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Letters from VR: a field guide to our favorite virtual reality

The Verge's New York offices now have an official virtual reality room. With an HTC Vive and an Oculus Rift, we've got access to dozens of games, tools, and experiments, letting us do everything from paint in 3D to try out being an astronaut. There's way too much to write about it all, but we're putting our writers, editors, artists, and videographers through some of the best that VR has to offer. Here's what we think.

  • Adi Robertson

    Aug 2, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    Everest VR is not like climbing a mountain, and it shouldn’t have to be

    I grew up at the foot of a dormant volcano in the Cascades, and like many of my classmates, I climbed it a few times as a teenager. Mountains — real, tree-bare, snow-capped mountains — feel like alien worlds. Air is thinner; water boils faster. Wind scours any signs of life from sheer rock faces, and algae turns snow a strange, bloody pink. The natural forces that you shrug off at sea level, like nightfall or bad weather, become life-threatening obstacles.

    Booting up Everest VR, a new virtual reality experience for the HTC Vive, is not very much like climbing a mountain. No virtual reality can mimic the crunch of snow under your boots during slow, numb hours of trudging up a slope that never seems to end, or the sense of accomplishment when it finally does, and the sky opens up ahead of you. And that’s for a straightforward climb that most reasonably fit people could manage in a day — not one where you spend weeks simply acclimating to the environment.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Jul 22, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    I’m too motion-sick to finish this cool VR game, so I made some GIFs to explain why

    the assembly

    I’m currently midway through a game called The Assembly, which was released on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive a few days ago. The Assembly is one of the closest things VR has to a full-length, first-person exploration game, which is one of my favorite genres. The plot has shades of Portal and The Prisoner, alternately following two protagonists through a secret underground research facility that operates above the law. The writing and art direction aren’t perfect, but it’s still one of the stronger VR efforts I’ve seen recently. It also makes me sick — really, incredibly nauseated.

    Broadly speaking, VR simulator sickness happens when your eyes think you’re moving but your body says you’re not, or vice versa. But in first-person VR games that use a normal console controller — The Assembly can be played on either a headset or a flat screen — it’s strangely variable. Some people will say the nausea factor is based on framerate, others on how quickly your character accelerates. In this case, though, I think it’s something fundamental to the genre: the sheer amount of moving around you do. The Assembly shows us that designing for VR isn’t just about tweaking how characters move or interact, but rethinking how designers construct the geography of video games.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Jul 1, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    A Dark Souls of VR would be wonderful — here’s how you’d make it

    "The Dark Souls of X" is such a common cliche that there’s an entire Twitter account dedicated to mocking it. The phrase is usually an unnecessary substitute for saying a game is hard: Super Hexagon is the Dark Souls of mobile games, Super Meat Boy is the Dark Souls of platformers, Homefront: The Revolution is the Dark Souls of cooperative multiplayer. But in virtual reality, it’s not just empty marketing, but positive inspiration. Chronos, one of my favorite Oculus Rift games, took a lot from the series, transplanting the fighting system into a new world and adding interesting puzzle components.

    For all its good points, Chronos could have been made for a console, not a VR headset. For something that feels genuinely of VR, you might look to Left-Hand Path — a literally and figuratively dark fantasy game whose creator has described it as Dark Souls for the HTC Vive. Left-Hand Path is the perfect example of how someone could build an amazing VR project on the Souls formula, and a reminder of how hard it would be to do so.

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  • Alessandra Potenza

    May 24, 2016

    Alessandra Potenza

    Time Machine is the closest you can get to Jurassic Park in virtual reality

    Minority Media

    I’m sitting in an underwater pod observing some beautiful, prehistoric giant turtles swim around. Suddenly, a pliosaurus — a lizard-like monster — arrives and starts eating the turtles, spluttering blood everywhere. That’s one of the first things you experience when playing the VR game Time Machine. It’s a pretty gruesome start, but also what makes this game worth it. It’s like visiting Jurassic Park in virtual reality.

    Unlike the movie, there’s no walking around and petting brachiosauruses. But there’s the thrill. You’re underwater and you have a mission to accomplish. The year is 2033 and a weird virus that was once trapped beneath the ice is now infecting and killing half of the world (not even virtual reality can escape global warming). Monda Museo, a corporation with a real purpose that is a bit of a mystery, has picked you to use a time machine and go back to the year 155 million BCE. Your job is to scan some dinosaurs, and hopefully in the process you’ll gather knowledge that will stop the virus and save the world. The virus is lamely dubbed the Jurassic flu.

