Initiate

Overview

At this level we want to start with a gentle introduction to VR. Some may see the headset, the cables, the accessories, the types of gameplay, the requirements for space and moving, and they get overwhelmed. The reality is that VR has a range of complexity, with the lowest tier being great and just requires you to buy a simple mobile headset. At this level, we will learn the minimum amount of information required to be well-enough versed in VR to start having a really good experience. This includes basic concepts and also good starter VR headsets that'll get you up and running very quickly. Before we do that, let's watch a video to get us in the mood...

Does it make us bad people for laughing at this video? Maybe. But don't be dismayed, the reason to show this right away is to drive home two important points:

1) VR feels REAL. It is far more real than you could possibly expect and that's why people react in the way they do. You forget you are in a videogame and the level of immersion is FAR more than in a flatscreen game. 

2) There is a little groundwork that needs to be done to be safe and know what you are doing. VR headsets have plenty of safety features to ensure that you create a space that will bound your play area and ensure you are not going to hit anything. Furthermore, with Augmented Reality (AR), where you can overlay virtual elements onto the real world, concerns about fast paced games with lots of swinging go away as you can always see the space you are in.

With that out of the way, let's jump into the topics we'll cover in this section:

Part I: Setting up your space

Types of play spaces

Many VR games have different options to set up your play space. These are typically seated, standing or room scale. For the best experience, room scale is preferred, but standing scale works most of the time. Seated scale is supported by many titles but can be quite limiting in some, but in some like racing or flying, it is the best way to play. The key is to find an area that is free of expansive things that you could hit and feel comfortable moving freely. If you have a 2m x 2m area, that is plenty, but you could still get away with a quarter of that space (1m x 1m) for most games. 

Laying things out

When you wear a headset, you are looking at a screen that is not transparent. Unless there is passthrough (Part III), you have little visual awareness of what is around you or in which direction you are looking in. To avoid any unfortunately mishaps, and especially when using the room scale option, a boundary (sometimes called a guardian or concierge) is defined that will pop up during gameplay and prevent you from hurting yourself (and others, especially cats). A floor level will also need to be set so that the headset knows where the floor is, which is used for positioning virtual items once you're in the game. 

Once you have set up your space and ensured the safety of your prized possessions and feline companions, it is important to understand how navigation is achieved when you are in the virtual environment, for example, to open browsers or to launch games, change settings, etc.

Part II: Getting in control

Navigation

Your headset will be accompanied by a set of motion controls. These can track your hand movements 1:1 in the virtual space and will have various buttons and analog sticks on them. Some controllers offer pressure sensitivity and other advanced features, but games generally have some base universal control experience, and controllers with more advanced features may or may not have them utilized, depending on the game. 

WIP

Part III: Moving around

Locomotion

In conventional games movement is accomplished by pushing on the analog stick on a control or holding the "W" key on your keyboard. In VR, there are a few more interesting options due to the inherent complexity of embodying your character in a first person game. Because game words are large, we cannot possibly define a space as big as the game, so there has to be a way to give the player to move themselves without "actually" moving themselves in the real world. Why is this tricky in VR? Well it turns out if your brain thinks you are moving forward but your body stays stationary, you will quickly get motion sickness. So for a long time people thought that "smooth" locomotion would not be widely accepted in VR, and thus a few compromises were made. Nowdays, smooth locomotion is almost always recommended and works just fine for most people once they get their "VR legs" (more on this later). For now we can showcase several commonly encountered locomotion methods:

One will find that many games offer several types of locomotion options, but in general it is best to attain the superpower of "VR legs" so that you do not have to worry about getting overwhelmed. Note that with a roomscale VR space, it is possible to both move around in the real world and using the thumbstick within the game, both of which will move your character in the VR space, which can take some getting used to. Which brings us to the next section.

Part IV: Getting the fabled "VR Legs"

Part IV: Augmented reality and passthrough

WIP

Part V: Connection schemes

WIP

Part VI: Connection schemes

WIP