Game studios are working furiously to churn out virtual reality content, but VR platform and headset makers aren't sitting back to let them have all the fun. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Sony and Valve unveiled their own game demos and VR experiences.
While the PlayStation VR headset won't ship until October, Valve has a bit of a time crunch on its hands because the HTC Vive Pre, which runs its SteamVR platform, arrives next month. So the company walked me through a few of the free games it will offer in time for the first Vive owners to strap their headsets on.
The demos are part of a 12-game collection Valve is calling The Lab. It's a virtual room where you instruct a VR avatar to choose which game or experience you'd like to try by grabbing a glowing orb and smashing your face into it like a 2-year-old at a birthday party.
For the demo, a Valve developer pre-selected the experiences I would try. The first was a photogrammetry-based, 360-degree view of a peak in the North Cascades mountain range of Washington state, complete with hikers and futuristic mountain animals with which you can interact.
The feature that impressed me most here was the ingenious way you can move around within the VR world. Rather than physically walking around the real-world room in which you're standing (which is nausea-inducing in the virtual world), Valve has developed a telemetry system of sorts. On the peak, you hold the controller's trigger and a bunch of green targets appear on the side of the mountain. Point at the one you want to move to, release the trigger, and you're instantly transported.
Next up was a medieval-themed game in which I had to defend a castle by shooting bows at invading armies of what appeared to be gingerbread men. Holding a bow and arrow with VR controllers is challenging, though the haptic feedback is handy for making you aware of the tension in the bow.
I then moved on to a Fruit Ninja-style game, which was simple but the most enjoyable. The controller becomes a tiny spaceship, and you point its laser beams at enemy ships to destroy them. Careful, though, because if you hit one of the enemy's red orbs, it's game over.
After moving on to shooting projectiles from a catapult, the demo finished in a galaxy far, far away, where we had to defend R2-D2 from Empire forces with a lightsaber while Hans Solo repaired the Millennium Falcon.
All in all, the The Lab's offerings felt much more polished than Sony's VR demos, which is understandable since The Lab launches in a few weeks.
One of the criticisms of the HTC Vive is that it doesn't have as much content as the Oculus Rift, which has spent years in development, or PlayStation VR, which will stand on the strength of the PlayStation ecosystem). But it's clear that Valve is working hard to remedy this. It already announced a desktop theater mode, which will allow you to play 2D games with a VR headset. The fact that it is giving away several very polished games for free at launch is icing on the cake.