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  • Adi Robertson

    May 5, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    How virtual reality can change the way we see gender and horror movies

    Yes, virtual reality will now let you experience being tortured to death by a lovesick robot. Or at least, that's what I'm getting from Road to VR's Paul James, who recently tried out Abe VR on the Oculus Rift. Abe VR is a first-person adaptation of a 2013 horror short, about a robot whose programming drives him to kidnap beautiful women who don't reciprocate his affection. As a film, Abe is well-produced but thin — it's a 7-minute villain's monologue from a sociopathic C-3PO. But as a VR experience, it reveals a curious new twist in the way we've been thinking about cameras, fear, and gender for decades.

    Maybe more than any other genre, horror films are about a camera's gaze: the watcher in the darkness, the unsuspecting target, the helpless viewer who sees it all unfold. Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws, published in 1992, is a book-length analysis of how that gaze falls on different genders. The book responded to a common reading of horror (and particularly slasher) films of the '70s and '80s: that they were misogynistic invitations for men to torment women by proxy. Instead, Clover suggested that slasher films make largely male audiences identify with the surviving "final girl," both narratively and cinematically. Seminal slasher film Halloween opens from the killer Michael Myers' point of view, but by the end, we're hiding with Jamie Lee Curtis in the closet.

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  • Paul Miller

    May 2, 2016

    Paul Miller

    I saw something horrible and wrong in VR

    BigScreen Beta

    Warning: this post includes graphic content.

    I went over to a friend's house the other day to have some quality time in his Oculus Rift. He has a nice apartment, and instead of hiding the Oculus away in a bedroom, he's devised a setup where you can sit at the kitchen table in his brightly lit living room. It's nice; it makes VR feel a little more "social" and a little less "man cave."

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  • Adi Robertson

    Apr 11, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    Chronos is a VR game about stress, skill, and the weirdness of fiction

    Chronos
    Gunfire Games

    What does virtual reality do for a game that doesn’t need to be played in VR at all? That’s the question I’ve been asking about Chronos, one of the best games on the Oculus Rift. Chronos is a gorgeous third-person action game that fits well in the Rift, using VR to turn players’ worlds into a series of tiny imaginary landscapes. If a good game can eventually make you forget the outside world, Chronos is even more engrossing, focusing you entirely on a puzzle or boss fight. Still, mechanically, there’s not much reason for Chronos to be exclusive to the Rift. It doesn’t require you to convincingly inhabit another body, and it uses a standard Xbox gamepad, so you’re not playing with motion controls or getting up and walking around.

    Spoilers for Chronos ahead.

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  • Ben Popper

    Apr 1, 2016

    Ben Popper

    Strategy games in virtual reality: I am a mighty but overworked god

    Airmech Command
    Airmech Command

    I stumbled in late to the staff meeting, my face flushed and sweaty, deep creases worn into both cheeks from the Oculus Rift headset. I had planned to spend 30 or 40 minutes testing out AirMech: Command, one of the launch titles for Facebook’s virtual reality headset. Three hours later I awoke from a VR coma to find the workday had mostly slipped away. A co-worker thoughtfully cataloged my progress, a dad alone in the dark. Never has the phrase "real-time strategy" seemed more ironic.

    When people talk about the magic of virtual reality they inevitably talk about being transported to a new universe, that feeling of being present in an alternate world. A lot of VR games are built to take advantage of this immersive quality by placing you in a first-person perspective. AirMech is not one of these ambitious stabs at a new medium. I’ll let developer James Green describe the company’s approach to evolving AirMech for VR. "We took advantage of the gameplay experience in VR, just because you’re in VR. It sounds simple. People are like, ‘What’s different about it?’ ... Being immersed in an environment is so powerful. Until you put on a headset it’s hard to explain. Just look at the world around you. It’s actually pretty cool."

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  • Loren Grush

    Mar 30, 2016

    Loren Grush

    Adrift is as close as most of us will get to a spacewalk — nausea and all

    ThreeOneZero

    I'm floating in the ruins of a destroyed space station positioned somewhere in lower Earth orbit, with large chunks of debris passing me by. If my situation wasn't dire enough, my spacesuit is malfunctioning, and I'm quickly running out of the oxygen that's keeping me alive. I need to find air fast — and fortunately, I spot a box of oxygen canisters floating right in front of me. I use my suit's small propulsion system to move forward, so I can reach out and grab one, and I manage to refill my air supply just in time before I suffocate to death.

    Now that the situation has been handled, I can finally focus on another big problem that's been looming over me: I feel like I'm going to throw up.

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  • Ross Miller

    Mar 26, 2016

    Ross Miller

    The Little Prince in VR is like a diorama come to life

    The Verge's New York offices now have an official virtual reality room. The library for its HTC Vive Pre holds a bunch of experiments and demos for full games we won't see for weeks or even months. But there's too much cool stuff to ignore. So for the next few weeks, we're putting our writers, editors, artists, and videographers through some of the best that VR has to offer. Here's what we think.Sometimes the best interaction is having literally nothing to press.

