LogInGreg Fodor has opened a new portal.
Virtual reality sounds great on paper, but despite its revolutionary introduction years ago, the real reality turned out less exciting. Teleporting to game worlds is awesome, but wearing a heavy headset is not that fun.
It's especially inconvenient to developers, who have to take the headset on and off over and over again to test their creations. Thankfully, there are bright minds like Greg Fodor out there, who came up with a solution that could benefit both sides.
He presented Portal, a setup that does the same headsets do but with a phone and a tablet instead. The former acts as a controller, and the latter shows the virtual world. By pressing the sides of your phone screen, you can grab and hold objects, and the volume button is the trigger you can use to shoot, for example. If you place the phone behind the table, closer to your body, you can aim easily.
Fodor tested the setup by punching a bag, fishing, petting a chicken, shooting aliens, and getting a bazooka from a "deranged rabbit." It all looks fine in his footage, and you will be able to try it out soon when Portal launches on Android and iOS.
Oh, and it supports old-school 3D glasses. Because why not.
"In the end, it made me think maybe we're thinking about VR completely wrong. Maybe it's not about taking over your whole visual field, but just about feeling like you're interacting with a virtual world that's not where you are. And if you can get that through a tablet, maybe it means you could build a whole new device that really dials in the experience for people that don't want to wear something on their face."
Naturally, there is a pretty obvious drawback to the idea: much lower immersion, which is kind of the whole point of VR. However, as the creator pointed out, there are people who are ready to sacrifice it to avoid having something on their heads, and developers will likely find this solution more convenient.
Portal is a custom OpenXR runtime for Android, so you won't need to port your games to Portal. If you're a developer and want to test the setup now, you should contact Fodor and follow his progress on X/Twitter.
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