GDC 2014: Phil Spencer: Microsoft Have “Been Playing With” Virtual Reality “For Quite A While”
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Friday, March 21, 2014
One of the big things at this year’s GDC in San Francisco has been Sony’s Project Morpheus, the latest high profile virtual reality device to be announced since Oculus Rift. Head of Microsoft Studios, Phil Spencer in his fireside chat session at GDC today, revealed Microsoft’s vision and stance on virtual reality and surmises what job it will play in the living room.
“VR is cool tech and one of the things at Microsoft is that we have this huge Microsoft research organization which is pretty important to us as platform holder in helping us think about might be next – it’s where Kinect came from, it’s where the voice system came from, it’s where Drivatars. There’s a bunch of stuff in our games that have been birthed out of the Microsoft research team,” noted Spencer when quizzed upon VR.
“Looking at things like Oculus and Morpheus, when I think about VR and the uses of it in gaming, I think there’s a real there there. I don’t think it’s going to be that every game requires me to put goggles on my face in order to me to go play it.
“I think there are some user scenarios which are simply: ‘I live in a dorm room or an apartment and I don’t have room for a 60” plasma, is there something I can put on my face that gives me a virtual 60” plasma.” That isn’t really VR, but the technology can obviously support that.
“And then there are other really immersive games where actually being able to completely both audio and visually immerse a user in an experience can be really compelling.
“Will it ever become mainstream? You see this bifurcation, some people are playing simple touch games where you feel like you’re controlling the death star, and then other people are putting goggles on their face where they feel like 24/7 they live in a world.”
“The big hump will be in the middle, or even closer to the casual side in terms of usage,” finished Spencer, “But I think the technology is really interesting, and it’s definitely something we’ve been playing with for quite a while.”
If you want to read our sister site's (which is basically ours, of course) opinions on our recent hands-on with Project Morpheus, head on over.