The action speeds along fluidly, and even with 20+ AI opponents on the grid it maintains impressive graphical fidelity. However, when you find the right car and track combination – plus pick the right weather and time of day – PCARS 2 is an absolute delight and a definite must-try for any racing fans with a VR headset. I could write a whole article about the things I don’t like about this game a lot of the cars handle very strangely and some of the engine sounds are unconvincing or just plain wrong (looking at you, Ford GT with four cylinders). Whether its vehicle handling matches its graphical prowess is arguable, but after spending some time with PCARS 2 in VR I can categorically say it works tremendously well. Not only that, but it has some of the best changeable weather effects in any game, and it still looks great four years after release. On the mobile side, Google improved on its Cardboard product with its mobile-powered Daydream to counter Samsung’s Gear VR.Released in 2017, Project CARS 2 (PCARS 2) garnered favourable reviews from fans and critics alike, as it crammed a whole bunch of racing content into one PC and console – from Ind圜ars to Rallycross. Rift and HTC’s Vive were available for PC early that year, while Sony’s PSVR would be out in October for PS4. “But as happens with very new technology, until you can go from pure hype-like, ‘this is going to change everything,’-to really finding specific useful cases, it never becomes this instant, overnight thing.”īack in 2016, it seemed that every major tech company was eager to carve out its piece of the VR pie. “The expectation among the nascent industry was that it was going to be this crazy takeoff,” Lang said. (Goldman Sachs said in 2016 that mass adoption of VR hardware alone would overpower the $99 billion TV market by 2025, and it was hardly the only company making such lofty claims.)īut an instant revolution was never in the cards, as Road to VR executive editor Ben Lang told Ars. ![]() AdvertisementĮvan-AmosWhen the Rift CV1 was released, evangelists proclaimed that VR wasn’t just going to revolutionize games-it would change the world. Meta’s Quest 2 headset has helped significantly revitalize consumer interest in the sector with its user-friendly experience and relatively low price (though it's not as low as it once was), with its Oculus Store supporting a handful of bona fide VR-native hit games. But the latest wave hasn’t been another high-profile failure, either. Six years later, VR has yet to reach the stratospheric heights its cyberpunk fantasy promised. “We all wanted Snow Crash to happen, and then we put on the things, and it was just Pterodactyl Terror, and we all threw up,” he told Ars, possibly (jokingly) misnaming Virtuality's less-than-stellar VR arcade experiment Dactyl Nightmare. Decades removed from the hangover of failed VR arcades and gimmicky consumer trinkets, things would be different this time.ĭouble Fine’s Tim Schafer put it best at DICE 2016. Google even partnered with Disney to give away its low-tech paper Cardboard sleeves, enticing fans of Star Wars and other mega properties with themed mobile experiences. Oculus’ co-founders were breathlessly profiled in glossy magazines, with Luckey landing on the cover of Time in August 2015. Analyst predictions were bullish, going so far as to say that the VR market would be worth $150 billion in just five years. ![]() ![]() The lead-up to the 2016 launch of the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift (the CV1) only raised consumer VR’s profile further. ![]() Two years later, Oculus accepted a $2 billion buyout offer from Facebook. This led the Kickstarter campaign for the first Oculus developer kit to balloon past its $250,000 funding goal on the way to a final haul of $2.4 million. With the demonstration of his impressive prototype Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) in 2012, Palmer Luckey managed to instantly erase the poor image VR had garnered from ‘90s movies like The Lawnmower Man and woefully premature commercial curios like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. Six years ago, consumer virtual reality seemed set to be the next major tech breakthrough.
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