How Realistic is Shooting in Video Games ?

No two dimensional game is correct because none of them display correct scale (unless you have a wall size projection) or your nose is two inches from the monitor, nor do they recruit your stereoscopic vision. Virtual Reality (VR) games can display correct scale and simulate “binocular” stereoscopic vision.

We can distill their accuracy to three variables –Point of Aim (POA), Point of Impact (POI) and Sight Picture. It is easy to get POA and POI right in video games – unless the programmers do not allow for leading a moving object, which most of them do not. And Sight Picture, which is incorrect in many video games – the gun barrel is coming out of your nose – unless the game is using a telescopic scope, which becomes a video within a video – which can be doubly removed from reality, or a laser, which is unrealistic for most shooting situations, or has a VR gun controller with motion sensors that are separately tracked and represented in the VR scene.

Otherwise, you are dealing with a rough approximation of reality that will probably teach you a lot of bad shooting habits.

If the target is moving, it is generally not realistic at all since you have to shoot in front of a moving target – lead the target or as the Brits say give it “forward allowance” and most video games do not account for that. So the game ends up teaching you to shoot exactly where the target will not be – where it was when you pulled the trigger – not where it will be when the bullet gets there.

This is particularly the case in aerial shooting – flying objects from the ground or from the air. Anti-aircraft gunners have to learn how to lead the target and the real anti-aircraft guns take that into consideration.

The other aspect of shooting that many video games lack is true sight picture based on real gun dimensions, including eye dominance, realistic ergonomics and the position of your eye to the sights.

Many video games represent gun squarely in front of you, as if you were aiming with your nose – not aligned with either eye. That’s not how it works. You aim with one eye or the other. A properly programmed gun controller – which represents the real gun in VR – can correct that.

We have a patented VR shooting game that represents and teaches correct spatial lead on moving objects. It has two patents on it with one more on its way. All the scenes are to scale, the trajectory of the moving objects are based on empirical data from videos, and the ballistics are correct – so the amount of forward allowance (lead) is accurate. It is a good example of using VR to teach a real world skill in the virtual world. To add verisimilitude, we are going to put the VR gun controllers onto full scale AirSoft guns and offer an attachment to put the VR gun controllers on real guns.