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

Sony made a big deal about virtual reality at its PlayStation Experience event last weekend, but its onstage demo didn’t work so well. Richard Marks, the head of the PlayStation Magic Lab at Sony, wanted to show two players dueling with each other in the same virtual space. But Marks’ PlayStation Move sticks — which control his hands in virtual reality — didn’t work. And so the demo was disappointing.

With VR, there is such a thing as pushing too hard and getting too excited. But as Sony’s main VR advocate, Marks is undeterred.

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The virtual reality and augmented reality markets are expected to grow to $150 billion by 2020, with much of the initial revenues coming from games, according to tech adviser Digi-Capital. Sony wants to be the lead company in making that happen. And it has the advantage of having 30 million PlayStation 4 consoles in the market. The PlayStation VR headset, which ships in the first half of next year, will compete against rivals such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on the PC, as well as the Samsung Gear VR on mobile.

We talked with Marks about the demo and the progress that Sony is making in getting developers to make VR games at the PSX event. Here’s our edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: The PlayStation VR demo onstage didn’t quite work. I guess it’s a learning experience. What were you trying to do with the demo?

Richard Marks: Our goal as a group is to always push the limits. VR hasn’t been demonstrated live very much because that’s very hard to do. We thought this was a unique opportunity, because it’s a fan event. A lot of fans here won’t get to try VR. We try to circulate as many units as we can, but we only have so many. We thought we could give them a bit of a taste. It’s an exciting crowd. It’s not like we have a business objective at that point.

Unfortunately the Move controllers just weren’t in a connected state. They wouldn’t light up. It’s not as if the tracking didn’t work. They weren’t even on, really.

GamesBeat: Is this basically a multiplayer demo? That hasn’t been done very much.

Marks: The demo has two players networked together. You can see the other character. Most people so far have just been rendering hands and head. We wanted to try pushing the limits of what you can render for a character. We have this full body system. It’s still a tech demo. We’re still looking at it. A real animator could use some of the ideas and make it look a lot prettier.

GamesBeat: It made people wonder if there was something else controlling or detecting the body, besides the Move.

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Marks: We didn’t have enough time to go into that on stage. We’ll probably talk about it later at a tech conference. All we had was the head and the hands. But as long as you know a person is standing in place, which you’re supposed to do in our system, you can figure out a lot about what the body is doing. Even the twists and things. If it isn’t exactly what your body is doing, it can still look very rich for the other person. It gives them a good representation of your motion, even if it doesn’t match perfectly.

GamesBeat: Can you get both people doing that on the same PS4?

Marks: We can only track on PlayStation VR system per console. You can’t have two people playing in VR together on one console.

GamesBeat: So you can’t do it in a living room, but you could do it online?

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Marks: Right. Rendering two people is no problem at all. It’s just the lights and everything, we have it set up for one person. Space is also a consideration. We don’t want to try to fit two people into one camera view.

GamesBeat: The processing power for VR and displaying it to a screen—if you tried to do something like a split screen, would that be possible?

Marks: Sure. There’s a lot of power available. Every graphical choice you make might impact that, of course. But already, the Playroom VR, they’re doing a completely different screen for the television than they’re doing for the person in VR. They’re rendering two different views on one PlayStation.

GamesBeat: The first titles we see, though, are going to be showing a single-player experience?

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Marks: Well, we already have Rigs. We have EVE: Valkyrie. They’re showing some great multiplayer experiences. There are more multiplayer experiences in development. We were pushing the limits a bit with seeing the other character fully animated. Like I say, most of the demos we’ve seen have focused on the head and the hands. The Toybox demo from Oculus is an example of that.

GamesBeat: What would you expect from the first and second and third generations of VR, the successive waves of games?

Marks: The thing that’s great about what’s happening now—there will be a set of launch games, but it’s clear that the pipeline continues on. It’s not as if we’ll have the launch and then nothing for a while. There will be a nice progression of games. The very first games, like with any console, they’re doing their best to get a game ready. Then every developer after that gets the benefit of seeing what they’ve done and improving upon it. You’ll see a solid progression of just the software changing, without the hardware having to change.

We always count on that from a console point of view. Developers get better at using the hardware they have. That’ll be even more true for VR, because it’s so new for developers.

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GamesBeat: With Ubisoft on board, it seems like bigger companies are experimenting.

Marks: Every company I know has some kind of internal development. It’s really more of a timing thing for those bigger studios, when it makes sense for them to get involved business-wise. But there’s no doubt that all of them are working on it. Really, it makes sense. There’s no product out hardware-wise. There’s no point in shipping software yet. They want to time it to match their product cycles.

GamesBeat: Did you observe anything from the launch of Gear VR and some of the titles that are out for that?

Marks: It’s great that it’s happening. It’s raising awareness of VR. Same with Google Cardboard and things like that. I hope, though, that people understand that there’s a pretty big quality difference between what you get out of those systems and what you’ll get from the higher-quality position-tracking VR systems. It’s good for overall awareness. Same with the Facebook acquisition. That raised awareness of VR quite a bit.

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But I want people to know that there are different levels. Our product is great because it’s high quality, but it’s very accessible. If you own a PlayStation 4 you can plug it in and it works. There’s no risk of driver problems.

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.

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.