immersion or the augmented feeling of the objects really “being there”.
Third impression: the brightness is great! If you crank up the brightness settings you won´t see real objects behind (non-black) virtual objects anymore and I could even top my running TV screen. Everything has the touch of a translucency to it (obviously this fits the name of the product – promoting a flaw to a feature), but does not bother me.
Draw-Backs to live with
Obviously there are draw-backs in the current hardware that are well-known and I`m sure confirming these, too.
First off, the field of view is very limited. Period. You will notice it right away and depending on the content it might be no issue or get on your nerves totally. All virtual objects are just cut off top and bottom dramatically. I don´t have issues in the peripheral left/right, though. Sometimes it´s enough to resize a hologram a bit (make it smaller) to fit into the field of view or to pin a 2D Windows 10 window (like the shop or settings windows) farther away from you to have it not cut off. When starting different applications you notice quickly who thought about the limited viewport during design and who did not (or who just ignored it waiting for better hardware in the future).
For example, the HoloTours demo switches between AR (see an easel standing in your room) to VR (complete Rome appears around the easel from the street artist). Here the illusion breaks and you scream: give me my Vive to continue!
But other demos just work fine. Sometimes you can´t scale objects up to be cut off or objects disappear when you get too close, etc. I´ll go into the details with the Robo Raid demo below later!
So, now I´ve downloaded and tried all demos and apps and clicked my way through the day. How does it feel?
Air-tapping through the day
After hours wearing the glasses I can already say: we will all be living with AR sooner than we think! You get used to spatial computing so quickly and love it right away, though 2016 it´s not there yet. But order! Order in the court! Step by step:
The weight and bulkyness sure is an issue, but during initial tests it did not get on my nerves yet. Obviously this needs to go down dramatically to have an all-day-device. Now it´s limited to specific sessions for a special task (repear an engine, do a design review, make a skype hologram call) and also battery time does not allow more than 3-4 hours of full usage.
As said, overall room scanning, object placing, re-recognition of a previously trained space, spatial audio – all works as expected. Sometimes the WiFi failed or took longer to connect (but that might just be my crappy provider – damn, I´m happy that I`m switching).
Flower Power for the holographic user?
Okay, okay, clickbaity-headline. Of course, I´m talking about the user interface. Calling the home screen or Hololens menu is triggered by the flower gesture “bloom” (opening your closed hand with five fingers spreading to all directions (facing upwards)). This works very stable – as long as you hold your hand within the camera´s volumes. Air-tapping (bringing the index finger to your thumb to select objects or menu items) works stable too, although I´ve seen many first time users who get it wrong (holding up more than the index finger, holding the hand outside the volume). Here I`d be happy about more space. I get easily tired of air-clicking too often (for this you get your bluetooth clicker along).
So, the simple gestures work well, tap-dragging objects around, too. What´s missing? I`d say the overall user interface is not ready yet for AR. We are still in the learning phase and here you notice it the most for the Hololens (or other devices, e.g. when you use your LeapMotion for the Rift). To gaze at a button with your head and then air-tapping can fail easily on longer distances and is not really that intuitive. It drags the old mouse metaphore over into AR. That´s certainly nothing we want in the end! (But hey, we need to start somehow!)
I´d love to have more ready-made gestures to use or even accurate Leap-style finger tracking via the SDK to have more power for natural interaction trials. Many people I´ve seen trying it on first time directly wanted to use their hands naturally to grab things, but failed. Abstract gestures like the flower need to be learned and can be a problem, too. Oh, well time to learn and let´s try out different ways to get closer to natural spatical computing.
Two last things I want to mention here are multi tasking and registration before moving to the game.
It seems like most demos don´t really support context switching and will just close when you go back to the home screen space with the flower. When you go back they will reboot. That said, there is no real context switching of apps (Alt+Tab) on the go. But maybe it´s just my RAM being crammed up with apps or demonstrator limitations. I will dive deeper into this another time.
Second is the missing registration. The tracking works quite stable as said and I´m very happy for a DK1! But you cannot really align your holograms with the real world by a centimer or millimeter. You can just place it somewhere… But what if I want to overlay a specific piece with augmentations? Like the new spoiler for my car, the digital window (replacing my dirty city landscape), etc.? No demo does it today and I`ve seen nothing within the SDK to achieve this out of the box. Well, time to code it myself, I guess. :-) I will cover this extra another time, as it is one of the biggest issues!
So, but I said, it will be short first recap, so let´s take a look at one demo as an example now! They´ve done their job quite well – using the DK1 wisely
Evil Robo Aliens to destroy your living room
The RoboRaid was done by Microsoft as a demonstrator and was shown before at one of their presentations. The demo nicely shows what can be done today. You briefly need to scan your room, select a wall and the game is ready to start. Holes will get punched into your walls and alien robots will break through. You need to shoot them air-tapping before they hit you too often (dodge them). Take a look:
In reality it looks better as your world is not recorded through the camera (no pixelation), you have little motion blur and the stereo effect helps a lot. The thing I like about the demo is, that they integrate all features. First off, your real room plays a crucial role in the game! This is often forgotten and many demos could happen anywhere. They just show a holographic experience that floats in your space, but does not take into account your actual environment! Chapeau, Microsoft! I want more in this style!
