One year later, Sony’s new Morpheus prototype is still VR done right
Reloading a gun in home video games is crap.
Shooting is crap too, in a way. Moving your mouse or tilting your joystick and hitting a button doesn't really simulate the feeling of aiming and firing a gun that well, but at least there's some directionality and physicality to it (especially if you're squeezing a shoulder trigger on a handheld controller). Reloading, on the other hand, is total crap as an analog for the real-world action it simulates. All you do is tap a button, then watch a canned animation of your avatar making a complex series of motions to refill an ammo clip precisely with an unseen trove of bullets that are just sitting in an unseen backpack or something.
I didn't really realize how unsatisfying and artificial this process really was until I played with the latest prototype of Sony's Morpheus virtual reality headset at GDC today. There, in a demo called London Heist, I ducked and dodged behind a solid wooden desk as assailants fired on me from all directions, popping out to aim carefully placed shots by moving and tilting the PlayStation Move controller in my hands.
When the gun ran out of bullets, I realized I had no idea how to reload—the attendant at the demo had only told me that I could fire by pulling the trigger on the controller. There were additional ammo clips sitting on the virtual desk in front of me, but I couldn't just magically pick them up by running over them and/or tapping a button, as I would in most games.
What I could do, instead, was reach out my left hand, pick up a clip with the squeeze of a trigger, then slam that clip into the bottom of my empty gun with a satisfying click. I was doing this in the game, but I was also doing it in the real world, moving my hands and bumping my palms together naturally and intuitively in a motion that I imagine mimics a real quick reload situation quite closely.
This, more than anything else, is what has me excited about gaming with the Morpheus. The PlayStation Move is so well suited to virtual reality that it's a bit hard to believe it was a consumer product for the PlayStation 3 years before Oculus put the concept of home VR back into the public consciousness (though Sony may have been thinking about Morpheus even back then). The combination of camera tracking and gyroscopic angular tracking map the position of your hands to real space quickly and accurately, making it easy to just interact with the virtual world in the same kinds of ways you would with the real world
