Paris: The year was 1968 and American computer scientist Ivan Sutherland had just finished creating what was widely considered the first virtual reality (VR) headset. There was just one catch: it was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling in order to be worn by anyone.
The VR headsets due for release in the first half of 2016? No suspension is required — you simply plug them into your PC or video game console, and put them on your head and adjust, allowing you to move around a room with freedom (albeit with a cord following you). Cameras, used in conjunction with lights on the headset and its controller, are used to track motion, in addition to gyroscopes and the like.
This is why so many people in the gaming industry now believe that VR — which enables you to immerse yourself into other worlds and use motion-controllers as an input — is finally set to take off in the form of a consumer-friendly device that will likely cost about the same amount as a console (to give you some idea of price, some VR headsets on the market today start at $US350 for their development kits).
But this isn't the first time there's been a push for a consumer device launch. The most promising, from SEGA, was meant to launch in the 90s. An arcade version came out, but the consumer device was cancelled, reportedly because the VR effect was too realistic.
But VR pioneer Mark Pesce, an American-Australian who worked on the Sega VR project, said in 2010 that the real reason it was canned was due to the results of testing by a third-party lab, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which gave Sega dire warnings about the hazards of prolonged use. Fearing lawsuits and consumer backlash over health risks, Pesce claimed to audioholics.com that Sega cancelled the product and buried the never-released report.
A public review of literature by Australia's Department of Defence published in 2004, however, is more forthcoming, saying there are "unintended psychophysiological side effects of participation in virtual environments".
But game developers say most of the issues experienced in the 90s — dubbed "cyber sickness" and caused partly by a lag between doing something in the real world and the virtual world not responding fast enough — have largely vanished with newer technology.
Besides being faster, the latest headsets are much cheaper to build now, and, more importantly, gaming studios are beginning to put time, effort, resources, and money into creating entirely new experiences with VR rather than just porting their existing games over to the platform. All of this combined is why gaming industry insiders are convinced that VR's time has finally come.
"I don't think we've been here before, not at this level of equipment, for this price," said Anton Mikhail, senior programmer at Media Molecule, creators of the game Little Big Planet and the upcoming title Dreams. "You could buy a kit that was similar to this for … like 1 million dollars [in the 90s] - I'm not exaggerating."
Mikhail added that headset manufacturers dramatically reducing lag in recent times has helped make VR a real thing.
"So it's a very big shift in what was possible even though [today] looks similar [to the 90s]," he said.
"There is a physiological thing that changes when you raise the level of quality."
At this week's Paris Games Week, Sony's PlayStation VR, HTC's Vive, and Facebook's Oculus Rift headsets were all available for people to get their hands on. PAX Australia, being held in Melbourne this weekend, will also allow attendees to experience the latest VR has to offer.
It's pretty hard to describe the exciting feelings and emotions that come with playing VR games. You'll flinch if you think you're in danger, and sometimes close your eyes or want to pull the headset off.
The most promising demo Fairfax Media was able to experience in Paris was RIGS Mechanised Combat League, a multi-player first-person shooter set in 2065 where the aim is for you and your teammates to earn points by plunging your characters into a large hoop-like circle in the middle of an arena after running around and collecting yellow orbs that put you into "overdrive" mode.
At times RIGS elicited a gut-churning feeling and resulted in this reporter involuntarily closing his eyes and gritting his teeth to stop some of the nauseousness it caused when jumping off a platform. But after a while of playing the game, the gut-churning feeling disappeared.
As Simon Harris, executive producer at Supermassive Games, said at Paris Games Week of a game he created: "When we showed it to people for the first time it ended with you basically having your head bitten off by a predator. And watching people literally falling off their chair with the headset on during the demo and watching them scream ... that was phenomenal.
"We'd created something that just wouldn't have had that sort of impact in any other format."
Harris added: "I've never seen people play a game I've been involved in and walk away with such emotional, exciting experiences, even on the really really big and successful games. And now I've seen people take [headsets] off shaking with fear or laughing or giggling or just going, 'I don't ever want to do that again'. And that's really really powerful from a creative point of view."
Said Media Molecule's Anton Mikhail: "We've had to catch headsets."
As for what developers are planning to do with the technology?
"We're essentially looking for new ways to scare people," said Supermassive Games' Harris.
Piers Jackson, game director and studio manager at Guerrilla Games Cambridge, hopes the the technology can be used to create entirely new experiences people have "never experienced before".
"We've found a level of immersion can create a huge amount of excitement," he said. "You take the kids off at the end and the expressions on their faces are just magical. You know you've touched something right there and then."
But users may not even need much to get something out of VR.
"We have found pretty quickly that the VR experience is so strong that we don't really need to show much gameplay to please people," said Sony Computer Entertainment's president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida.
Dave Ranyard, Sony Computer Entertainment's London studio director, said it felt "very pioneering" to be involved with creating VR games. "It's been like landing on a new planet and going out and discovering new things," he said.
"It's great, I love making games; but there's a lot of stuff you're kind of tied down to as that's the way games work and that's the way things happen. Whereas with VR we're getting the chance to create new ways of doing things"
Said Jackson: "It does feel like there's been a major rest button applied within design in the games industry with VR. The experience in them and the experience people see is different and we're all back at school, we're starting again. The templates that we would normally rely on and the experiences we have, some of them hold true, a lot of them don't. And you find these things out by applying them."
Another potential for VR? Curing phobias.
As Todd Sampson showed in his TV series Redesign Your Brain, putting snakes or spiders in a VR environment can be used to help diminish your fears of them. Then there's of course simulated VR sex, as documented by VICE.
Virtual reality is here to stay and it's going to change gaming forever. It's going to be big, it's going to make you feel things you've never felt before, and it's going to bring an entirely new audience to gaming.
The writer travelled to Paris Games Week as a guest of Sony
