I've been neglecting my bloggage as usual, this is the second of two very delayed posts about things that have happened.

Virtual Reality

Back in April I noted that the fanciest headest around the Valve Index was now getting back into production after having been released last year and being immediately sold out. As they became available for purchase I took the plunge and got the whole Index kit including headset, controllers and base stations and a copy of Half-Life: Alyx.

It seemed like it took them a long time to ship it, but according to my records it arrived on the 24th, so not terribly long at all.

See some pictures of the package here.

Setup was very easy and smooth, I had no issues getting started. I had expected to be able to use the roomscale VR just barely, but it turns out my apartment is just too small. Standing (or sitting) mode it is.

What's it like?

It's a very worn word by now, but it's hard to describe how immersive it is, you really are in the game when you put the headset on. The excellent audio of the Index' not-on-your-ears 'phones doesn't hurt either.

The Valve Index uses LCD panels instead of OLED type displays that I understand many of the other headsets use, this has the advantage of being really pixel dense—apparently the index has the highest density display on the market—but even with that, VR for productivity, i.e. reading things or displaying anything with any precision at more than a few virtual meters of virtual distance can get quite "pixelly" or "blurry". Here's also a gotcha that I managed to get myself into in that I naïvely set the display to maximum refresh rate (144Hz); this caused something (my graphics card) to scale down the resolution so it could keep up with the set rate, so I got even worse graphics... I played through most of HL:A in this mode. Doh.

A problem with LCD displays is also black levels, in the enclosed environment of the headset, dark areas are not truly black, they're gray. I noticed this especially in HL:A.

That is not to say that it doesn't work, I tried OVR Toolkit and Virtual Desktop and both work, but I liked Virtual Desktop more. The user interface was less ambitious and simply worked better in the latter.

But I digress, let's get back on topic.

When you first boot up the headset—after completing a short set-up tutorial (that for some reason doesn't happen in the headset, so at first I was wondering why nothing was being displayed)—Steam VR's Home program launches. It is a sort of staging area before going into a game or application; by default you arrive in a very sleekly modern (and bare, execept for some screens on the wall) mountaintop house. From there you can launch other programs, have group VR conversations and play with some basic physics items. It also includes a Tilt brush and recently they also added a ray gun that can knock over physics items. You also return there when quitting an application to presumably not get you Sudden Return To Matterside syndrome, if you've read Starship Titanic... I for sure got this a couple of times after long sessions in HL:A.

It's pretty slick, but I felt I quite quickly bumped into the edges of what was possible in the Home app, it was also kind of disappointing that the navigation and hand functions? How could you describe it, was so much better in HL:A than Home, but that's what you get I guess.

Games

Since it was primarliy a game thing for me let's go on to games. I didn't want to immediately jump into the deep end with Half-Life: Alyx, I started out with Valve's The Lab. It was clear that it was originally launched with the HTC Vive, but worked just as well with the more modern Index controllers and features.

Very neat stuff. For every Valve demo I tried like Aperture Hand Lab, it continually astonished me how much effort they put into making them, all kinds of details. Except for the Wizard's store area, that was really dull for some reason, but I guess it was an early thing that nobody wanted to fix up. Valve apparently has some strange ideas about who works on what, given the whole Half-Life 3/Episode 3 thing.

On to the elephant in the room then, Half-Life: Alyx.

Wow. This was a truly amazing experience. Extremely realistic and detailed, beautifully modelled environments and a story to match; although towards the end it was a bit of "..and another twist!". What kind of suprised me with playing Alyx was what a wimp I apparently am. I've played all kinds of 3d action shooter games without batting an eye, but when my virtual body was on the line I completely wussed out on many an occasion, sweatily trying to reload Alyx' pistol in the dark with zombies and headcrabs somewhere out there slowly coming towards me... The elevator scene in the beginning was quite upsetting to me when the Combine soldier puts his weapon in your face. Yipe, I later watched a livestream with Yahtzee Croshaw playing and he just batted the combine's rifle around and tried to take it from him (?!)... I don't know, perhaps I just emphatize too much with the characters in the game or he's jaded or something.

All I could do was put my hands up.

Somehow the zombie parts (especially in the dark) were the worst (and Jeff), fighting the Combine solders later in the game wasn't nearly as bad and was quite fun. You could really tell that the antlions were specifically programmed not to attack you too fast though (I also noted this in the headcrabs too, but not to the same degree) but this is understandable I guess since you don't really have the same kind of ability to pinpoint-accurately spraying bullets around you when you have to actually move your hands and body around and not just flick a mouse around.

I loved it though, and may yet play it through again once I get my nerve back.

If Valve comes through on the tease at the end of the game, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Staffan, now just lacking Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module and one Burdine intelligent translator...