By Sarah E. Needleman
Lucas Unger was excited to reach the next level of "The Gallery:
Six Elements," a virtual-reality videogame his parents are
developing. But the eight-year-old had a problem. He wasn't tall
enough in real life to pull a lever in the virtual world.
"I was too short," the second grader said. "I was reaching up
super high. It was hard."
Despite developing "The Gallery" for more than two years,
Cloudhead Games never considered that people wearing
virtual-reality gear would be of varying heights--and that it
mattered. "It had never been an issue in videogames before," said
Joel Green, a producer at the 10-person Canadian startup. "All of a
sudden short people are short and tall people are tall."
The setback illustrates the kinds of challenges software
makers--many of them small, independent developers--are facing as a
wave of virtual-reality headsets begin heading to store shelves as
early as next Christmas. Researchers at Gartner Inc. project that
more than 25 million will be sold by 2018.
Big hardware makers are crowding the field, underscored by
Facebook Inc.'s $2 billion purchase of Oculus VR last year. Samsung
Electronics Inc. and HTC Corp. are penciling in holiday releases
for their headsets, the Gear VR and Vive, respectively. Sony
Corp.'s Project Morpheus is expected to debut in the first half of
2016.
The market for virtual reality could be valued at more than $5
billion by 2018, according to a recent report by KZero Worldswide,
a U.K. consulting firm. Videogames are expected to be the most
common way to reach potential buyers initially.
"There is this fear that if a really bad product goes out, it
could set the industry back to the '90s," John Carmack, chief
technology officer at Oculus VR and a programmer of the pioneering
shooter game "Doom," told a crowd at the Game Developers Conference
earlier this month in San Francisco.
Mr. Carmack is still urging game makers to get in on the ground
floor, and many are lining up. Roughly 1.3 million developer kits,
ranging in price from $20 to $590, have been sold over the past 18
months, according to analysts at Superdata Research.
"The upside is enormous, but the risk is enormous," said Paul
Bettner, who co-created the hit mobile game "Words With Friends"
and sold it to Zynga Inc. in 2010. He is making an adventure game
for the Oculus Rift that Oculus is helping to fund. "We've done
millions of dollars of work on this game," he said. He also worries
that one bad experience from any game could turn off buyers.
When programmers at Side-Kick Games Ltd. got their hands on a
developer kit, they tried copying over their top-selling mobile
games, a well-worn practice in the game industry called "porting."
Some games looked "really weird," said Guy Bendov, chief executive
of the 20-person company, which has offices in Tel Aviv and Irvine,
Calif. Clouds and smoke were motionless, for example.
That didn't make for much of an immersive world. "To have a
great experience that surrounds you requires a lot more thinking
about how the environment should look," Mr. Bendov said. "We were
surprised by how much additional work we needed to do."
Even something as simple as showing how many "lives" a player
has left has to be rethought, said Sigurður Gunnarsson, a senior
programmer at CCP Games, which is making a virtual-reality shooter
set in the Icelandic company's 11-year-old "Eve" franchise.
In a traditional game, the number of lives left might be
displayed in a box in the upper-right corner of the screen. But in
virtual reality, overlays of information are obtrusive. Players in
the coming "Eve: Valkyrie" game might instead have to look at a
spaceship's dashboard to keep tabs on their status.
"You kind of need to throw out the book of game design," Mr.
Gunnarsson said.
As Lucas discovered with "The Gallery," there are plenty of
real-world challenges. Players using the Vive headset, which HTC is
developing jointly with the PC game distributor Valve Corp., risk
knocking into walls while moving around a laser-tracked space. To
guide people away from bumps and bruises, the companies are
experimenting with having white lines appear in the virtual world
to show players when they are getting too close to real-world
objects.
Mr. Bettner, whose McKinney, Texas, startup has 30 employees, is
nervous about how consumers will react to virtual reality. "The way
[it's] going to translate into an actual consumer platform over the
next year is anyone's guess," he said. "We're holding our breath to
see if this is going to be virtual reality's moment."
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
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