We Escaped the Pain of SXSW with PlayStation VR

In an old bungalow-turned-bar in Austin, with a half dozen TVs blaring March Madness in the background, I got to play with Sony's new virtual reality platform, PlayStation VR. In development since 2012, PS VR (formerly known as Project Morpheus) will be available to the public in October. With multiple flagship VR devices also hitting the market over the next few weeks, it looks like VR gaming—long part of the popular imagination—will finally become, well, real.

Here's how PS VR works. You wear a visor-style headset with a 5.7-inch OLED screen that fits over your eyes, which has a 1290 x 1080 resolution and a 100-degree field of view. The whole thing weighs about 1.3 lbs. The headset connects via cables to a processor that looks like a PS4, but smaller; this processor feeds back to the PS4 console itself. A PlayStation camera sitting atop your TV uses the LED lights on your headset and sensors within your controller (either the Dualshock or Move) to track your position, making sense of everything. A separate pair of headphones completes the setup.

Compared to its PC-based competitors, PS VR is cheaper—the equipment and game bundle (which doesn't include the PS4 itself) will set you back $499. It's intended for the mass market, not necessarily the kind of nerds who would invest thousands in a state-of-the art gaming PC, but that's not a slight against it. It's a plug-and-play option with a low barrier of entry and a potentially favorable reward-to-cost ratio. According to Sony, 230 developers and publishers are currently working on PS VR titles, and 50 games are planned for release by the end of the year–with that type of support, it's bound to have some blockbuster titles.

The first demo I tried was The London Heist, a first-person action shooter. You're sitting in the passenger seat of a SUV racing down a highway, driven by a Jason Statham-esque tough in a suit. The demo gives you a minute to get oriented—fiddle with the stereo or toss around empty soda cans with the pair of disembodied hands you control with the Move sticks—before you're swarmed by a rival gang on motorcycles. Each shot from your automatic causes the bikers to crash and explode in unpredictable ways, the debris blasting in your direction.

"Immersive" is among the tech world's most beloved, abused words. It's one of those adjectives that sounds like it means a lot without saying much. But PS VR warrants the description. With the headset and headphones on, you are elsewhere. A person sitting next to you doesn't register. An entire bar of folks shouting at a ball game doesn't register. The immersion is so complete it has the potential to be alienating. To the type of person who feels a bit guilty staring at their phone all day, blind to everyday life's beauty, this is clearly a next step, literally affixing a screen to your face. It's the frontier of escapism. Which is to say it's really, really fun.

Soon, you'll be able to sit on the couch in your wrecked, closet-sized apartment and "travel" to wherever you want, which to many people such as myself sounds somewhat appealing. It's pretty easy to imagine how a bunch of people will just totally disappear into this world, and for a piece of technology to be so good it makes you sad and lonely.

I suspect the designers of PS VR understand this. There had to be a way to make it a more extraverted experience, so people in the room can actually engage with a person wearing the headset. But how can you have multiplayer without everyone buying their own? PS VR has a pretty neat solution to this problem: The processor splits the signal so what you're seeing in your headset is not necessarily what is shown on the TV. This "social screen," as they call it, means friends without headsets can use regular controllers and the TV to play with or against you. (It also means you can play in the headset while others use the TV, hereby resolving many a roommate dispute.)

This multiplayer function really shines in Monster Escape, for example, where the user wearing the headset sees through the eyes of a giant reptile destroying a metropolis, a la Godzilla. There aren't any buttons; you duck and destroy by moving your head. Your teammates, who use Dualshocks and look at the TV screen, are controlling a bunch of tiny, toy-like characters who work together to kill the monster by throwing random objects. It's simple and playful, the kind of family-friendly, party game you might see on Wii. Crucially, it allows the person in the headset to interact with others, turning what could be an isolating experience into a social one.

When introducing VR games, it's helpful for keep the gameplay elementary, so users aren't burdened with a bunch of complex controls, and can instead focus on what you're trying to show off—in this case, the otherworldly sensation of being divorced from your body, out in virtual reality. And all the games I played seemed to be designed with this in mind. In each, you moved along a fixed path, with limited opportunity to wander and explore. Most were shooters requiring two buttons or less. The point is for you to be able to put on the headset and see what VR is all about, whether you're an experienced gamer or not. In this goal, it succeeds.

With Rez Infinite, a reboot of an old PS2 classic that has you flying through a psychedelic space matrix listening to techno, you shoot at satellites with the X button and aim with your head. Anyone can play it. More extreme is Into the Deep, which as far as I could tell consists of just looking around underwater while a shark tries to kill you. It's unlike any game I've ever played. You don't press any buttons. I'm not sure if you do anything at all. The point is for you to revel in the aquatic scenery and the thrill of being hunted. Of all the titles I tried, it best demonstrated VR's awesome potential to transport us to other worlds, a harbinger of its inevitable application to film and travel.

My favorite of the demos, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, is set up like a theme park ride, where you're in a car moving on a track through a funhouse while a masked, murderous psychopath messes with you. There are two buttons: shoot and load. It feels like an arcade game, with an added nuance being able to look everywhere, but not everywhere at once. The horror genre, in particular, benefits from the immersive qualities of the PS VR. Things always seem to be moving in your peripherals, in the shadows, before leaping up in the foreground. Even if you know what's coming, you still feel vulnerable and exposed. The effect is exhilarating and legitimately scary. It's also good fun to watch others play, since they're squealing and squirming in their chairs, terrorized by whatever it is they're seeing in the headset.

This was pretty cool.

There's definitely a sense that game developers are testing the waters. No one is quite sure what a VR game looks like yet, or what it can be. Sony has advised the studios against going for broke on a tour-de-force, VR blockbuster—which would probably be outdated by the time it was released—in favor of a "shotgun" approach with a ton of simple, well-executed titles. That way they can, as a community, figure out what works. This makes sense, and from my time spent with the tech, it produces an enjoyable experience. But you can tell there's room for the storytelling to grow as developers get more comfortable with the platform. Playstation VR is making horror games scarier, multiplayer games more engaging, and single-player action shooters more immersive. In short, it's adding a little something for avid gamers and neophytes alike. It will even make space for experiences that stretch the traditional definition of "gaming," like Into the Deep. I'm looking forward to the first title that fully integrates the immersive qualities of VR with a compelling narrative, a true sense of mobility, and challenging gameplay for a AAA blockbuster game. With Sony's latest venture, it would seem that we're well on our way.