#vrjam

Has virtual reality gone too far?

In late March VRgility posted about Oculus’ high-profile VR Jam, the biggest virtual reality competition to date that has attracted thousands of engineers to the VR sphere. This year VR Jam took place in mid-April and as anticipated received a great number of intriguing entries. Since part of the purpose of this blog is to feature innovation in VR technology, we are going to do a short series highlighting the most interesting VR Jam 2015 entries. This is the first featuring Project Elysium.

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In the ancient Greek tradition Elysium was believed to be a special place in the afterlife reserved solely for heroes and godly men. Amazingly, this ancient illuminated realm made a startling appearance at Oculus’ VR Jam 2015, thanks to a two-man team from Paranormal Games.  

Officially submitted to VR Jam on April 19th, Project Elysium is a VR program that allows individuals to communicate with their deceased loved ones via a virtual reality experience. To get a better feel for the project, you might as well read a portion of the description presented by the design team for VR Jam: 

Quick question, What if I told you that I built a small stand alone room in a warehouse. Also that room has a window to see into the room and if you look through that window, you can see a deceased loved one who is not in our world anymore, standing in there, in that very room as alive as they once were.

But there is also a door next to that window and I then hand you the key..... Would you go in there? What would you do? Would you open the door? Project Elysium builds those rooms.... in virtual reality. 

Sounds a little weird, to say the least, but it is what it is: the Elysium team has set out to reunite the living with the dead through virtual reality.

In their project description, the engineers further describe their software as serving three primary functions. First, their goal is to enable people to render eternal their deceased loved ones by creating a virtual reality experience called an “Elysium Project”. The second purpose is for clients to create custom VR experiences that they can leave behind for their loved ones to enjoy once they themselves have passed. And third, the purpose of Project Elysium is to create mass market experiences for deceased major public figures like Elvis Presley, who might be presented virtually in concert or film.

Undoubtedly the creators of Project Elysium have taken a creative approach to VR innovation and one has to give them props for thinking outside of the box and presenting the world with something that is unconventional and even alarming. However, with all that said, there is something very disturbing about the concept of Project Elysium.

Personally, I find it offensive that someone might compare a virtual representation of a loved one with the actual experience of being with that person. Sure technology can and does do a lot for us, but to try and keep the dead living seems far-fetched and a poor outlet for our engineering capabilities.

Even if Project Elysium does see some success at VR Jam, I can’t see their idea catching on. Yes, making Elvis immortal will be a popular endeavor and in essence it is a form of entertainment━a sphere the man dedicated his life to. But to do the same with people’s family members and friends rings a bit disrespectful to my ear. 

What do you think?

Post Author: Lilit Markosian

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Hi.

Mark here with some thoughts on the game design of Chuckwagon, a game I’m making with Joyhype, and the use of playing cards in the questing system and interface design:

Games are like most technology in that it references past innovations, and creates our identity though our perceptions of that past.

What’s particularly interesting about Chuckwagon is  how through game design we reveal a window to  a moment in the past, and create an interface using game elements from that era; specifically card games.

There is a resurgence in board games design/card games in the indie community, I think because of the same reason vinyl albums are still selling: attractive interface design.

Holding something well designed in a person’s hand still has an intrinsic value that is, for most people, still higher than having everything digitally composed in a streamlined user interface. In the past, people used to stare at many things that did not have their complexity of smartphones, but still had good aesthetic interface. Things like books, drinking glasses, tables, keys, etc. are still more complex than the tools crows make, and keep us pretty occupied. Because they are pretty.

Album covers are pretty and immersive objects. Listening to an album, staring at an album cover can create a completely immersive experience because of one main factor that has not changed: the witness of this is still the human mind.

Card games as well have this aspect, and because of the quantity of the individual 2D objects you can reference, it is essentially a paper container that has 52 screens. 52 possibilities aren’t as many as the probably billions of images we all look at, but it does contain sufficient for a game making experience, and in fact it is a longer standing interface design that has been refined over much more time than laptops or smartphones.

In fact I think what makes laptops and smartphones effective is that there is a direct linkage in user interface going from physical 2D media like pictures, playing cards, and album covers to the screens of smartphones, laptops, and movie theaters.We are still making a mnemonic language.

Mobile games like Threes, Card Crawl, and Hearthstone take directly from the card vocabulary though, creating a postmodern experience, where you don’t need to physically carry cards to play a card game, so you get to have your cake and eat it too.

Because this is a VR game, and we are creating in essence an immersive reality, it made sense to incorporate something like card games into the game mechanic. We are trying to send you back in time and make you think in a way similar to a frontier era, really anywhere in the world, not just the wild west. Just anywhere where people play cards as a pastime. There are people in Mali, right now, who use flintlock rifles to as tools of self defense, hunting, etc. It makes me think that everything we create in the past is actually about the past in the future, the future past, where we have awareness of more advanced technology but are enjoying the benefits of less options.

Particularly in game design, this issue comes up a lot. The concept of choice. Do I make a game where I can do anything? Do I need to make every event programmatically possible, or make a system where glitching and modding by way of sandboxing? I  think the question gets answered here by two things: the choice for immersive story based gameplay, and also the need to create game sessions that can be as long or short as needed that will not effect the quality of the game.

Like with the Tarot, system invented as both a game and decision making tool, we are using a deck of cards as a means of making fun choices.

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