Virtual reality's driving force: How one genre stands above all others in VR's new frontiers.
I've been toying around with VR for a short while now, and I haven't been wholly convinced just yet. There are too many barriers in place at present, from the expense to the space required and through to the fact that so much of it still feels like shallow novelty that can be too easily tossed aside as a faddish distraction. The biggest challenge right now, though, is that VR's still not convincingly figured out the controller problem. PlayStation VR's appropriation of Move and the imminent (and expensive) release of Oculus Touch will help, while Vive's full-body immersion works well enough if you've the space, but there's still an abstraction present in both.
Driving games, though, are enabled by the best controllers around: 1:1 recreations of steering wheels and pedals and, if you're dorky enough, beautiful H-pattern gate shifters. A good force feedback wheel solves VR's control problem with a blunt simplicity. Match a Thrustmaster T500 with an Oculus Rift and you've got one of the best VR experiences around, and you don't have to clear out an entire room to achieve it.
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