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More than ten years have passed since Oculus VR launched a Kickstarter in 2012 for their Virtual Reality (VR) headset, named the Rift. The market for VR is expected to grow over 20% between 2020-2027 and by 2025 the number of private owned devices will most likely reach 43 million^[1]. More and more games are being made for VR, while other pre-existing games are being ported to the new platform. The hardware for VR devices are getting better year by year, however it is quite far from being perfect. As Lazaraff highlights^[3], the perfect VR headset should have a resolution of 16k by 16k per eye with a dream of 1000 frames per second to achieve a compelling experience. Lazaraff also talks about latency, which can cause the user to vomit, explaining it with a fan-made theory. It says that while playing, your reptilian brain kicks in and thinks you are hallucinating, therefore making you vomit, thinking you have eaten something poisonous. Michael Abrash, a developer at Valve and former chief scientist at Oculus VR, brought a detailed report in his GDC talk^[4] about the limitations of current VR technologies and the set of new open-ended problems that are yet to be fixed. He splits the problems into “really hard problems” and “really really hard problems”. The 'really hard' problems include tracking, latency, and producing perceptions indistinguishable from reality. The VR displays move differently, since they move relative to both real reality (RR) and eyes, while also moving with your head, while images have to appear and remain in correct position at all time. This leads us to tracking, which refers to head position and orientation in real space. Generally, a gyroscope and accelerometer are used to calculate the inertial measurement unit (IMU), which is essential for mobile VR headsets to track head position and orientation. Because of that the head translation information is lost, meaning you cannot peek around the corners, you cannot duck down or look up over things. Also, there are drifting issues where the orientation in-game cannot stay stable with respect to real reality, ruling out AR board games. Although the talk was done on 2013, the base techniques described here are still relevant and are used in modern VR headsets, such as Playstation VR which again uses accelerometer and gyroscope for tracking. Another really hard problem is latency, which is the delay between head motion and the virtual world update reaching the eyes. Latency issues can result in motion sickness^[5], where your visual senses are in conflict with other spatial senses. This is a serious hardware issue, since latency should be somewhere between 1 & 20 ms for total tracking, rendering, transmitting to the display, getting photons coming out of display. Furthermore, the head can easily move 100 degrees per second. Temporal sampling done by displays can be an issue because colors are emitted separately, resulting in color fringing. Regardless, there is one specific problem which is my area of interest, that Michael Abrash addressed as a 'really, really hard problem': 'Figuring out what's uniquely fun about VR.' PC games innovated play and entertainment, earning their place in the league of contemporary art. It allowed to create experiences impossible before. With VR, game designers can take that experience even further and redefine the notion of games and entertainment. To maximise its potential it is crucial to take into account its limitations, some of which were mentioned before and its strengths available only with headset. John Carmack, who, besides his background at id Software, held the CTO position at Oculus VR, mentioned in his podcast interview with Lex Fridman^[6] that the game 'Beat Saber' is an example of a game that played on the strengths of VR and hid its weaknesses. He stresses the importance of controls, mentioning initial ideas where the user would have a gamepad, and it would already be cool to just move one's head around and look into the virtual environment. In Beat Saber, the player has a solid grip on the controllers the entire time and slices through objects without bumping into them. Whereas when you knock on a table in a game but your hand goes right through it, it breaks the immersion since the brain tells you that you should have felt some pressure on your hand. He also talks about audio and music being powerful aspects of VR. It is a powerful tool in game designers' arsenal to block the outside world off and construct a new one around you. Mobile VR headsets also have the issue of battery life; therefore, VR games need to run efficiently, even on relatively low-powered hardware, and should have a valuable loop in a small amount of time, whereas many games nowadays are packed with hours in a session. VR headsets can inflict discomfort after long sessions. In Beat Saber, the player rarely moves and mostly stands still. It has entertaining music, and the game loop is small. On the other hand, solving the mystery of the unique fun of VR touches on the issue of when certain experiences become worse when brought to the realm of virtual realities. There is a certain tendency of different companies to bring their brands into the virtual environment^[2]. Attempt has been done to make a tool for teaching students signal processing by trying to build intuition for digital filter design^[7], however conclusion shows “that many of the functionalities in this project could have been done without using virtual reality. In fact it could probably have been made even better if instead of using virtual reality the user is only sitting in front of a computer”. Linus Augustsson^[5], in his 'Design with Virtual Reality in Mind', argues that virtual reality can greatly enhance the gaming experience. However, a virtual reality solution does not suit every game, and there are certain types of games that are better experienced on a monitor. The only way to make them 'fun' in VR is through modification of their mechanics. Therefore, when designing a game for a headset, the game designer should aim to create a sense of presence while taking away anything that threatens to break immersion. In conclusion, my degree project proposal aims to research through design and develop several rules of thumb and an arsenal for game designers when making a VR game, taking into account the techniques practiced in previous successful titles and addressing technical challenges faced with current hardware.

[1] Oleksandr Dluhopolskyi, Anastasiia Simakhova, Tetiana Zatonatska, Serhii Kozlovskyi, Ihor Oleksiv, and Jurijs Baltgailis. 2021. Potential of Virtual Reality in the Current Digital Society: Economic Perspectives. In 2021 11th International Conference on Advanced Computer Information Technologies (ACIT), 360–363. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ACIT52158.2021.9548495 [2] IKEA. 2017. IKEA invites people to make virtual pancakes releases a virtual reality app on Steam. Retrieved November 5, 2023 from https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/innovation/ikea-invites-people-to-make-virtual-pancakes--releases-a-virtual-reality-app-on-steam-170530/ [3] Rob and Jason are joined by Nicolas Lazaraff to discuss the current state of VR development with C++ https://cppcast.com/nicolas-lazaraff/ [4] Why Virtual Reality Is Hard (And Where It Might Be Going) https://gdcvault.com/play/1017797/Why-Virtual-Reality-Is-Hard https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/MAbrashGDC2013.pdf [5] Augustsson, L. (2015). Design with Virtual Reality in Mind (Dissertation). Retrieved from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-254500 [6] John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets | Lex Fridman Podcast #309 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4&t=12178s [7] Dalbom, A., Sprogis, M., Stolpe, E., & Söderkvist, N. (2018). A Tool for Learning Digital Filters in Virtual Reality (Dissertation). Retrieved from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-353852