VR Gaming for the Future

You might think you’ve experienced VR, and you might have been pretty impressed. Particularly if you’re a gamer, there are some great experiences to be had out there (or rather, in there) today.

Virtual reality (VR) is no longer a niche. VR applications are evolving fast, and they are penetrating in many industry sectors. From healthcare to the automotive industry, VR is changing the way things are done, and expectations for the future remain high. This is particularly true for video games.

The latest depiction of a future in which VR entertainment is ubiquitous arrived at the dawn of a new hardware generation that thus far seems like a setback for VR gaming. The last generation was a watershed for widespread access to VR. As of last January, Sony had sold more than 5 million units of its PSVR headset for the PlayStation 4, which launched in October 2016. That figure fell far short of the most optimistic estimates — one overexuberant analyst forecasted 6 million sales in 2016 alone — and it’s a pittance compared to the total number of PS4 systems sold (approximately 115 million). But the PSVR provided an important proof of concept, delivering quality, living-room VR in an easy-to-set-up accessory for a widely available gaming platform.

That tangible progress toward a utopian vision of VR makes the present state of the market more perplexing. For decades, VR was the stuff of science fiction, and either technologically impractical or effectively unaffordable. In the past five years, though, that has changed: The headsets are real and at least somewhat spectacular, if not fully refined. However, the future of VR as a means of mass entertainment remains almost as murky as ever.

But over the next few years, in VR, as in all fields of technology, we’re going to see things that make what is cutting-edge today look like Space Invaders. And although the games will be amazing, the effects of this transformation will be far broader, touching on our work, education, and social lives.

Today’s most popular VR applications involve taking total control of a user’s senses (sight and hearing, particularly) to create a totally immersive experience that places the user in a fully virtual environment that feels pretty realistic.

Very soon, VR creators will extend this sensory hijacking to our other faculties — for example, touch and smell — to deepen that sense of immersion. At the same time, the devices we use to visit these virtual worlds will become cheaper and lighter, removing the friction that can currently be a barrier.

VR is already making great inroads into education, with a large number of startups and established companies offering packaged experiences and services aimed at schools. Engage’s platform is used by the likes of Facebook, HTC, and the European Commission to enable remote learning. And one study published in 2019 found that medical students trained using VR were able to carry out certain procedures quicker and more accurately than peers trained using traditional methods.

These new methods of teaching and learning will become increasingly effective as new technologies emerge. One that is likely to make waves is the Teslasuit, which uses a full-body suit to offer haptic feedback, enhancing the immersion through the sense of touch. It also offers an array of biometric sensors enabling the user’s heartbeat, perspiration, and other stress indicators to be measured. The suit is already used in NASA astronaut training, but its potential uses are unlimited.

The pandemic has changed many things about the way we work, including the wholesale shift to home working for large numbers of employees. This brings challenges, including the need to retain an environment that fosters cooperative activity and the building of company culture. Solutions involving VR are quickly emerging to help tackle these.

Spatial, which creates a tool best described as a VR version of Zoom, reported a 1000% increase in the use of its platform since March 2020. In total, the value of the market for VR business equipment is forecast to grow from $829 million in 2018 to $4.26 billion by 2023, according to research by Artillery Intelligence.

Communication giant Ericsson (which has provided Oculus VR headsets to employees working from home during the pandemic for VR meetings) has talked about creating the “Internet of Senses.” This involves developing projects involving simulating touch, taste and smell, and sensations such as hot or cold. It predicts that by 2030, we will be able to enter digital environments that appear completely real to all of our five senses simultaneously.

This will lead to the advent of what it calls the “dematerialised office” — where the office effectively vanishes from our lives as we’re able to create entirely interactive and collaborative working environments wherever we are in the world, simply by slipping on a headset and whatever other devices are needed for the task at hand.

The “killer app” for VR is gaming, and the reason the technology is developing at the pace it is, is due to the large market of people willing to spend money on the most impressive and immersive entertainment experiences.

Sandbox VR operates real-world VR centres where equipment that it simply wouldn’t be practical or affordable to use in our homes offer some of the most immersive experiences yet created.

Using full-body haptic feedback suits, they offer five games — one licensed from Star Trek — that let groups cooperate or battle it out in deep space, aboard ghostly pirate ships, or through a zombie infestation.

It makes sense in many ways that there could be two markets for consuming VR entertainment — at least in its early days. While the most immersive and impressive tech is big, expensive, and requires technical skill to operate, it’s more viable to offer it at dedicated venues rather than as an in-home experience. As with movies, the stay-at-home offerings will provide something perhaps a little less spectacular but more convenient — at least until we get to the point where we can have full-size Star Trek holodecks in our own homes!

There are still a large number of challenges that VR gaming developers need to overcome, but as popularity and demand grow, innovation will follow. The video game industry has been changing for years and has done so at a gradual pace. VR gaming has not seen the rapid growth that they first expected, but the future is bright and will be more mainstream before we know it.