
Making Great VR: Lessons Learned from “I Expect You to Die” - sagargv
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/
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moron4hire
The criticisms of tracked hand motion are spot on, at least with regards to
the Leap Motion device. But even if the controller were to work well, having
no feedback makes actually interacting with the environment extremely
difficult.

So I hacked together a haptic glove out of an Arduino, a few vibrating motors,
and a WebSocket-to-Serial-Port bridging program in a weekend. Took it to
National Maker Faire and demoed it to a few hundred people. There were only a
handful of skeptics, and of them, only two of them walked away unconvinced.
Even basic haptics has a huge impact on the believability of the motion
interaction.

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ylem
Hi! I saw you guys there! A friend suggested that adjustable tension in the
glove rather than haptics might be a good way to deal with interaction.

~~~
moron4hire
Hey there! So I imagine based on your "you guys" comment you're actually
thinking of NullspaceVR [0]. They are a team out of Rochester University that
is developing a slew of haptic devices. I got to talk to them some and they
are a very good group of people that hopefully we can do some work together in
the near future.

I was there with DCVR [1]. We're a social meetup group for entrepreneurs and
hobbyists in the Washington DC area centered around virtual reality. We
decided to organize and put a booth together to help promote our individual
projects, while also trying to grow our local community for our meetups. But
otherwise, in regards to my projects, I was there myself.

Since you sound like you're in the area, please come to our next DCVR meetup.
They are a lot of fun and it's probably one of the best ways to get involved
with VR from scratch right now.

[0] [https://twitter.com/nullspacevr](https://twitter.com/nullspacevr)

[1] [http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-
DCVR/](http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/)

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Lancey
Was I the only one disappointed to hear that the knife couldn't be used as a
screwdriver? I would think that a game designer would be excited to allow the
pocket knife to be used as a separate, emergent solution to the puzzle. Don't
give the player a tool and then tell them it doesn't work. That's not
immersion, it's a tease.

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hyperpallium
I liked "Fail Fast, and Follow the Fun" and emphasis on immersion.

But this article, like Carmack's pro-VR article, convinced me that VR isn't
ready. Before it was unacceptable latency for some motions; now it's motion
sickness.

But these are clever guys. One day it will be ready.

~~~
dshankar
You should try a current-generation VR system, or even last year's tech like
the DK2. You would be surprised.

Motion sickness is now mostly an issue of badly designed software, not
hardware. Developers porting content designed for 2D screens don't realize
that their camera movements make people sick.

As someone who writes VR software, I think VR hardware unfairly gets blamed
for bad VR software.

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amelius
My biggest problem with VR, and 3D goggles in general, is that eye-
accomodation is not necessary in the virtual world, with current technology.
This means that the eye will get lazy if goggles are used too often.

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Raphmedia
From what I've heard, keep in mind I have a bad memory and am not an expert,
your eyes are supposed to work just as much if not more than while using a
regular screen. You will focus your eyes all over, while on a 2d screen, you
keep your eyes on the same position (center of screen, 20 inch away) for the
duration of your gameplay.

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amelius
You are talking about a different kind of eye-movement/muscle-group.

I'm talking about accomodation (the mechanism the eye uses to focus near and
distant images with equal sharpness on the retina).

That mechanism (not the muscles, but the part of the brain responsible) will
get lazy.

~~~
mjcohen
And once you hit my age, your have have stopped accommodating for quite a
while. I also wear glasses with two quite different prescriptions. I wonder
how many of the VR systems will work for me.

