Forum Discussion

CrashFu's avatar
CrashFu
Consultant
9 years ago

We have to stop associating all VR with motion controls...

Things I see Vive-owners saying on social media on a near-daily basis:

"The Vive  is the only real VR because it has motion controls!"

"Without motion controls, VR is just a monitor on your face"

"Why would I play this game if it doesn't have motion controls in it?"

"This game is incredible because motion controls! (no other reason given)"

"You can't get immersion without motion controls."

"I'll buy anything with motion controls in it!"

Things I see my fellow Rifters saying here:

"Oh yeah well the Rift WILL be the best AFTER we get motion controls!"

"These games are fun I guess but they'd be better if they used Touch"

"Every game I want to see in the future involves motion controls."

Things I remember Wii-owners saying:

"I can't wait until the Wii comes out, motion controls are going to revolutionize gaming!"

"Oh wow, Wii Sports is the most incredible game I've ever played! Motion controls, yay!"

"Huh... motion controls sure got old fast. All these developers just shoe-horned them in unnecessarily thinking we'd buy anything involving the wii-mote, instead of actually making the games good."

"All these motion-control games are the same. I'm not buying any more."

"How much store credit can I get for this Wii?  You say you're already overstocked?"


This pattern worries me.  Thanks to the Vive craze, a LOT of people are now looking at VR headsets as just an accessory TO motion control gaming, rather than the other way around.  So what's going to happen to VR after everyone inevitably gets bored of motion controls again?  Will the VR platforms thrive even after people become jaded with motion controls?  Wil people jump ship from the Vive to the Rift, because we have content that doesn't rely entirely on motion controls to be fun?  Or will they just conclude that all VR was a fad?

Or will motion controls actually survive past the "novelty" stage this time around?  Will developers have learned from the Wii's short time in the lime-light (and the utter failure of Kinect) and actually go to the effort of making GOOD games that just happen to involve motion controls,  or will they flood the VR platforms with glorified tech demos and half-assed shovelware that rely entirely on the novelty of motion controls, after seeing how easily impressed consumers are with such content on the Vive?

Believe me, I'm as eager as the rest of you to get my hands on Touch, but much like the people raving about the Vive now, and everyone hyped for the Wii when it first came out, this excitement is based on what could potentially be rather than anything we know for sure.  The future of the entire VR industry shouldn't rely on whether our expectations for motion controls are met, because then if motion controls prove to be a short-lived novelty, VR would die with them. People need to see that VR is amazing with OR without motion controls, so that it will survive even if that proves to be a fad.
motion controls
oculus touch
Rant

168 Replies

  • Zenbane's avatar
    Zenbane
    MVP
    9 years ago
    This is why it's always best to ignore the general public. People need to feel good about themselves by pretending that they drew a dividing line where they are automatically on the winning side.

    I see it as people trying to go against conformity the lazy way, by conforming to the exact opposite; kinda like the Goth Kids in South Park



  • CrashFu's avatar
    CrashFu
    Consultant
    9 years ago
    @Zenbane - The problem is, the issue goes beyond people just picking one platform because of immediate access to a particular feature or simply because it's owned by a more popular / more established company (although that was certainly enough for Overwatch to pretty much kill Battleborn overnight... Totally separate issue, but I think even if Vive steals ALL the market share, Oculus would just end up pulling a sega and live on as a third-party game publisher / content producer or something like that)

    The issue is that all this raving about how amazing and essential motion controls are (from both sides, Vive and Rift owners) is creating a lot of serious misconceptions about what VR is, and causing people to undervalue and even completely disregard VR that doesn't conform to the trend of using motion controls.

    I'm worried this is going to stifle the industry, result in a severe lack of diversity in future VR content, and potentially even doom it if people start going "Well I'm bored of motion controls now so I guess I must be bored of all VR"
  • Lawyer4Ever's avatar
    Lawyer4Ever
    Protege
    9 years ago
    I have no interest in the motion controls.  I bought my Rift primarily for sim racing, which does not require motion controls.  I do find it cool that in Assetto Corsa, I can stand up and look at my car and the surrounding track as if I were there.  I also ended up buying a lot of non-sim racing VR games, including Eve Valkyrie, Chronos, ADR1FT and Edge of Nowhere and I have found they are great and highly immersive sitting down using my Xbox One controller.

