Applied Nostalgia: Everybody's Gone To The Rapture

A couple of years ago I was impressed by the release of Gone Home, an indie game set in 1995 with heavy use of applied nostalgia triggers.  The design included general period features and some beautiful detailing to evoke a strong emotional reaction as the player explored an abandoned home.

As someone with a strong interest in this area I was pleased to see nostalgic content appearing sporadically in other games (such as The Witness) but few were as steeped in it as Gone Home.  That is, until a few months ago when a new game appeared...

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture

I'd seen articles about this game online and investigated it a bit over the Summer; however, I finally got to see it properly in action at the EGX Eurogamer Expo in Birmingham.  And I was blown away.

First thing: this game is jaw-droppingly beautiful.  The Chinese Room have done an astonishing job on this aesthetically.

The game is full of nostalgia-inducing objects, including 1980s-period Ford Fiesta (and Cortina) cars and an old Commodore 64 style computer (with floppy disk drive and box-style CRT monitor).

There's even a metal push-button payphone (model CT24 if you're feeling particularly geeky about phones), which harks back to my post on the potential of telephones as nostalgia triggers.

The whole thing evokes the feeling of the "deserted village" episodes of 1960s/70s TV shows like The Avengers, UFO, or Doctor Who; period bicycles, a 1970s John Deere tractor, a 1960s-style Transit van ... the level of detail is astonishing.

Mind you, this isn't surprising -- the developers went to a lot of effort to recreate that tone:

"For Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, we really wanted to explore the very British apocalyptic sci-fi of the 60s and 70s," says creative direct Dan Pinchbeck. "John Christopher's The Death of Grass and A Wrinkle in the Skin, John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and some of the really early 'cosy catastrophe' fiction like The Tide Went Out by Robert Wade."
— "Where literature & gaming collide" by Thomas McMullan, Eurogamer

While researching, I came across the website of Mark Silvester, an environment artist who recently graduated from the University of Portsmouth and was asked by The Chinese Room to do some asset work.  Nice to see novice designers pulled into this world.  Here's his (original 1979-style) Walkman:

This game really is quite a visual feast and, if you get the chance to watch any gameplay, do.  The PS4's power gives life to gorgeous metallic railings, glistening in the sunlight.

 I felt like I was swept back to the heady halcyon summer days of the 1970s, and that's a great confirmation of the power of nostalgia applied in video games.

VR the world; VR the children

OK, so I apologise profusely for the pun-tastic post title.  Since my last post I've been busy with all kinds of different things; my game projects have all crawled along in the background making s-l-o-w progress.  More significantly, I seem to have found myself becoming an evangelist-cum-apologist for Virtual Reality technology.

It's a bit of a weird situation.  The major commercial VR products are just about to hit the market.  There's been a flurry of activity this last year.  Early adopters are poised to pounce.  And yet there's also a resigned feeling that the whole thing will be a five-minute wonder.  I've heard the phrase "the next 3D TV" so many times that I'm thinking of getting a T-shirt made.

So, is VR going to take over the world?  Or will it be just a toy for the kids?  (Hey, I have to justify the title somehow!)

View-Master

The Mattel View-Master VR (which I blogged-about back in February) has finally hit the streets ready for the Christmas market.  You can already buy it from Amazon and Walmart (but, sadly, not in the UK yet ... and the rotters won't ship internationally).

View-Master VR with mobile phone.
(Credit: Harrison Weber, VentureBeat)

It looks pretty good.  A $30 (that's £20 sterling to you, guvnor) you get a plastic Google Cardboard.  One that won't fall apart or crumple when it gets sat on.

Mattel's GIF animation.  Don't blame me if it doesn't work on your screen!

I can't wait to get one.  Except I know what will happen: I'll look through the eyepieces and realise that I won't be able to use it.

The Problem of Interpupilary Distance

The problem is a simple one.  My eyes are too far apart.  (Yes, I've literally got a big head.)

One of the reasons that binoculars have a big hinge in the middle is because everybody's eyes are a different distance apart.  This interpupilary distance (IPD) creates a problem for VR systems, because they need to focus each eye on half of a stereo image -- and that's difficult when IPD varies so much.

A graph of typical IPD measurements.
(Source: research by Neil Dodgson, University of Cambridge)

The graph above shows that 95% of people sampled fell within the 55-70mm range.  Therefore a number of VR manufacturers tend to work on the basis that:

• A fixed IPD of 63mm to 65mm will be comfortable for most of the population.
• Fixed lens position is better than variable, because people will set a variable one wrongly anyway.  (That's Firefly VR's position, anyway.)

Google's own Cardboard specification originally presumed a fixed 65mm IPD, but that's complicated by the range of different phone screen sizes, which doubles the problem up.

My own 70mm IPD and big screen phone were enough of a problem that I needed to device my own scaled-up Cardboard template.

Oculus Rift & chromatic aberration

I picked up an Oculus Rift Development Kit (DK2 version) back in the summer and have been playing with adapting existing VR environments for it.

A VR-adapted version of The Lone Viking, a game (by my former students Grant & Chris) for the Unity game engine.

The DK2 tries to get around the IPD problem by adjusting the display output to the user, attempting to compensate for both eye position and focusing issues.  As you can see in the photo below, the kit comes with hefty lenses, switchable with near-sighted versions.

The DK2 unboxed.
(Photo shamelessly pilfered from Geeky Gadgets)

The lenses have a high magnification, which increases an effect called chromatic aberration.  This effect is demonstrated on the following image (courtesy of mabrowning)

Essentially, the shape of the lens distorts the light coming from individual sub-pixels on the display screen.  If your eye is off-centre of the lens then the colours won't position properly -- known as the "screen door" effect.  There's a nice article about the issue at VR-tifacts.

This is a big nightmare for fixed IPD devices.  Thankfully, it appears that Oculus have taken the plunge and the consumer version of the Rift will have a manual IPD adjustment slider.

Even with this, the issue of aberration is not completely diminished.  It's hard to stop the problem at the extremes of view, so you'll notice that the screenshot above shows some colour fringing where the software attempts to compensate for the problem.

Conclusions

Of course, the big advantage of the Oculus Rift is that you can move your head freely (although there's still a small amount of motion sickness on the DK2).  However, I was shocked to find that the image on my £10 made-at-home Google Cardboard felt better than the blurry one on £300 DK2.

This is likely a result of my big head -- sorry, larger-than-average IPD -- and I'm sure that a carfeully-adjusted consumer Oculus Rift will not have that issue.

And what are we going to use VR for anyway?  Gaming is seen as the killer app but I doubt companies like Facebook would invest $2 billion into buying Oculus on that basis alone.  At work we're already talking realistically about using it for training & education: from welding simulators to biology.

However, I can't help but think that the biggest quantity of sales for VR this next 12 months will instead be the toy market.  I think Google and Mattel have hit the jackpot in combining nostalgia with high-tech, and those of us with bigger-than-average heads will undoubtedly start cannibalising our cheap VR headsets to join in.