"We're old dogs, but these are new tricks," Griesemer said. We were sitting in an environment meant to simulate what most people will have at home: a seat in front of a television, with couches on the side. There was space, but not so much as to be unrealistic. The team wanted a virtual reality experience that anyone could play in an environment set up for gaming, not the sort of room-scale VR Valve shows to the press and developers.
"PlayStation VR is definitely the platform for us. It hits the audience we want to hit: people who aren't investing an entire room in their house," Griesemer said. "They're hardcore gamers. They're gamers more than they're technofetishists."
The team also didn't want to rely on a teleportation mechanic for their core movement, something that many VR developers were using to make sure the player could explore the environment without getting sick. And you couldn't be locked in one location. Highwire wanted you to be able to walk around and explore the entire environment.
"It has to be super intuitive because at least with the controller you can say, 'Press the A button to jump,' and you look down and there's an A button on the controller," Griesemer said. "But for us you can't see your hands. We don't even have a language to express, 'Look at the left and slightly tilt your head.' We don't have the tutorial knowledge. You just have to put the thing on and it works. It has to be comfortable and safe."
Many people said movement in VR was nearly uncrackable; it's something Highwire was used to hearing from past projects. "Just so you know, when we moved Halo to the Xbox back in 2000 and we went from keyboard and mouselook [to a controller]? I was one of the people who said it would never work on a controller with two thumbsticks, just for the record," O'Donnell said with a laugh.
And that's the secret of movement. The game's lead character is sitting up in bed, just like you're sitting in your chair. You can look around the room and you can move by leaning the top half of your body.
Virtual reality can make people sick, and that sickness can come from a few different places. The latency has to be low and the frame rate high so the motion of your head matches what you experience in the game world, but also your eyes and brain may think you're moving while your inner ear is saying you're staying still. Golem's approach, which is achieved by using the sensors in the PlayStation VR headset to track when you lean in any direction even a tiny bit, means your body moves along with the character in the game.
"Did you notice as you were sitting in your chair, that you were able to go completely forward and then turn around without turning around in your chair?" O'Donnell asked. It's a neat trick; there's a tiny bit of a dead zone in your view where, as you look around, you're just looking around. Go outside of that circle, and movement becomes a bit more pronounced and your character turns. You don't notice it when you're in virtual reality; it simply feels natural. But you can virtually "walk" anywhere in your environment and even turn around a full 360 degrees merely by subtly moving the top half of your body and looking around.
"Your ears are OK at telling you you're accelerating, but they're shit sensors ... by the time you're about 4, you're mostly getting your balance information from your eyes ... as long as you're in the ballpark you can feed the eyes anything," Griesemer said. "We make it so that when you're in the headset sitting, and you turn around so you're looking behind you, you're only looking around 90 degrees."
"Your vestibular system is so easy to fool," O'Donnell said.
And the hell of it? It works. I found myself leaning just a tiny bit to walk around, and the act of turning by looking and tilting my body was comfortable and enjoyable. It only took me a few minutes to get used to how it all worked, and I found myself moving less and less to get the desired response from the game. "When you see someone who has been playing for a while, they're only moving a tiny bit," O'Donnell said. "It's new people who exaggerate a lot."
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