Letters from VR: a field guide to our favorite virtual reality – The Verge

Everest VR is not like climbing a mountain, and it shouldn’t have to be

2016-08-02T15:55:39-04:00

I grew up at the foot of a dormant volcano in the Cascades, and like many of my classmates, I climbed it a few times as a teenager. Mountains - real, tree-bare, snow-capped mountains - feel like alien worlds. Air is thinner; water boils faster. Wind scours any signs of life from sheer rock faces, and algae turns snow a strange, bloody pink. The natural forces that you shrug off at sea level, like nightfall or bad weather, become life-threatening obstacles.

Booting up Everest VR, a new virtual reality experience for the HTC Vive, is not very much like climbing a mountain. No virtual reality can mimic the crunch of snow under your boots durin …

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I’m too motion-sick to finish this cool VR game, so I made some GIFs to explain why

2016-07-22T13:45:14-04:00

I'm currently midway through a game called The Assembly, which was released on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive a few days ago. The Assembly is one of the closest things VR has to a full-length, first-person exploration game, which is one of my favorite genres. The plot has shades of Portal and The Prisoner, alternately following two protagonists through a secret underground research facility that operates above the law. The writing and art direction aren't perfect, but it's still one of the stronger VR efforts I've seen recently. It also makes me sick - really, incredibly nauseated.

Broadly speaking, VR simulator sickness happens when your eyes th …

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A Dark Souls of VR would be wonderful — here’s how you’d make it

2016-07-01T13:41:07-04:00

"The Dark Souls of X" is such a common cliche that there's an entire Twitter account dedicated to mocking it. The phrase is usually an unnecessary substitute for saying a game is hard: Super Hexagon is the Dark Souls of mobile games, Super Meat Boy is the Dark Souls of platformers, Homefront: The Revolution is the Dark Souls of cooperative multiplayer. But in virtual reality, it's not just empty marketing, but positive inspiration. Chronos, one of my favorite Oculus Rift games, took a lot from the series, transplanting the fighting system into a new world and adding interesting puzzle components.

For all its good points, Chronos could have …

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Time Machine is the closest you can get to Jurassic Park in virtual reality

2016-05-24T09:10:24-04:00

I'm sitting in an underwater pod observing some beautiful, prehistoric giant turtles swim around. Suddenly, a pliosaurus - a lizard-like monster - arrives and starts eating the turtles, spluttering blood everywhere. That's one of the first things you experience when playing the VR game Time Machine. It's a pretty gruesome start, but also what makes this game worth it. It's like visiting Jurassic Park in virtual reality.

Unlike the movie, there's no walking around and petting brachiosauruses. But there's the thrill. You're underwater and you have a mission to accomplish. The year is 2033 and a weird virus that was once trapped beneath the ic …

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How virtual reality can change the way we see gender and horror movies

2016-05-05T11:24:31-04:00

Yes, virtual reality will now let you experience being tortured to death by a lovesick robot. Or at least, that's what I'm getting from Road to VR's Paul James, who recently tried out Abe VR on the Oculus Rift. Abe VR is a first-person adaptation of a 2013 horror short, about a robot whose programming drives him to kidnap beautiful women who don't reciprocate his affection. As a film, Abe is well-produced but thin - it's a 7-minute villain's monologue from a sociopathic C-3PO. But as a VR experience, it reveals a curious new twist in the way we've been thinking about cameras, fear, and gender for decades.

Maybe more than any other genre, ho …

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I saw something horrible and wrong in VR

2016-05-02T16:11:14-04:00

Warning: this post includes graphic content.

I went over to a friend's house the other day to have some quality time in his Oculus Rift. He has a nice apartment, and instead of hiding the Oculus away in a bedroom, he's devised a setup where you can sit at the kitchen table in his brightly lit living room. It's nice; it makes VR feel a little more "social" and a little less "man cave."

We started with Dreamscape, the official collection of short, passive VR experiences Oculus provides, which was great. I hadn't seen all these tech demos before. They were fun, although not quite mind-melting. It was gentle way to start an afternoon of VR.

" …

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Chronos is a VR game about stress, skill, and the weirdness of fiction

2016-04-11T14:19:45-04:00

What does virtual reality do for a game that doesn't need to be played in VR at all? That's the question I've been asking about Chronos, one of the best games on the Oculus Rift. Chronos is a gorgeous third-person action game that fits well in the Rift, using VR to turn players' worlds into a series of tiny imaginary landscapes. If a good game can eventually make you forget the outside world, Chronos is even more engrossing, focusing you entirely on a puzzle or boss fight. Still, mechanically, there's not much reason for Chronos to be exclusive to the Rift. It doesn't require you to convincingly inhabit another body, and it uses a standard X …

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Strategy games in virtual reality: I am a mighty but overworked god

2016-04-01T10:02:08-04:00

Airmech Command

I stumbled in late to the staff meeting, my face flushed and sweaty, deep creases worn into both cheeks from the Oculus Rift headset. I had planned to spend 30 or 40 minutes testing out AirMech: Command, one of the launch titles for Facebook's virtual reality headset. Three hours later I awoke from a VR coma to find the workday had mostly slipped away. A co-worker thoughtfully cataloged my progress, a dad alone in the dark. Never has the phrase "real-time strategy" seemed more ironic.

When people talk about the magic of virtual reality they inevitably talk about being transported to a new universe, that feeling of being present in an altern …

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Adrift is as close as most of us will get to a spacewalk — nausea and all

2016-03-30T10:30:03-04:00

I'm floating in the ruins of a destroyed space station positioned somewhere in lower Earth orbit, with large chunks of debris passing me by. If my situation wasn't dire enough, my spacesuit is malfunctioning, and I'm quickly running out of the oxygen that's keeping me alive. I need to find air fast - and fortunately, I spot a box of oxygen canisters floating right in front of me. I use my suit's small propulsion system to move forward, so I can reach out and grab one, and I manage to refill my air supply just in time before I suffocate to death.

Now that the situation has been handled, I can finally focus on another big problem that's been …

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The Little Prince in VR is like a diorama come to life

2016-03-26T10:53:36-04:00

The Verge's New York offices now have an official virtual reality room. The library for its HTC Vive Pre holds a bunch of experiments and demos for full games we won't see for weeks or even months. But there's too much cool stuff to ignore. So for the next few weeks, we're putting our writers, editors, artists, and videographers through some of the best that VR has to offer. Here's what we think.Sometimes the best interaction is having literally nothing to press.

The Rose and I is a short piece by Penrose Studio that made its world premiere this past January at Sundance Film Festival. Loosely based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little P …

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