Let's talk about Giant Bomb's first VR Quicklook

I thought they did a fantastic job. I'm pretty sure PSVR was made with the ability to easily capture video from it. I don't see a format more ideal than what they did, it was perfect 1:1 to Mr. Shoemaker's movements.

I don't think it's necessary for all VR games, but it would be cool if they could get something like what these guys did:

edit: I should add that this is not a criticism of the Golem QL which I thought was great :-)

I think that it was presented really well and I hope that the style continues. It's always going to be difficult/impossible to truly capture the "magic" of VR but in terms of the way in which GB deals with the coverage I think they've got it right. Also, I don't know if he was consciously thinking about it but I was pleased that Brad kept to smooth head movements rather than whipping his head around, it made it much more watchable than other coverage I have seen.

Even though that looks nice, I think it's a really bad way to present a VR game, specially on a QL, since it doesn't show the players POV nor best represents what the player is doing. The best way to go with it is the same way they went with Kinect games and the way they did with the first video. A screen of one of them with the googles, other screen with what he's seeing. That's enough and easy to understand for the viewer.

I think it was pretty well set up, especially for the first Quick Look on it.

I mean, I voted more Googly Eyes because yes, obviously, but I share my sentiments with liking it.

Definitely want more googly eyes, but other than that, I liked it.

I get pretty bad motion sickness anytime I'm a passenger in any moving vehicle. Not having tried VR, I've been wondering whether motion sickness would be a problem for me.

I think this video pretty definitively answered that: if I start to feel motion sick just from watching the "social screen" scaled down to my phone's screen, then VR is definitely not for me. :(

Edited to add: for whatever reason, watching FPSs and driving games doesn't make me feel nauseous, but this does. I think it's experiencing the unfettered head movement of Brad Shoemaker.

As long as there is a face cam at all times I'm happy.

@lylebot: I wouldn't immediately discount it, you may not get motion sick! Remember, the VR is 1:1 movement based on YOUR head, so if it's your head moving and not someone else it may feel natural to you and not give you motion sickness.

This was about as good as it can be, but I think there is just an inherent flaw with VR QLs that no one will really overcome: VR is much more difficult to relate to if you are not experiencing it, because so much of it is experiential by nature. Watching someone play with it just isn't as satisfying as watching someone play a 'regular' game.

In the Golem QL, the bugs freaked out Brad. I couldn't even pretend to understand why. Conceptually, I get that they probably looked very large, but I didn't see that - I'm used to seeing proportionately big things on-screen, in 2D. For some games, it's fun to see people's movements as they physically move in space in order to play a game (like in the integrated green screen video above), but for more traditional VR games, that element is missing, and the disparity between what a VR player experiences and what a viewer is able to relate to is more apparent. To compound this, you can even see how ineffective watching someone use VR is on the QL guest/participant's (Jeff's) face. I now understand why the crew thinks it sucks to talk about VR on their podcasts: it is, in fact, very difficult to convey what VR is like to anyone who isn't actually experiencing it.

Outside of the fundamental issues with showing VR, I think the only recommendation I have is to not show the QL guest/participant on-camera. Otherwise, I'm glad these are gonna happen, and I think they SHOULD happen, I just think VR is showing itself to be the isolating experience that it is.

I thought it was a surprisingly good way to show it.

I think it helped though that I've already used a VR device previously, so I can more easily envision what the experience is like.

This seemed fine. But are we calling Brad mr. Shoemaker nowadays? I know he has some grey hairs but :D

I think it would be quite different if you were the one in control. As you said, it was probably Brad's head movement that caused your motion sickness. Just like you don't get motion sick when you're the one actually driving a car, I think there's a good chance you wouldn't experience motion sickness in VR if you were the one in control. At the very least you should give it a shot before just assuming you'd get sick.

Actually, in the video they would cut between the Players POV and a third person fly-cam to show from multiple angles.

The real question is if they can do a quick look that I can watch in a VR headset that lets me see the game like the player. I'm guessing no, it wouldn't work. It would require a whole new video player and even then still be weird. But we'll see, there's too much money in game videos for Twitch and YouTube to ignore the possibility.

Not well. You'd be looking at recording 360 videos (which the game doesn't natively output so you'd need a second sync'd copy of the game on a different machine generating that video file) so that you didn't puke (in VR, your head decides what you're looking at - when Brad moves his head, you can't have the thing you're watching be rotated like that unless you're also moving your head like that) and even then that stuff isn't stereoscopic 3D (both eyes see the same thing so it looks like watching a flat video or going to a cinema where the screen is all around you - not a 3D space you're actually in). This will be a thing, but I'm not sure it'll ever be a good thing that people really get into.

This Social Screen stuff (the PC VR has equivalent stuff, although some of them aren't de-warping a warped eye but rather can output the scene before the thing was warped in the first place - PS4 can do this but only by using more processing resources [and pipes that frame via USB and a compressed mp4 stream using the encoder that otherwise does game recording/Twitch output] so most games won't) is going to be how you do Twitch streaming of VR games. So just like this QL but without necessarily seeing Brad. Except we already know most Twitch streamers do have a camera and scene composition so just expect them to do exactly that, only rather than their face you'll be seeing their VR headset in the camera view box.

Going back to how you actually do this well for people in VR (rather than viewers on Twitch) - think Dota 2. You watch the International often in the Dota 2 client. Every action in the game done by the players and a commentary audio stream are fed to your game that replays it. With this type of in-client streaming of games, you can totally offer to let someone else "view" you playing a game. Of course, you still have the above constraints (don't move the view of the person in VR) so you're not sync'd to watching 1 person from their view but you can definitely show a game where VR people are spectating. I fully expect Vive users to be able to jump into the Dota 2 map and look down over that space as professionals pay a game below them. Maybe they'll be a view where, rather than looking at it on a screen, you're looking at it floating out of a virtual holographic table the size of a dining table. And everything will be in stereoscopic 3D and actually looks like the 3D figurines they sell at the event, only virtual and animated. That's going to be pretty cool for spectating games in VR but you need to have that streaming client infrastructure to support it so most games won't be offering it and the best way to watch will be taking the VR headset off and just watching it on a stream like you do today.

I think the mixed-reality stuff the Fantastic Contraption guys have been doing is the closest I've seen so far to successful footage of the VR experience. It probably wouldn't work for all types of games, like cockpit ones for example.

The format was fine; my issue was with the fact that Brad said almost nothing during the demo. The one person who can actually experience what we're supposed to be imagining and yet the devs are doing all the talking. It left me very unconvinced.

Node has put up a ton of really well shot VR content, I feel like this is pretty much the gold standard for presenting VR. The use of first person cameras and the comparison shots between reality and in-game footage in particular is very effective in showing how the player is interacting with the game. I'd like to see GiantBomb use head/chest-mounted cameras and I don't think it would be too difficult or expensive to produce content like this. Obviously the amount of editing Node does is probably too labour intensive for GiantBomb but for more complex games I'd like to see them do some of this.

@veektarius: VR is an especially weird thing to demo, in that you basically need other people there to fill the air. With traditional gaming, it can be hard enough to talk and play at the same time, often one thing suffers so that the other can be dealt with. it's why Dan is the best on staff at playing gamers, because he rarely talks during them, and why Jeff and Brad seem to be the worst, because they get stuck in their own head.

In VR, you're not only totally preoccupied with a game that's currently unlike anything else out there, but you're also, for all intents and purposes, completely isolated from the world around you. It's hard to get across what being in a VR game is like, but it often ends with taking the headset off and being slightly confused at what the real world is like and why you're back. it's nearly impossible to hold a coherent conversation when you're off in another world.