Words by Gregory Goh and Matthew Chiam
Additional writing by Terence Wang
We've heard of it before, the staple in so many sci-fi movies, books, comics, games. It simulates one's physical presence in virtual worlds; worlds that mirror our own, worlds of fantasy, anything you can dream of. The reality of virtual reality (VR) today is that, well, it's no longer virtual. I won’t deny that VR has been around for awhile, way back in time, even before I was born. Projecting a virtual world right in front of your eyes definitely sounds exciting, but having to put on a bulky, cumbersome helmet that threatened to snap your neck was not. That’s why VR remained as a dream, floating in man’s imagination. Virtual.
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A few years ago, the game industry was blooming. Back then, console was king, while PC gaming had just begun to catch up. Either way, it meant that game developers had their hands full developing games for either platform. Those games were usually hardcore, aimed at dedicated gamers. Thus we see quite a number of action games, but just a handful of adventure games. The latter was less popular, but if done right, would consume many hours of gaming and bring about sleepless nights. Moments like these make one feel like they are actually in the game. But with limited hardware, the immersion, no matter how enthralling, is always held back. Your field of vision in the game world is only as big as your TV screen or monitor, less than half of your actual field of vision in real life. Your interactions with the game world are limited by the buttons on your controller. Furthermore, to move in the game world, one twiddles the joystick. No wonder so many gamers are unhealthy.
Such stigma towards gamers will cease to exist with VR. As mentioned earlier, in the pursuit of immersion, to move in the game world would mean moving in the real world as well, but with constraints of course. No longer will a gamer be sitting on the couch exercising their fingers, he or she'll be exercising his whole body while having fun! Not to mention exploring worlds beyond his imagination.
One thing I’d like to point out here is that all that I have mentioned about immersion applies to games with a first-person perspective. Which leads us to an interesting problem. If you’ve played Call of Duty, Counter-Strike or games like that, you can probably guess where this is headed. In first-person shooters, the player character holds up their gun in a fixed position relative to their line of sight. This causes the character to be always aiming the gun in the direction they are facing. No matter where they look, whether taking in the scenery or scouting for supplies, the gun is always there, at the bottom left of the screen. It makes sense somewhat, given the limitations. But once you put on a VR headset and hold a controller shaped like a gun, things start to feel wonky. This is because where you look may not necessarily be where you want to aim. With motion tracking technology such as Kinect and Leap Motion, tracking the player’s movements is not a problem. It would be up to the developers to support such tracking in their games. With the recent rise of indie developers all over the world, I see a bright future ahead.
Today, the game industry shows no signs of slowing down, with new genres, new platforms, new devices and hardware popping up all over the place. I believe that with Virtual Reality, things are only starting to get interesting, and it’s not restricted to the gaming industry only.
This flourishing, cutting-edge technology certainly has also caught the attention of other parties. Organizations and agencies all around the civilized world, chiefly those affiliated with governments, have been quick to adopt and implement VR to aid and improve upon their causes. One of the most prominent one that can be said of is, of course - the military. In August 2012, the first-ever, fully immersive virtual simulation training system for soldiers began fielding at Fort Bragg, North Carolina ; the Dismounted Soldier Training System [DSTS]. This virtual system, essentially, allows leaders at the squad level to maintain their squad's proficiency of their assigned tasks in a timely and safe manner, even in the event new Soldiers arrive to the unit.
This flourishing, cutting-edge technology certainly has also caught the attention of other parties. Organizations and agencies all around the civilized world, chiefly those affiliated with governments, have been quick to adopt and implement VR to aid and improve upon their causes. One of the most prominent one that can be said of is, of course - the military. In August 2012, the first-ever, fully immersive virtual simulation training system for soldiers began fielding at Fort Bragg, North Carolina ; the Dismounted Soldier Training System [DSTS]. This virtual system, essentially, allows leaders at the squad level to maintain their squad's proficiency of their assigned tasks in a timely and safe manner, even in the event new Soldiers arrive to the unit.
"You can mold the situation, and you can do it as many times as you want and give younger guys a chance to step up and be leaders. I can see us in the future using this system to conduct rehearsals," said Sgt. Charles Haywood, team leader, 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (US Army).
With a wide variety of environments such as mountainous, wooded and desert environments, and the ability to insert specific entities into the scenarios, the options for training opportunities are virtually limitless; rehearsals for missions or live-fire exercises are just a couple of examples. Additionally, if anything out of the blue occurs, the training’s ‘reset’ button is always there, allowing the training to be restarted, albeit with a shorter time, thus also allowing the ability to have more repetitions. Upon completion of the mission, the after action review process is also enhanced because of the system’s ability to assess each mission conveniently on a television screen.
The downside of all this, of course, is that it begs one to consider a few questions: when the virtual world becomes more enticing than the real one, which one do we choose? Will the 'real world' still remain important enough to us to not abandon it entirely? And, perhaps more importantly, when the eventual happens and both worlds merge and converge unlike ever before, where does one draw the line?
Will there even be such a distinction anymore? As it is, the digital world has blended so much into our everyday lives that referring it in third-person seems rather out of place; the imaginary line that separates our online lives from our 'real' ones has already blurred to the point where it's more a symbol than anything else. Your Twitter personality, your Tumblr persona, they're not someone else out there far away beyond the realms of our 'real world' that you interact with once in a while. They're you and you alone.
As VR begins its slow passage of acceptance in our lives, this blurring of lines becomes all the more notable. No matter how uncannily real it becomes, putting a bullet through someone's skull in a virtual first-person shooter will never be the same as doing it in 'real life', nor will it ever come with close to the same amount of consequences. But when the time comes, will we be so entrapped within our little dream worlds that we fail to make a distinction anymore?
The stuff of science fiction is now science fact. Dreams have become, or are becoming reality. With this technology, there are so much we can achieve. The possibilities are limitless. The Oculus Rift is but a beginning, a mere spark of the revolution that is the era of virtual reality. It was a dream, floating in man's imagination. Virtual.
The stuff of science fiction is now science fact. Dreams have become, or are becoming reality. With this technology, there are so much we can achieve. The possibilities are limitless. The Oculus Rift is but a beginning, a mere spark of the revolution that is the era of virtual reality. It was a dream, floating in man's imagination. Virtual.
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