Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus Rift, was recently in a panel discussion with Nvidia’s Tom Petersen, Cloud Imperium Games’ Chris Roberts and Sony Online Entertainment’s Matt Higby on PC gaming at PAX East is Boston, and there, he spoke at length about the challenges that are faced by Virtual Reality in the future, saying that they’re the same challenges that are ahead for PC gaming itself. However, his main concern for VR was that the fact that its base system- the PC- was so inconsistent and scattered was a problem.
“PC is a difficult platform,” Lucvkey said when asked about the challenges the PC platform presented. “It’s hard to get higher performance. Especially because the trend this last few years has been to get better and better looking games, not necessarily to cut latency down because it’s sexy to say ‘oh look at the global lighting’, nobody wants to say ‘oh… way less latency: it was smooth now it’s really smooth’.”
“I think a lot of the same things actually do apply for virtual reality,” he said. “I mean VR has its own unique set of challenges as the hardware advances but I think most of them are the same as the rest of the PC gaming industry faces.”
Luckey then went on to use the example of 60 FPS, saying that the benchmark was now such a big deal for visuals in PC gaming that any game that now runs at 60 FPS, no matter what its visual potency, is considered technically rich.
He does have a point, though I doubt things will be so simplistic for VR. It’s a new format altogether, and things might take a while for VR gaming to take off.
[Source]
