4 Ways Virtual Reality Will Change The Future of Gaming
Virtural Reality has become globalised. From education to healthcare, VR applications have been developing at an incredible pace.
Social interaction, gaming and new technologies are interconnected. This combination not only changes the way people behave, it also broadens our horizon and experience never before situations. This also helps game designers to develop new interesting concepts.
Being in its infancy, experimenting and combining it with existing opens a new door for opportunity in the entertainment industry.
Game writer and narrative designer Rob Morgan spoke to us on what the future will be like with Virtual Reality being in it.
WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY?
Virtual Reality (V.R.) refers to the technology where you remove distractions with opacity which takes over as many as possible of the users senses and put them into a different world. Although this might sound like a classic 90's plastic space helmet over the eyes, having the audio sensory take over is an important part of VR development. The next important technology that has evolved over the recent years is the touch sensory technology, this has also been implemented into the V.R Experience as a holistic idea.
“The bottom line is, that you try to eliminate as much as possible of the real world from your sensory experience and replace it with the virtual one” - Rob Morgan
1. Not possible in reality is possible in virtual reality
Virtual Reality creates a simulation. It brings you into a scene, and radically embodies you in that environment. However, it is still not at its peak of its capacity and can be further developed. It allows us to see things from different perspective that we would have never imagined and put us in a total different person's view and allow us to immerse ourselves in this other person's experience or even be that person we wouldn't have thought of.
Virtual Reality creates a world of imagination, which has the capability of breaking the traditional views on education and learning. For example, children learn best by doing. Instead of just reading about history, children can become historical characters themselves. And instead of studying about Archaeology, they can become an archaeologist.
But Virtual Reality is not only to become someone else. You could be an enhanced self, where your achievements and identity and how you look like is improved. For example, you could achieve something or instantly visual muscle growth or practice public speaking in the simulation.
In the medical field, using VR has helped patients and doctors visualise the effects of exercising on the body and showing positive impact in motivating people to exercise. If people are able to view an accelerated visual of how a recovery will work or even how the final product will look like to themselves, even if this will take place over a longer term in reality, people are willing to keep motivated and have positive results.
2. Emotions: Bringing the scenes closer to the people
VR brings users and clients to what is happening around them and even more. It provides more enhanced tools compared to playing a game in a flat screen.
Having a flat-screen game can at best make you experience what is going on in the environment, but with the implementation of VR, you can turn up a notch and make it feel like you are in the situation itself and you have the responsibility towards the events happening around you. That has been the drawback of flat-screen gaming as they have never been able to breakthrough it. However, VR has the potential to give you more tools to do that and it will be really exciting.
3. The Importance of the Protagonist
In Virtual Reality Games, more often then not, you are not playing as the protagonist. This leads to a more interesting approach as it is hard to play as someone you are not interested in. However, if there was a chance you could be given someone interesting, no matter how different they are to you, you would go back to that simulation again and again just to experience being a different person in that simulation.
The main reason why VR is exciting to most players is because you are present in the simulation differently. In the simulation, you could just be a floating camera, but even then you feel like you are in the scene and whatever happening around you, you are watching something happen on the other side of the room.
4. Fostering social behaviour with collaborative gaming situations
V.R. also has a huge potential to create social experiences in gaming – imagine one person is in the V.R. headset; only he or she can see the virtualised elements. Imagine being in a game where the person can see the virtual elements and no one else and his job is to notify the team at what he's looking at and the team infer from that and what the right thing to do would be. This can create information sharing social situations.
One example would be astronauts. For these people to become successful, they would have to undergo specialised training and be good at everything. In theory, they should be able to fix the spacecraft on their own and know what each part in the spacecraft is called. But if they are doing a spacewalk or doing a particular mission, the people who is providing instructions to those astronauts are just as important as the astronauts.
"Asynchronous Gameplay" is used in gaming where different users have different information and require them to combine it together to solve a problem that is presented to them. That's a great social experience.
Adding this to Virtual Reality, it will not just make use of the fact that the screen is closer to the users eyes, it is taking advantage that the user is forced into a type of perception while others around them can have completely different perceptions.
In this generation, we're able to review all the new kinds of games that are being created and managed where users do not have shared information, and part of the game exists at a meta-level where the gameplay is successful. Imagine being at a bomb disposal and only one person can see the bomb and has to describe what the bomb looks like to his teammates. The teammates then look through the manual and tells the player what to do. One other person is solving math puzzles to work out the code or someone searching the internet for information.
The main interest for Rob would be the interplay between intimate and public. Currently in the market, most of the VR games that were designed and meant to be solo entertainment experiences where you can put on a helmet and be immersed into your own world. However, the social element is irreplaceable in Virtual Reality, the fact that there might be other people in the room with you and the fact that they might be able to experience it together would be the ideal situation.
Tags: #VR #VirtualReality #Future #Gamers
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