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03/18/2015 @ 7:22PM/ IN FULL/ Virtual Reality: Promising but Posing Challenges

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http://ih.advfn.com/p.php?pid=nmona&article=65939169

Virtual Reality: Promising but Posing Challenges
Date : 03/18/2015 @ 7:22PM
Source : Dow Jones News
Stock : Zynga Inc. - Class A (MM) (ZNGA)
Quote : 2.625 0.005 (0.19%) @ 8:10PM

Virtual Reality: Promising but Posing Challenges

http://ih.advfn.com/p.php?pid=nmona&article=65939169

By Sarah E. Needleman Lucas Unger was excited to reach the next level of "The Gallery: Six Elements," a virtual-reality videogame his parents are developing. But the eight-year-old had a problem.

He wasn't tall enough in real life to pull a lever in the virtual world.

"I was too short," the second grader said. "I was reaching up super high.
It was hard."

Despite developing "The Gallery" for more than two years, Cloudhead Games never considered that people wearing virtual-reality gear would be of varying heights--and that it mattered.

"It had never been an issue in videogames before," said Joel Green, a producer at the 10-person Canadian startup.

"All of a sudden short people are short and tall people are tall."

The setback illustrates the kinds of challenges software makers--many of them small, independent developers--are facing as a wave of virtual-reality headsets begin heading to store shelves as early as next Christmas.

Researchers at Gartner Inc. project that more than 25 million will be sold by 2018.

Big hardware makers are crowding the field, underscored by Facebook Inc.'s $2 billion purchase of Oculus VR last year. Samsung Electronics Inc. and HTC Corp. are penciling in holiday releases for their headsets, the Gear VR and Vive, respectively. Sony Corp.'s Project Morpheus is expected to debut in the first half of 2016.
The market for virtual reality could be valued at more than $5 billion by 2018, according to a recent report by KZero Worldswide, a U.K. consulting firm. Videogames are expected to be the most common way to reach potential buyers initially.


"There is this fear that if a really bad product goes out, it could set the industry back to the '90s," John Carmack, chief technology officer at Oculus VR and a programmer of the pioneering shooter game "Doom," told a crowd at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month in San Francisco.

Mr. Carmack is still urging game makers to get in on the ground floor, and many are lining up.

Roughly 1.3 million developer kits, ranging in price from $20 to $590, have been sold over the past 18 months, according to analysts at Superdata Research.

"The upside is enormous, but the risk is enormous," said Paul Bettner, who co-created the hit mobile game "Words With Friends" and sold it to Zynga Inc. in 2010.

He is making an adventure game for the Oculus Rift that Oculus is helping to fund.

"We've done millions of dollars of work on this game," he said. He also worries that one bad experience from any game could turn off buyers.

When programmers at Side-Kick Games Ltd. got their hands on a developer kit, they tried copying over their top-selling mobile games, a well-worn practice in the game industry called "porting." Some games looked "really weird,"

said Guy Bendov, chief executive of the 20-person company, which has offices in Tel Aviv and Irvine, Calif. Clouds and smoke were motionless, for example.

That didn't make for much of an immersive world.

"To have a great experience that surrounds you requires a lot more thinking about how the environment should look," Mr. Bendov said. "We were surprised by how much additional work we needed to do."

Even something as simple as showing how many "lives" a player has left has to be rethought, said Sigurður Gunnarsson, a senior programmer at CCP Games, which is making a virtual-reality shooter set in the Icelandic company's 11-year-old "Eve" franchise.

In a traditional game, the number of lives left might be displayed in a box in the upper-right corner of the screen. But in virtual reality, overlays of information are obtrusive.

Players in the coming "Eve: Valkyrie" game might instead have to look at a spaceship's dashboard to keep tabs on their status.
"You kind of need to throw out the book of game design," Mr. Gunnarsson said.

As Lucas discovered with "The Gallery," there are plenty of real-world challenges.

Players using the Vive headset, which HTC is developing jointly with the PC game distributor Valve Corp., risk knocking into walls while moving around a laser-tracked space.

To guide people away from bumps and bruises, the companies are experimenting with having white lines appear in the virtual world to show players when they are getting too close to real-world objects.

Mr. Bettner, whose McKinney, Texas, startup has 30 employees, is nervous about how consumers will react to virtual reality. "The way [it's] going to translate into an actual consumer platform over the next year is anyone's guess," he said. "We're holding our breath to see if this is going to be virtual reality's moment."

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [e-mail]
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