Eyeing the virtual frontier: the Oculus Rift games that reinvent play

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...culus-Rift.jpgWe said last week that virtual reality’s future is bigger than videogames; Mark Zuckerberg clearly agrees. Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus has taken everyone by surprise, and it follows on from a GDC at which news of Sony’s Project Morpheus, on top of Oculus’ own Crystal Cove tech, has made virtual reality the most tantalising new frontier in videogames. In this feature written and published in print before news of the Facebook acquisition, we speak to the pioneers in virtual reality game development on Oculus Rift.

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New devices have ever looked as likely to bring about radical change in the videogame industry as the virtual reality headset. Oculus Rift – and surely a raft of imitators to follow – places you at the centre of an immersive stereoscopic world. In doing so, it overturns many of the fundamental assumptions about how games are produced, controlled and experienced. Oculus’s own guidelines detail hundreds of ways VR games need to work differently to conventional ones to avoid confusing the human mind. That’s because VR isn’t just a new way of seeing a game, but a new frontier in game design, which makes it hard to predict what the future of videogames will look like.But by speaking to those development studios brave enough to chart the new frontier, we can get at least some idea. And for an analogue of the kind of change now happening, you could do worse than consider CD-ROMs. Their popularisation in the early ’90s provided games with a storage medium hundreds of times the capacity of standard floppy disks, and the industry lurched to make use of all the extra space, producing re-releases of older games (now with spoken dialogue), terrible games with full-motion video starring real actors, umpteen adventure games with higher-res textures than previously possible, and Myst.Oculus Rift has already inspired a raft of frighteningly similar projects, with developers simply attaching a VR camera viewpoint to traditional games, but these are just the start. In time, massmarket virtual reality headsets might be responsible for a larger and far more exciting adventure game renaissance than Kickstarter ever was.

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