    The Rose and I is a short piece by Penrose Studio that made its world premiere this past January at Sundance Film Festival. Loosely based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, The Rose and I presents a vignette where the eponymous Prince — living on a very tiny asteroid — "meets" a single rose that has sprouted up, approaching the new development with a mix of trepidation and curiosity. There's little else to say, honestly; the full experience is over in minutes.

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  • Russell Brandom

    Mar 10, 2016

    Russell Brandom

    The future of virtual reality games is soul-killing office work

    The Verge's New York offices now have an official virtual reality room. The library for its HTC Vive Pre holds a bunch of experiments and demos for full games we won't see for weeks or even months. But there's too much cool stuff to ignore. So for the next few weeks, we're putting our writers, editors, artists, and videographers through some of the best that VR has to offer. Here's what we think.When writers dreamed about virtual reality 20 years ago, they imagined putting on a headset and being whisked away to golden beaches or powdery slopes. This technology could take you anywhere, they reasoned, so of course we’d use it to go to the most beautiful places on earth.

    Instead, I used it to go to a small cubicle in the middle of a low-polygon office floor, where I made coffee, ate a donut, and plugged in a computer. Clearly, the future is not everything we hoped.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Mar 9, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    The Brookhaven Experiment is your endless, inevitable virtual reality death

    One of the very first games I played in virtual reality was Valve's clumsy Oculus Rift port of Half-Life 2. The Half-Life series, which helped define a generation of first-person shooters, is a blend of super-fast action and survival horror. They’re not complicated games — you pick up an increasing number of weapons and use them to kill enemies that drop ammunition or health packs, while trying to reach freedom and save the world. But they revel in improbable power. Players start out in a train and end in a high-security alien stronghold or a parallel dimension, having methodically cut through hundreds of hostiles and surmounted seemingly impossible barriers through the clever use of physics.

    Half-Life 2 was a wonderful VR experience in some ways: its early rooftop chases felt properly dizzying in a headset, and firefights were intensely intimate. But like many similar games, its twitch-reflex movements and nimble jumps made it disorienting at best and nauseating at worst. Today, the catalogue of first-person shooters built for virtual reality is much larger and more diverse. The HTC Vive's lineup will include several of the games, a few of which are already available as demos: the bare-bones Space Pirate Trainer, the brightly colored and slightly convoluted Jeeboman, and the survival horror-themed Brookhaven Experiment.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Mar 8, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    Budget Cuts is like Mission Impossible crossed with Portal in virtual reality

    Budget Cuts on HTC Vive

    HTC Vive games have to overcome a fundamental barrier: they've got to be good enough to justify flailing around at things no one else can see. Anyone walking around the Verge offices late last week, for example, would have caught me standing perfectly still in the middle of our VR room, raising a controller over my shoulder and jerking it forward like the world's most expensive fly-swatter. Sometimes, this would be followed by a few minuscule but triumphant steps forward. Almost as often, it would end with several seconds spent whirling around for no apparent reason while muttering "No no god no no no no no," a full minute of nearly fetal crouching, and another, more careful controller swat. Such is the fate of anyone who ventures into the pre-alpha demo of Budget Cuts, a motion-based stealth game coming out this year for the Vive.

    At first glance, Budget Cuts looks a lot like Valve's first-person puzzler Portal, and it's not an unwarranted comparison. Like many virtual reality experiences, your character in Budget Cuts can walk a few feet in any direction but relies mostly on teleportation. Instead of just pointing and warping to a destination, though, you'll use a gun whose shots open extremely familiar-looking blue-rimmed portals. This is the central conceit of the demo: playing some kind of spy, you must teleport through several floors of an office building after hours, sneaking through empty hallways and fighting deadly robots. In the game's cold, dystopian future, you do all of it just to surreptitiously add an "approved" stamp to your job application.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Feb 28, 2016

    Adi Robertson

    Painter of light: my awkward adventures in virtual reality art

    Tilt Brush, the painting tool that's become a mainstay of HTC Vive demos, does not tap psychic waveforms. But the tool, along with other virtual reality art programs like Quill and Medium, does open up a new set of possibilities for art. Somebody is going to truly master Tilt Brush, and when they do, the three-dimensional sculpture-paintings they produce are going to be very different from what we currently think of as art — the way that prints are different from oil paintings, or maybe even the way hand-drawn animation is different from illustration.I am not even close to that person, and I don't know exactly what that art form will look like. But I've been getting to play around with Tilt Brush this weekend, and as we've noted before, it's a lot of fun even for complete amateurs. Here are a few of the things I've learned along the way.

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