    VR will flourish with or without motion controls.  My guess is that the bulk of the great games will not require motion controls to be great.  We already see that with the Rift games.  The Touch controllers won't change that IMO.
  • Zenbane's avatar
    Zenbane
    MVP
    9 years ago
    If both the Vive and Rift had equally shipped with room-scale tracking, motion controllers, and even identical software titles... people would just start bitching about the lack of foot-controllers in VR. Phrases like, "how can I get my VR legs if I can't even see my legs in VR?"

    The cycle of negativity is endless; which is why I prefer to embrace it, with fervor.
  • LZoltowski's avatar
    LZoltowski
    Champion
    9 years ago
    @CrashFu I agree ... but like with all new mediums people are not quite sure what they want from it yet ... give it a year or so and things will even out a bit more. Keyboard warriors love to speculate tho :)

    And @zenbane I want to see my testicles in VR ... for science.
  • ThreeDeeVision's avatar
    ThreeDeeVision
    Superstar
    9 years ago
    I don't agree.  Progression of the VR technology isn't going to be limited to head tracking, especially for other VR applications beyond gaming.  Leap motion style hand tracking and tracked controllers are only the beginning of what will make VR immersion better.  The more your in-game avatar is a believable representation of your physical body, and the more haptic feedback you get through the VR input device, the closer we will be to actual immersion.
  • CrashFu's avatar
    CrashFu
    Consultant
    9 years ago

    Lawyer4Ever said:

    I have no interest in the motion controls.  I bought my Rift primarily for sim racing, which does not require motion controls.  I do find it cool that in Assetto Corsa, I can stand up and look at my car and the surrounding track as if I were there.  I also ended up buying a lot of non-sim racing VR games, including Eve Valkyrie, Chronos, ADR1FT and Edge of Nowhere and I have found they are great and highly immersive sitting down using my Xbox One controller.


    Glad to hear you're appreciating this stuff.   I've tried telling people, "You get a device / console / platform because you want what's on it NOW, not because you think it'll have something to justify it later"  and I definitely would have waited to get a Rift if they hadn't been showing off such impressive content for release or soon-after release.  Likewise, even if Touch was available now, I would wait to buy it until the games showed up... fortunately (for them) it sounds like they're building up quite the launch library to go with it.

    Lawyer4Ever said:

    VR will flourish with or without motion controls.  My guess is that the bulk of the great games will not require motion controls to be great.  We already see that with the Rift games.  The Touch controllers won't change that IMO.


    VR will be appreciated by true VR enthusiasts even without motion controls.  Whether the industry flourishes without them will depend on whether the public can be made to see that they aren't necessary for good VR.  As long as the Vive continues hogging the lime-light on social media, and everyone developing for it continues to exclusively make motion-control games to jump on the bandwagon, the general public will just become more and more deluded.

    I think what we need now is for some high-profile internet celebrities to show off the non-motion-control games, like back in the Pre-Vive days, when YouTubers playing silly jump-scare horror games on the Rift development kits helped put VR on the map.
  • CrashFu's avatar
    CrashFu
    Consultant
    9 years ago



    The more your in-game avatar is a believable representation of your physical body, and the more haptic feedback you get through the VR input device, the closer we will be to actual immersion.


    What if I'm bored of my physical body, with all its averageness and physical limitations, and I want to be or witness something better and more interesting?  That's supposed to be the whole point of virtual reality, isn't it?   If I wanted to continue being my boring old self with my regular human abilities and just make the space around me look more interesting, I'd be into Augmented Reality instead.

    Motion controls do a very limited number of things exceptionally well, namely simulating the natural use of hands, or hand-held tools, or just as a simple means to indicate a point in physical space nearby and relative to the user, or point in a particular direction from that space. That's pretty much it, and there's only so much that can conceivably be done with it.  You can be a face with one or two hands, tools, or digital cursors.

    But if you give someone enough raw digital inputs (IE buttons, triggers, and analog sticks) arranged in a way that is intuitive and comfortable to use (IE a gamepad), that interface serves as a direct link to the conscious mind THROUGH the hands, and the player can be pretty much anything.

    So why do you have to be yourself to feel immersed in something?  Don't you ever play role-playing games and step into the shoes of a character that isn't you? Don't you ever have dreams where you're different from your waking self?  When you read a book, do you need the protagonist to be a blank-slate mary-sue, because you can't get engrossed in the story unless you can imagine the main character is you?

    This isn't meant as a personal criticism, I'm genuinely curious why having a world that seems real isn't enough for some people to feel immersed unless they can get their real-world limbs involved in the process.  Maybe some people are just more attached to their body, while others think of themselves as their consciousness and it doesn't matter to them whether they're in their body or placing that consciousness inside a vehicle or the shell of a virtual character (or disembodied frame of reference).