The Real Thing

At CES, Vive Pro and some future-gazing startups kick off the next generation of VR

Later this issue, in An Audience With…, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda sounds a familiar refrain from big publisher bigwigs. Asked about his and his company’s current stance towards VR, he joins the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft and EA in saying that, while virtual reality is an area in which his firm has a keen interest, the tech just isn’t there yet. It’s too expensive, requiring, at the top end at least, a premium-priced HMD and a beefy PC. Headsets are too bulky to be comfortable, and too inconvenient, trailing wires everywhere. Xbox head Phil Spencer said, at last year’s E3, that the industry was “a few years away” from cutting the VR cord. Yet January’s Consumer Electronics Show suggested Spencer’s prediction may in fact have been a few years out of whack. The future is now.

CES has always been a bit bonkers, and not just for the way it summons a tech industry still getting over the turkey sweats to Las Vegas, of all places, in the first week of January. Every year it yields another crazy crop of because-we-can innovations – robot dogs, ovens that run on Android and, this year, a fingernail mounted sensor with a sleek, nail-art finish that lets sun-worshippers moderate their UV intake. Yet it is the perfect setting in which to unveil new innovations in virtual reality; while the technology may be grounded in videogames, it’s long been expected that it will extend far further than the field of play. This year’s event showed how the second generation of high-end VR hardware is shaping up.