LOS ANGELES — Virtual reality may be finally nearing its moment in the sun.
Headsets that display an immersive world around the wearer have been touted as the next big thing in entertainment for decades. Early efforts, including Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and Sega’s VR in the 1990s, lacked the technological sophistication to pull it off.
Improved hardware is closing the gap to game developers’ aspirations.
Prototypes of virtual-reality devices have been regular residents of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in recent years. The difference at this week’s iteration of the video-gaming trade show here is that they have evolved from early demos to products approaching commercial release, with a pipeline of games and other content in development.
HTC’s Vive, a headset being developed in a partnership with Bellevue’s Valve, could be available by the end of this year.
Oculus, owned by Facebook, this month announced it would release its PC-linked headset in the first quarter of 2016. Sony has said its Project Morpheus is likely slated for a release in the first half of next year.
The race to capitalize on the hype loomed large at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Just inside the complex’s main entrance, conference-goers with headsets swiveled around, firing mock shotguns. Inside their goggles, players fended off zombies in an upcoming game based on “The Walking Dead” comic-book series.
Microsoft’s HoloLens, a late-announced entrant in the virtual-reality race, was there, too.
Guests to the Xbox booth, including an unscheduled visit from a curious Kanye West, used the headset to interact with a “Minecraft” game projected onto a table, watch a “Halo” projection or zap creatures flying out of a room’s walls.
“People are intrigued by it, and they want it,” Brian Blau, an analyst with researcher Gartner, said of virtual-reality devices. The technology is generally good enough to be a commercial hit, Blau said.
“But the question in my mind is how good are the content experiences going to be?” he said. “Are they good enough to sustain interest over time?”
In other words, will the games and other content built for virtual reality be good enough to justify a probably expensive headset?
A lack of specifically tailored content helped doom 3-D television, a technology many here cite a cautionary tale for those banking on a big hit for virtual reality. Television in 3-D was similarly pitched as massive step forward in entertainment, only to fizzle commercially.
Plenty of developers are working to prevent a repeat performance.
Paul Bettner, a former Microsoft game developer who worked on the “Age of Empires” franchise before helping create the mobile hit “Words With Friends,” said developers tend to run into problems when they use old techniques on new platforms.
Paramount in virtual reality, Bettner and other developers said, is comfort. Sharp movements or sudden images can make the wearer nauseated. And the human brain, it turns out, is pretty good at recognizing when it’s being tracked: Delays or seams in images rip users out of the experience.
Bettner and colleagues at Playful, his McKinney, Texas, game studio, spent three months creating rapid-fire prototypes of virtual-reality experiences — tests of simple concepts like flying, falling, running — to see what worked.
One result is “Lucky’s Tale,” a lighthearted platform adventure game Playful built for Oculus that features a fox bounding around puzzles. The demo shown at E3 was familiar to anyone who’s helped an animated character jump through levels on a game console.
“This technology lets us deliver,” Bettner said. “People tell us that this is like the first time they played ‘Mario 64,’ ” he said, referring to the Nintendo hit that introduced many gamers to 3-D environments. “I love that.”
In a demo of a game German studio Crytek built for Oculus, players scaled a cliff face on a dinosaur-filled world. A glance down revealed what seemed like a thousand-foot drop into a river. Surround-sound headphones seamlessly conveyed the thump of the wings of dinosaurs jumping off the cliff.
“If you asked me a year ago, I would have said [virtual reality] is gimmicky,” said Patrick Esteves, a designer with Crytek. “But it’s close now. This is the way video games should be going.”
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Virtual reality getting nearer, clearer for video-gaming world
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