Digital mischief maker Loki Eliot recently posted an excellent blog post : Mapping a Gamepad to Second Life & OculusVR with Voice to Text. This post highlights quite a few issues and challenges for the usage of Oculus Rift within Second Life as well as highlighting issues with Oculus Rift and that level of immersion in any virtual world.
In the post Loki explains how he mapped an old game controller that is compatible with the xBox and mapped the buttons on that to control some of the menus within Second Life. Loki also used a voice to text dictation application to allow him to send voice to, well text, and therefore communicate with other Second Life users in text. I’ll embed Loki’s video at the end of the blog post but you should really read Loki’s post to get a good grasp of the issues.
Loki makes some points I’ve heard before, such as this one regarding the field of view and keyboard usage :
Instead they wrapped EVERYTHING around your field of view and expect you to be able to touch type which i know some superhuman SL users can do. Im not one of them unfortunately.
This emphasises a problem with trying to make Oculus Rift compatible with existing experiences, not just Second Life by the way but Second Life has an additional challenge that many games don’t face because communicating via text in Second Life is massive. That’s why people complain about Group Chat not working as well as they would hope.
However Loki’s use of a game controller reminded me of people I know who swear by game controllers. I actually have one but hardly ever use it, although it’s a chicken and egg situation because I’m sure if I used the game controller more often, I would be far more impressed by it. However the people whom are fans of game controllers in general are, gamers. No surprises there but as Second Life isn’t well known for attracting gamers, it highlights another challenge for Oculus Rift and Second Life harmony.
That being said, Loki does indeed manage to pull this off quite well and his video demonstrates this wonderfully. However Loki highlights another point that others have made about VR, all these additional peripherals that are required to utlilise it. I’ve seen people mention this in relation to High Fidelity too, are people really going to use headsets, motion controllers, dictation apps, game controllers and also talk in voice as well as text?
Well quite probably because habits change, many people who grew up with the old fashioned joystick or keyboard controls of left, right, fire find game controllers a challenge as they have too many options, but the younger generation embrace them well.
However, Second Life isn’t that well known for attracting the younger generation, which highlights yet another point I’ve seen made, Oculus Rift usage in existing environments is not the ideal route. The ideal route is to build environments with Oculus Rift in mind. I’ve argued that as Second Life is so dynamic, it does have potential to serve Oculus Rift well. However I can most definitely see the flaws in using Oculus Rift in Second Life and if people find areas that are optimised for Oculus Rift, what happens when they go to places that aren’t?
I do feel that voice usage has to increase in the future for any Oculus Rift VR, mainly because of the usability factor. I know people don’t agree with me on this but I really can’t see a way around it. However Loki does demonstrate that despite all the hurdles, there are ways and means to improve the Oculus Rift experience with the current Second Life Viewer aimed at Oculus Rift users. This is not the main viewer by the way, Linden Lab have developed a special viewer for the experience.
As I said, Loki’s video is worth watching and his blog post worth reading, but bear in mind how early everyone is in development terms with regards to Oculus Rift usage. Gamers probably have a head start, but hopefully the rest of us won’t be left too far behind.