Future of VR

With the interaction I have had with the Oculus Rift and the Samsung gear as well as the release of Steam’s Vive a few days ago I decided to switch it up a bit. For a long time people have looked at these devices and said “bah this is a gimmick, this won’t last”. Well, must like the motion controls of the Wii and Kinect and 3D movies in the cinema, VR is here to stay, whether it will do well financially is up for debate but it will defiantly stick around. To look at this we would have to look at the history of VR gaming.

When we look back on VR, the forefather was the Sega Master System, released across the world across the late 80s, which featured 3D glasses for gaming, this was the first step into VR in gaming and while it didn’t do as well commercially as Sega had hoped it was not a failure. 3D gaming then disappeared until the mid 90s when VR became big in the arcades, sure we had racing games where the car would move like you were driving it, or star wars pod racing games where you have actual pod racing controls from the movies, but I’m talking about real VR Games, you see the most successful games in the arcades were either AR and VR, Virtuality dominated the arcade market in Europe for years because of its innovation in VR and Operation Blockade was the first fully 3D, immersive VR game in the arcades, simulating you in a defensive outpost where needed to defend the supply line. At the same time these games were taking off, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy, while it was considered a failure at the time it helped pave the way for 3D Gaming to come out later in the form of the 3DS by Nintendo in 2011. Until now though, VR has seemed to disappear with the death of arcades, which is why I think that Oculus and other VR peripherals will be here to stay. When inspecting these devices you can see they have learned from mistakes from the past. VR has hit a point where, unlike previous iterations, the graphics and hardware can keep up with the device. In the past VR failed because it either made people sick using it or people did not feel immersed because of poor graphics but no more, we have reached a point where neither of those things are that much of a problem and therefore, while VR can fail commercially for quite some time, the VR experience is here to stay as long as games for it exist.

The Muse

Working with the muse has been an interesting experience, I have never before worked with a brainwave headset and dealing with it has been a frustrating experience. Let’s start from the beginning.

With my team we decided to work on a project we called Fashion Passion, Wear your Heart of Your Sleeve. This project was designed to take the brainwaves we can read off the Muse headset and interpret emotions from them. Of course things didn’t go as planned, the muse itself only reads in the Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta and Gamma brainwaves as well as mellow and concentration, this means that it cannot read in emotions by itself. It means that as a group we had to do a lot of experimentation with which brainwaves triggered which emotions.

                The most difficult thing to deal with though with the must was the complete lack of documentation that has been built with it. The developers of the muse created it as hardware and then put it out on the market making it free to develop for but there is no information on how to develop it. The muse seems to have been built in a way that one can only develop it if they already understand what brainwaves do what, how to read data off the muse and how to convert their custom format to be workable in code. This would not be a big problem if there was a community to develop for it but the muse development community is non-existent and therefore nobody knows how to work around issues that occur. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I have had working with a hardware device. 2/10 would not suggest developing for unless they release actual documentation on how to work with it properly.