Project Scorpio Will Get VR When it Doesn’t Feel Like ‘Demos and Experiments
In a recent interview the Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer talked VR and the upcoming Project Scorpio. It seems like everyone wants on that VR hype train but Phil just isn’t sold on the tech just yet. He admitted to playing the tech in various forms from the Vive and Oculus Rift to PlayStation VR but still feels that it needs a ton more work saying, “I don’t know, just to be honest, I love the technology behind VR. I have a Vive, I have an Oculus. I’ve used the PlayStation device a lot in demos and stuff. I don’t think the creators in the game space have yet found – well, they haven’t obviously perfected the craft of building VR games. It’s so early, I think we’re a couple of years before we’ll really see that hit mainstream. I’ve seen great video uses of VR, like taking you to places you can never time travel, just the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or they simulate the surface of Mars, some really cool experiences users can see.”
Regardless of Phil’s thoughts on where VR is currently he doesn’t deny that there’s lots more to come in that space. He knows it will improve and Project Scorpio certainly is being designed with that focus in mind.
“I think VR will find its spot in gaming; I would make that bet,” he continued. “We designed Scorpio as a VR-capable console. Whether that happens this year, next year or the year after… like I said, I still think the creative community has to get its arms around what are these new tools, and this new feeling — this new immersion. What experiences do you put in people’s hands to have a long-term engagement? Most of these things I’m playing now feel like demos and experiments, which I actually think it’s absolutely the right thing to have happened. That’s not a criticism at all, but should be happening. But I think it will take time.”
Noting the success of the Kinect specifically with the Dance Central franchise, Spencer noted how most games that used body movements in place of button presses made for bad games. The success of Dance Central was because it lacked any mapping to a controller. It used the Kinect to its highest degree translating the motion of the player into dance moves on the screen. He thinks that in order for VR to truly succeed that is the direction it’s going to have to go. Whether or not we see VR on Project Scorpio anytime soon depends most likely on how quickly the tech can improve.
“Kinect turned into the Dance Central box. It was a great franchise. It didn’t map to a controller in any way. In fact, in some of our early Kinect games — and I’m not trying to draw any analogy between the two things [Kinect and VR] other than just from a creative process – we’d actually call some Kinect games ‘mimic games’ because of what they would do. If I put my hand out here, that’s the A button, this is the X button. Really, they were just turning your body into a kind of pass-through to the controls. Those didn’t work. Those weren’t good Kinect games. Things like Dance Central where it just said, ‘see something, do something and the game reacts’, those were what turned into the right Kinect games. They didn’t have a map to what happened in the kind of traditional controller-based games and I think VR will be the same.”