Boss Key Productions co-founder Cliff Bleszinski is busy these days with his next game LawBreakers but he did speak to GameSpot about the current state of virtual reality gaming. He noted that there are still obstacles to VR really taking off including high costs and the present hardware available.

“VR is very near and dear to me. I have a few ideas I’d love to play with, but again the friction point is getting VR installed. Sony’s got a great headset but still it’s kind of clunky, the price point, there’s a lot of shovelware on VR right now. A lot of crappy Unity games where it’s like, ‘Oh look I’m throwing a can.’ Yeah, big deal right? No actual real games, and part of that is this catch 22 of a lot of the proper platform-holders of VR finding funding. You can’t make a really deep, great game arguably in VR for like a million bucks. So you’ve gotta really pony it up.”

Bleszinski noted that a “real VR game” would be something like Robo Recall from Epic Games, which was announced at this year’s GDC. “Yeah, it’s a wave shooter but, damn it looks good. The controls are perfect and they really knocked it out of the park. That’s the kind of stuff that needs to happen, as opposed to more friggin’ roller coasters and things like that. There’s also jump scare games that YouTubers want to do. So there’s a lot more to it, but there’s like six things right now that are really preventing VR from really exploding in a good way.”

VR could eventually hit the mainstream but it’s going to take a while. “I think there’s enough people in Silicon Valley and beyond that have deep enough pockets to ride this out the long haul. I think [Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg] saw the potential in Oculus in realizing like the first time I did touch demo and [Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey] was standing across from me as a VR ghost, even though he’s in the other room. That’s when it gets magical. If I could play catch with my niece in California, that’s pretty magical … but we’ve gotta start pushing through and working through it all.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments.

Graphine today announced the newest updates to Granite SDK, which it claims is a breakthrough in graphical technology, since it will be bringing life like visual quality to video games.

Granite SDK is a middleware engine, that can  handle ultra-high quality 3D scans and hand painted objects or characters that are commonly used by VFX studios, all without skipping a beat and maintaining not only a resolution of 4K, but also 90 frames per second, leading to a highly authentic visual experience for virtual reality gaming. To showcase this technology, Graphine will show off a new RISE VR tech demo at GDC.

“The development of this project was led by Scott Metzger, a 15 year VFX industry veteran and Nurulize’s Chief Creative Officer. Scott is a pioneer in the use of 3D scanning for real-time visualization. His vision and attention to detail resulted in the RISE VR’s unparalleled photorealistic visual quality. The demo uses Granite SDK to handle the massive amount of HDR texture content to achieve this quality. RISE VR will be running in real-time at booth 101 on the GDC expo floor. A movie comparison between the previously offline rendered demo and the real-time rendered version using Granite can be found here,” Graphine said.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more information.

Nintendo was actually at the forefront of VR gaming with the original Virtual Boy released way back in 1995; Nintendo has since been experimenting with increasing immersion in games, with their efforts to push stereoscopic 3D gaming and motion and touch controls. However, after trying out the two current VR projects currently underway at E3, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken out, saying that he isn’t exactly sold on VR tech as it exists today yet.

“When you think about what virtual reality is, which is one person putting on some goggles and playing by themselves kind of over in a corner, or maybe they go into a separate room and they spend all their time alone playing in that virtual reality, that’s in direct contrast with what it is we’re trying to achieve with Wii U.”

He added, “So I have a little bit of uneasiness with whether or not that’s the best way for people to play. From Nintendo’s perspective, there’s interest in the technology, but we think it might be better suited to some sort of attraction style of entertainment, say something at a video game arcade or things like that, rather than something that one person plays alone.”

He added that Nintendo is still interested in VR tech, and that when it is ready, they would be there, but that he does not think the technology as it exists today is currently ripe for consumption.

His thoughts have been echoed by many in the industry- in an exclusive interview with GamingBolt, infamous analyst Michael Pachter spoke out against VR, calling it a fad that would fade out soon enough.

Do you think VR gaming is going to be a fad, like 3D gaming was? Or do you think Facebook are on to something with Oculus?

There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for virtual reality gaming, especially with Oculus VR and Sony making significant advances on both fronts, but publisher Ubisoft isn’t ready to engage in development until both platforms are commercially successful first.

Ubisoft VP of creative Lionel Raynaud stated the same during a round table session at GDC 2014. “VR would need to sell at least 1 million units to be viable for development.”

Thus far, the only companies to have really pledged some sort of development support for VR are Epic Games, Valve, CCP Games and Sony’s internal studios. Epic will be bringing out Couch Knight for Rift while CCP will have EVE Valkyrie for Rift on PC and Project Morpheus on PS4.

As it stands, both Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus are a ways off from commercial release. Rift will have its second dev kit out by July while Morpheus is still a work in-progress. So it’s early days yet for VR gaming.

(Source)