Only if we really integrate the virtual objects into our space and let them interact with it, augmented reality makes sense!
Next, they use the air-taps to shoot, spatial audio to orientate and the dodge of enemy bullets so that you really have to move in physical space! The cracks in the walls are a lot of fun and give a good augmented depth in stereo when you watch your appartment go bye-bye!
The last piece, I mentioned above is: they use the field of view wisely. The enemies are small enough to fit into the screen at a typical room distance and the cracks in the wall also don´t fill up the whole wall from top to bottom. Only one crack per wall appears so that you don´t notice the limted FOV too often. You can really dive into the game. Well done for a demonstrator, I`d say!
A good start for the spatial future
So overall I`m quite happy with a good selection of the demos I´ve seen. But even more impressive is how quickly I get used to having my holograms around me in my daily life at home! I go to the living room to “shop” a new app – because I pinned the window there. I have my pictures, holographic skype and calendar pinned next to my classic computer… It feels natural and I can now, after a longer trial period, really sign the prophecy that we will all replace our smartphones and basically all screens by glasses in a few years. We only need to work on standards and sugar-cube-sized tech.
So, spatial computing is the future!
I will write more about my Hololens experiences from now on (after all: with glasses we can really step into an AR world as I always wanted). But to not become a fan-boy of one system, I`d be happy to try out different systems as soon as possible, of course. Hey, Meta! Hey, MagicLeap! I´m happy to review your devices! :-)
Dominic Brennan gets his hands on ESI Group’s latest iteration of IC.IDO, their automotive visualisation tool that uses CAD-accurate data to generate extremely realistic VR simulations which let you take apart (or fix) your own virtual car.
The GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam drew much interest from the automotive sector, with a focus on autonomous driving, AI and visualisation. ESI Group’s IC.IDO program is an established virtual reality software solution with a long history in automotive and other manufacturing industries, through the use of CAVE systems, Powerwalls and 3D displays. For many years, it has been the leading software for workflow testing and decision making in a VR environment, with customers such as Bombardier, Ford and MAN.
In the VR Village, ESI Group were showcasing their upcoming Version 11 of IC.IDO, which enables HMD support (it was running on the HTC Vive, but will support the Oculus Rift too). While the beta version had been unveiled at ESI’s North American VR Summit a couple of weeks before GTC Europe, this was the first time it was being shown to the wider press.
The demo was presented as a “Virtual Service” scenario for a vehicle, which involved mounting the “Brake Booster” in an offline assembly operation, and raising the car on a hoist to access the exhaust pipe. According to Eric Kam, Product Marketing and Community Manager at ESI Group, this was a simplified demo, which would typically involve more accessibility and serviceability checks with engineers, technicians and designers present to validate the process. “What makes IC.IDO special is that we enable engineers to work with CAD data with little or no pre-processing of CAD into new or reduced formats.” The software is powerful, modelling multi solid body mechanics and the elastic behaviour of wires and hoses.
With everything set to real-life scale, picking up a virtual tool with a Vive controller, stepping under the car, loosening some bolts and removing part of the exhaust felt natural and most importantly, it was clear that each piece was interacting with other pieces with accurate collision detection. “Often time during service it would be desired to remove components without having to take all subsystems apart – modelling real-time interactions of the various parts is essential,” says Eric. “Most CAD mock up tools will not live simulate the collisions possible during assembly”.
One aspect of virtual testing that differs from reality is the mass of the components involved. The brake booster I clumsily fitted in VR is certainly not as a light as a Vive controller in real life for instance. IC.IDO has a few solutions to offer, depending on the application, according to Eric. “We often use our ergonomics plugin to enable useful feedback. These types of analysis allow the “pantomime” of VR to evaluate what would happen to humans if they followed those same actions under load. It indicates whether supporting a heavy virtual object under a given posture would stress the body in a bad way.” Using tracked objects with realistic mass, like the actual tools or assembly components is something that they’ve done in the past with CAVEs, but less practical for a VR headset. “Some mix between VR and AR would be needed”, says Eric.
But the benefits of HMDs over CAVEs is pretty clear – for one it is far more cost-effective, and can be set up more easily and used more frequently. Achieving the actions in the demo of getting underneath a car on a hoist would require ceiling projection, which not all CAVE systems have. Ultimately, the HMD is a simpler solution and “key to democratising the engineering benefit”, according to Eric. “The reduced cost means that now engineering decisions that are often “batched” into larger reviews can be made more frequently and earlier. CAVEs are very powerful collaboration tools that are often used by executives and managers of engineering groups to make key gate reviews. Because these reviews are made infrequently, that means that intermediate decisions are often made without the benefit of VR. HMDs might mean that two rank-and-file engineers at different locations could potentially collaborate immersively to make a better design decision without waiting until the CAVE is free.”
Version 11 of IC.IDO rolls out in November. HMD support will be an add-on for the existing desktop version of the software. “We believe that with version 11.0 our customers will be more effective in being able to review immersively that which could not be experienced without a CAVE”, says Eric. “More frequent and earlier application of VR will mean that engineering designs will be more mature and more cost effective.”
Disclosure: Nvidia paid for accommodation for one Road to VR correspondent to attend an event where information for this article was gathered.
