Valve's Virtual Reality Holodeck

[Deadly Furby]

Black Mesa project lead talks Valve’s "really compelling" VR holodeck tech

Carlos Montero is lead environment artist at Cryptic, the chaps who make Neverwinter. But he also moonlights as project lead of Black Mesa, the Source remake of Half-Life - and it’s likely for that reason he joined a select few at Steam Dev Days for a private tour of Valve’s VR cave.

Much of Montero’s description correlates with the account of a Dev Days guest on Reddit. Invited into a room walled with “QR-code looking symbols”, he donned a headset which tracked all of the codes for positioning.

Where the Oculus Rift offers an experience static from the neck down, Valve’s demo allowed guests to walk around the room and explore the space projected by their goggles. A “special carpet” featured raised areas, which let Montero know when he was leaving the space or reaching the limits of his cable.

“With Oculus Rift, I’ve gotten dizzy within 30 seconds of my first try while standing,” said Montero. “With Valve’s demo I stood and walked around for 30 min without getting dizzy.”

Over the course of a series of demos, Montero had his preconceptions thrown off a cliff. In one, he found himself stood on the edge of a precipice. Despite experience with hot-air balloons and rock-climbing, he felt immediately in danger: “My body wanted to spread out, balance myself.”

Asked to step off his platform and into space, Montero found himself “way more anxious than I should have been”.

“I had to spread my legs out wide and tip-toe my way out into the open air,” he wrote. “Once out there, I was told I was one of few percentage of people who successfully did this without freaking out.

“Standing in mid-air was extremely uncomfortable - my body wanted me to go back,” he went on. “Eventually I went back and felt much better.”

In one demo, Montero was placed at the foot of an “insanely huge” Blade Runner-style skyscraper, for which the “sense of space and perspective was nuts”.

In another, two spheres - one perceptually 100 feet in diameter, the other 30 feet - rotated “effortlessly” around the room in a manner Montero found “disconcerting”.

“It’s hard to describe, but it felt very surreal,” he said. “My conscious mind did not want to accept that what I was seeing was real - my brain was believing that it WAS real.”

A Portal 2 turret assembly demo highlighted one potential drawback of VR that Valve have noticed - normal maps, used commonly in contemporary games to make flat textures appear 3D, don’t work.

“I could look closely at the machine arms and tell the normal maps were fake,” said Montero. “They broke down very badly.”

In later demos of art made specifically for VR, however, Montero noted that the combination of VR with “high-poly geometry” made objects appear immaculately detailed, and was a “bit mind-boggling”.

Mind-boggling is very much what Valve are reaching for. They told Montero they’re wary that, in both hardware and software, it’ll take a very compelling experience to overcome the general public’s “stage fright”.

Valve explicitly told guests that the experience was not designed for consumers - rather, it's the standard to hold consumer VR to in the next few years though. They also said, though, that they’d built a similar room for Oculus.

The full account reads like the first notes of a continental explorer.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/black-mesa-p...-holodeck-tech

[FDA_Approved]

VR will always be exceptionally fascinating, but it's definitely not where video gaming is "going".

The experience document here sounds absolutely amazing and I'd love to have a similar one. But it goes to show just how much has to go into such an experience. It's never going to find it's way into competitive or any higher field of gaming. Just do to how taxing it is on a player, and even seems hindering to high performance and accuracy. Like wise I don't think it will be very successful in casual gaming either, at least not for a long time.

I think it'll find a niche market of hybrid "hardcore casuals". People who only play video games casually, but ONLY play video games, and also have the money to waste on it.

I imagine you could get usb steering wheels and pedals for pc and consoles alike for a decent price any more. And that would seem the ideal way to play a racing game. But how many people actually play racing games in that fashion? Mostly racing buffs I'd imagine. Or these type of hardcore casuals I mentioned. Play casually for fun, but need to have the best and full experiences.

Again the VR experience that guy had sounds enthralling, and I'm even envious of him. But I don't get why companies are making such a big deal out of VR atm.

[Dexter]

hardcore casual?

[ddm999]

The complete list of the real kinds of gamers:

competitive hardcore > people who play a few video games a lot on PC in tournaments
tryhards > people who play a few video games a lot on PC and think they are miles better than competitive hardcore players
hardcore > people who play a few video games a lot on PC
hardcore casual > people who play video games a lot on PC
casual > people who play video games on PC
mobile casual > people who play video games on phones
cod fgts > people who "play" call of duty on console
idiots > people who "play" call of duty on PC in tournaments
wtf > people who "play" call of duty on console in tournaments

By tournaments I mean real tournaments you can go and watch live IRL, not UGC FF. :P

[aleXtric]

i dont think VR gaming is plausible at all for home use. i imagine that if it ever takes off itd have to be an arcade setting. but whos going to go out of their way to go play a VR game? seems like something you'd do once/once in a blue moon.

theres no profit to be made in VR imo and even if there is it seems like something that would bankrupt you before you figured it out.

[KubeDawg]

I think the implications of VR are amazing. The future of gaming will see fucking robots in real arenas controlled by people playing in VR. So imagine a quake arena-like compound where you have god damn robots fighting to the death with nothing but user input.

Also they already have things like a special treadmill you can use while using occulus rift that allows you to walk in real time in game, and while it might be a sort of crude right now, just imagine how much better it could get 5, 10 years from now.

[ddm999]

Based on what Kube's said, that would be cool.

Oh, except for the fact there isn't enough room on the Earth for what we do currently, and you'd need millions of dollars to make giant arenas underground - where we could create underground housing (which is the only place we could go to make houses with current tech - that is, until architects realize that you can put dirt and water on the top of a block of flats to make both agriculture & housing in the same place - oh, and when people realize there's about 9 million square km of america with nothing but browny coloured hills and a few dirt roads)

I'd kinda agree with alex in that the only place you could fit a true VR experience would be an arcade. With it in an arcade, not only do you have the people who just go there for the VR, but you also have those just heading there 'cause it's there. Then you get more people interested in VR. Then you get more people interested in tech. Then you get more people interested in gaming. Then gaming has less of a bad reputation with everyone who knows nothing about what they're saying.

I mean

Originally Posted by aleXtric

theres no profit to be made in VR imo

doesn't really matter anyway because really the only people putting money INTO producing VR have massive setups filling their pockets with sweet dolla bills yo. (aka volvo and steam)