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In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#22None.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#23From a couple decades of gaming experience, you don't need much more than eyeballs, fingers and a little bit of forearm. I am convinced people who talk about immersion in VR have never been addicted to any game. It doesn't take that much to lose yourself inside of one. After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.
> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.
This couldn't be farther from the truth.
Take a game as simple as Zombie Training Simulator. Holding your hands up and firing virtual guns is a completely different experience than pointing a mouse and clicking. Physically bending over to pick up a grenade, then throwing it, is far more immersive than pressing the number 5 and holding a mouse button down to prime it, then releasing it to throw.
Then there's Ultrawings. Having head tracking, being able to look around by just pivoting your head, makes the flying experience feel so much better, even if the graphics are dated by 10 years in terms of texture and model detail.
When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real.
And I have plenty of gaming experience. I've been gaming since I got an NES for Christmas when I was 5 in 1987.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#24From a couple decades of gaming experience, you don't need much more than eyeballs, fingers and a little bit of forearm. I am convinced people who talk about immersion in VR have never been addicted to any game. It doesn't take that much to lose yourself inside of one. After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.
> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Take a game as simple as Zombie Training Simulator. Holding your hands up and firing virtual guns is a completely different experience than pointing a mouse and clicking. Physically bending over to pick up a grenade, then throwing it, is far more immersive than pressing th…
> When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real.
Not disputing anything you're saying but I actually have this same experience playing games where you can fall and the player accelerates (particularly if the camera is first person or right behind the player). Just looking at the screen when I jump off a cliff in something like WoW makes my stomach feel like 20lbs of iron while I'm falling. I've kinda learned to enjoy it at this point.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#25I think its more important for the body parts that are there to move correctly than to have them visible and not match. I remember trying a vive game that had arms but sometimes they would contort into impossible poses and it was extremely jarring. Having spent many hours in both vive and rift, while I prefer vive in general, the visible hands on the touch controllers on rift is just fantastic.
I'm a little confused by your post. > I remember trying a vive game that had arms but sometimes they would contort into impossible poses and it was extremely jarring [.....] the visible hands on the touch controllers on rift is just fantastic. Neither of the things mentioned here are specific to Vive or Rift. A Rift game can give you arms that contort into impossible poses, just like a Vive game can give you visible…
You're correct about the arms, but I believe the Rift has additional sensors on its touch controllers [1], allowing it to record your thumb position and update the hand model accordingly.
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Oculus-R...
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feet help. Feet & legs help a lot. FEAR is a game that really underscored this to me - and every game I see it in afterwards just adds evidence for it. Required? No. But adds to immersion a LOT.
Reminds me of the Jurassic Park PC game where you could look down and check out your character's gender. Given that you had to enter pin codes by setting the hand to pointing mode and move around with the mouse, i wonder how it would translate to a VR experience today.
Trespasser
yeah there was a bit with a keypad for getting into the Ingen employee village, I spent ages trying to use the pointy finger and a mouse to press the keys on the keypad... I couldn't do it, but there was a break a bit further along the fence/wall. They wrote the code on the wall (upside down) next to the keypad, but I guess they realised it was too cumbersome so they made a break in the wall further along.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#27From a couple decades of gaming experience, you don't need much more than eyeballs, fingers and a little bit of forearm. I am convinced people who talk about immersion in VR have never been addicted to any game. It doesn't take that much to lose yourself inside of one. After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.
> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Take a game as simple as Zombie Training Simulator. Holding your hands up and firing virtual guns is a completely different experience than pointing a mouse and clicking. Physically bending over to pick up a grenade, then throwing it, is far more immersive than pressing th…
In my experience every little bit of verisimilitude makes a huge difference. Little things like Oculus' hands which line up perfectly with your proprioception and have the fingers move depending on your finger position make a huge difference. Just a few of these little things and you get new people in a horror game completely forget that they even have the option of taking the headset off.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#28From a couple decades of gaming experience, you don't need much more than eyeballs, fingers and a little bit of forearm. I am convinced people who talk about immersion in VR have never been addicted to any game. It doesn't take that much to lose yourself inside of one. After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.
I think there will be a lot of difficulty with wording and meaning here, because we don't have a consistent terminology for the different kinds and levels of immersion or focus.
For example, the distinction between being deeply involved and distracted in a game (which does not require special tools) versus the extent to which the game will trigger automatic bodily reactions.
In other words, someone deeply "immersed" in a chess-match isn't quite the same as someone "immersed" in a VRv game so that they fall over at a jump-scare.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#29In deep trance states, the body progressively fades away and you perceive what would ordinarily feel like body sensations as other things, as the mind loses its frame of reference to cause and effect. All experience thus gets created by mind. I imagine with practice anything is possible regarding VR. The mind can make anything believable if you just relax and let it happen.
> I imagine with practice anything is possible regarding VR. The mind can make anything believable if you just relax and let it happen. That's generally good advice for journeying of any kind, whether we're talking about VR, psychedelics, drumming, meditation, lucid dreaming, or reading a really good book.
It's also exceptionally good advice for nights with your partner.
Re: In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Take a game as simple as Zombie Training Simulator. Holding your hands up and firing virtual guns is a completely different experience than pointing a mouse and clicking. Physically bending over to pick up a grenade, then throwing it, is far more immersive than pressing th…
> When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real. Not disputing anything you're saying but I actually have this same experience playing games where you can fall and the player accelerates (particularly…
I get the same thing, but it only kicks in once the fall is long enough that you know that your character won't survive.
What's interesting is that after far too many hours of WoW, that fall distance is so ingrained that I get that feeling at the same point in other games, even if they have a longer 'safe' fall distance.