We are still very much in the early days of virtual reality, with only two real choices for VR hardware. They are the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, both of which have only been available for less than a year. As you would expect, there are a wide range of VR games and experiences being built by indie developers, since they tend to be the earliest adopters, but there has also been a lot of investment and support from much larger names, most notably, Valve. Valve has been in the games industry for almost 20 years and is the powerhouse behind the HTC Vive. Starting back in 2012 they brainstormed and prototyped early versions of their VR headset. Teaming up with HTC in the spring of 2014 took the Vive hardware to the next level and turned it into what we see today.
In addition to playing a huge role in the development of the Vive hardware, they also built SteamVR, which is the software platform that powers the Vive. In fact, SteamVR supports both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. This allows developers to target either platform using the same SDK. Valve has always said that they won’t lock down SteamVR because they believe that being restrictive at this early stage would be bad for the industry.
Valve has also been the producer of a sizable amount of VR content. Just after Oculus released their first development kit, Vive put out versions of Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2 that supported the Rift, and they were amazing. For a lot of people, these games were their first experience with VR and it set the bar for how immersive and compelling it can be. They have also built the definitive experience for the HTC Vive with a game called The Lab. Actually, it’s a collection of small games and demos allowing players to have a wide range of highly polished AAA-level experiences. Based on community feedback they’ve actually released the source code for some of the more popular features so that other developers can use them in their own games.
Other big game developers are starting to follow Valve’s lead into VR. This year, at E3, Bethesda announced that they are going to release a VR version of their incredibly popular game, Fallout 4. Fallout 4 VR will target the Vive and make use of the Vive’s controllers for shooting and managing the Pip-Boy. EA has said that they are targeting the PlayStation VR with their Star Wars™ Battlefront: X-Wing VR Mission. Both of these games are sure to come with all of the polish that we expect from these studios and will be a huge step for bringing full length games into VR.
Even large companies from outside of the gaming industry are getting involved in VR. Oculus launched their Kickstarter project back in August of 2012 with a truly visionary take on what VR could become with modern hardware. Their Kickstarter went gangbusters and, for a goal of $250,000, they ended up with $2.4 million from backers! They spent the next two years prototyping, iterating and refining their idea and along the way released two development kits. They built a name for themselves and started to get the attention of some of the biggest names in tech. To pretty much everyone’s surprise, in the Spring of 2014, Facebook bought them for $2 Billion.
The release of the first Oculus Rift development kit sparked the creativity of some amazingly clever Google engineers who decided to see what they could come up with using almost no money. They figured out that you could turn $10 worth of cardboard and plastic lenses into a VR viewer powered by a smartphone. Their incredibly cheap and simple solution did a surprising job of delivering on the VR experience. This year, at Google I/O 2016, Google announced that they were going to take a step up from Cardboard with a project called DayDream. DayDream is a VR platform that is going to be built directly into Android starting with version 7.0 (Nougat). It’s still going to be powered by a mobile phone but the viewer is going to be much sturdier and will come with a controller to allow users to interact with the virtual world.
VR is just beginning to pick up steam and yet there are already a ton of great experiences from indie developers and mega studios alike. As lower cost headsets become available and the price of existing hardware drops I think we’ll see more and more people brining VR into their homes. This will create a much riper audience for larger AAA studios to take their first steps into the virtual world.
About the author
Casey Borders is an avid gamer and VR fan with over 10 years of experience with graphics development. He was worked on everything from military simulation to educational VR/AR experiences to game development. More recently, he has focused mainly on mobile development.