In 2D, there is no stereoscopic depth perception and limited field of view (FOV). For the scale to be life-size on a monitor, you’d either have to hold you nose up to the monitor or have a monitor the size of a wall – and curved. You’re looking through a spy glass at a picture of a doll house.
In order for the view, the “sight picture” to be correct in a rifle or shotgun, the receiver of the gun has to be right up in your face – held up in front of your dominant eye – with the stock resting on your shoulder. That is what it looks like in real life, but not in 2D video games – where the gun is centered, as if you are holding it in front of your nose.
I know because when we first submitted our shotgun shooting simulator to Oculus Rift, with that image – the back of the gun’s receiver right in front of the dominant eye (not both eyes equally), they rejected it as “too jarring.” I kid you not. Here is the reject below – when we submitted the gun as being either left or right eye dominant (in the X Box, non Touch version) and the non-dominant eye perceiving the gun as off-center – since it lines up with the dominant eye:
So, we had to dumb it down for the XBox version such that the gun could either appear correctly as “eye dominant/shoulder dominant” or as if you are blasting away from your nose. We even added a UI icon to facilitate which eye the gun would appear dominant in – for those intrepid gamers that could actually handle it. And Oculus Rift accepted it that way.
Steam, on the other hand, accepted the game as submitted – with eye dominance – and we are now designing our gun controller around the Steam VR platform. So here’s to Steam !
FPS can only be real in 3D – VR, not in 2D. And only if the VR game takes all of the realities of shooting – correct scale, stereoscopic vision, sight picture, head position on stock, eye dominance (unless using a hand controller) trajectory, ballistics, lead (on moving targets) and weight and dimensions of the gun controller (identical to the VR gun) into consideration. Most don’t even try.
Simply put, for it to be “real” the gun controller will have to be the same weight and dimensions as the gun represented in the game, and your head will have to in the same position in the game as it would be on the real gun. A lot like this:
I also demo’d the system for the USA Clay Target League
Aren’t the VR goggles too bulky in order to place the comb under the cheekbone for a proper gun mount?
Good question. Just barely ! The HTC Vive works OK – and that’s the only one that the gun controller works with anyway. Our guess is that the headsets are going to get smaller, not larger, so should be OK