Game Development Trends: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

As someone who has spent 7 years of his life working for one of the major developer / publishers we often discussed where gaming was heading. At the time of my departure the Oculus Rift DK2 was out but there was no timetable on a retail release. Google Glass was available but fizzled out. The HoloLens was a rumor but nobody really knew much about the device.

Like with any industry it was important to know where we were, where we are and where we are heading (and at what pace). Virtual reality is definitely not the holodeck and will not be no matter how realistic something like The Void in Utah gets. Sure, it may trick our brains into believing that we are somewhere else but the holodeck is based on actually recreating matter from energy; the objects are more than just virtual objects.

On the game development side we quickly observed some of virtual reality's limitations. First, it would be awfully difficult to have a fully immersed experience in a house or an apartment simply because you can't see where you are going in real life by definition. Bumping into a coffee table, a TV, walls... it just doesn't work. You could go to a field and use your mobile phone but that is equally dangerous as you don't know if anyone else is around you or if you are venturing off the field.

This makes virtual reality ideal for games where you don't have to move that much, or only have to move a small distance from your original position. A dancing game, for example, would work just fine.

There are attempts at solving this, like the Virtuix Omni, which enables stationary movement but as people can attest to its not the same thing as being able to move freely around in reality as you traverse a virtual world, like Skyrim.

Virtual reality has its place. There are times when a fully virtual environment makes sense and can work; one area that hasn't been discussed that much is in the realm of therapy. For example, if someone needs time in an open space and peaceful environment there could be a virtual world where there are some benches by a lake, sea or ocean where they could relax.

The other side is augmented reality, and this is where things get exciting. Google glass got the creative juices flowing but Microsoft's HoloLens brings the practicality.

With augmented reality you mix the real world with the virtual world. From a development perspective it presents a completely different problem. In virtual reality a level designer has to create the complete environment; in augmented reality a level designer doesn't create the complete environment (at least not in the same way) because they have to design the general way the environment should look. On the coding side you would take those parameters and based on what the augmented reality device is detecting create an environment that matches that pattern based on what the user's real environment is.

From a practical standpoint, however, it just makes more sense. Augmented reality doesn't suffer from the same drawbacks that virtual reality does in that you can play an augmented reality game from anywhere and not have to worry about where objects in real life are relative to you, or if you are venturing away from an open field and about to hit something, or if someone is about to mug you (you get the idea).

It has been an interesting journey so far, with some interesting debates on where the feasibility of one ends and the other begins but if I had to put my money somewhere I put it on augmented reality, not virtual reality.

That isn't a slam on virtual reality; it has its place and it needs content creators making virtual worlds. I just find the realm of augmented reality to have fewer limitations and thus more potential - but it really depends on the product and/or experience you are trying to provide.

Either way, the future looks exciting.