Sony wants PlayStation VR to push the limits of virtual reality gaming

Above: Sony’s Drive Club in VR at the PSX event.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: I saw Golem, from Marty O’Donnell’s company. That was pretty interesting.

Marks: Yeah, those guys are developers for us from the past. They worked on SOCOM (and other titles).

GamesBeat: With that and with Eagle Flight, when you control the movement with your body—is that turning out to be a stomach-friendly way to control a VR game?

Marks: There’s a few different reasons people are looking into that. One is it’s very straightforward. I like to call it the Segway controls. It feels like what you do on a Segway. But it’s easy. It’s intuitive. Also, if you’re going to do something with hand controls, it frees up those to do whatever you want them to do. You can still get the locomotion in a different way.

GamesBeat: They had the sword in one hand.

Marks: Exactly. Another reason is, for flying—it feels a bit more like flying. You’re changing the pose of your body, and that feels more like what a bird might do to bank and so on. That’s more for the feeling of it.

GamesBeat: Is there a common genre that people are turning to because of the way the controls work?

Marks: So far, no. It actually seems more like developers start out wanting to make a certain genre, and then they figure out how to make it in VR. It’s true for consumers, too. If they like a certain genre now, they’ll probably like it in VR too. It seems like the content is more important than the mechanics at the start.

I like puzzle games. I like tower defense games. I really want to play those in VR. Other kinds of games I’m not as excited about, and I’m not as excited about them in VR. It’s not as if one thing works better in VR yet.

GamesBeat: In the Far Cry Primal game, you could play as an owl with regular controls. I know that you have Drive Club, which you can play with a wheel or some other controller. What I wonder is, when you do that in VR, do you get something just a little more convincing? What, to you, is the difference between Drive Club with a controller in your hands versus Drive Club with these?

Marks: It’s the main thing VR gives you, that feeling of presence. Whether it feels like you’re watching something happen, or you’re in it and it’s happening around you. That’s a big difference. On your TV set it always feels somewhat distant. You’re removed from it. For driving, it gives you a much wider field of view. You can see around yourself more. It’s very natural to turn your head and look around. That’s the biggest difference.

Above: Until Dawn: Rush of Blood in VR.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: In a combat flight sim like Eve: Valkyrie, do you get a big advantage from the ability to see 180 degrees?

Marks: Yeah. And then there are other factors, like the 3D audio. You can hear things behind you in something like a racing game, hear engines coming up. It’s harder to do in a person’s home where you don’t know their speaker layout. People do 3D sound to some degree, but it’s a lot more streamlined in VR.

GamesBeat: Do you think you’re getting past the hard part of getting people excited about this?

Marks: It’s still the case that the biggest challenge we have—It’s not as big of a challenge with PlayStation owners. They want more immersive experiences. They’re excited about it. But it’s a challenge for people who’ve never tried anything like this to know what it would be.

We have 30 million people who are excited and ready. That’s a pretty big number. Those people are not so hard to convince. But it is still a challenge to reach a wider scope than that. You do have to try it to really understand it, and it’s hard to get everyone to understand it. That won’t happen until the product goes out. I’m glad there are products out there now, like Samsung’s. But I do hope that people will try the others when they come out next year.

GamesBeat: People have done polls showing that the awareness of VR is still pretty low, if you take a random sample.

Marks: People have this abstract notion of VR that they’ve carried around for 10 or 15 years. Now we’re in a different place than that. People don’t really know where things are right now. But again, that’s because it’s not in people’s homes yet. You don’t have friends who own one. If you have the rare chance to try something, it’s Oculus DK1, and that’s nothing like what’s coming out next year. So much has changed. A lot of the prototype hardware is very different from the product. Our product is very comfortable. It’s very much a consumer product.

It’s going to be great when you can just go into a store and try it out there. A lot of people will try it with a friend. I definitely feel like the first million people will show the next 10 million for us. We just want to make sure they have a good experience. The content is getting better so fast. Everyone’s making more and more amazing experiences. You get excited about these, and then by the time they come out, there’ll be more coming out that are even more exciting.

GamesBeat: You just need a wired version of the Move controllers for those crucial onstage demos.

Marks: A wired version sends such a wrong message, though. It would feel constraining. We did a diagnostic afterward. They were sitting there connected for a very long time during the show until our portion. There’s so much wireless in the room sending so many random signals, maybe one signal hit it just right to send it into something weird. The other system was fine, without any wireless interference at all. It was just a bad random coincidence.

GamesBeat: The same thing happened to Steve Jobs once. He told everyone in the audience, “We’re not going to continue with this press conference until everybody turns off their phones.”

Marks: I don’t think it could have quite commanded the room that way. But we’ll show it again, I’m sure. Like I say, we were trying to just give something interactive to the audience. They’re very enthusiastic about VR. Next time we’ll have plenty of games for people to try.