When VR isn’t immersive, players may bail — for good

Over the past week, I heard Facebook’s Oculus VR unit talk about using sophisticated tricks to help increase immersion in virtual reality games. From moving screens that let your eyes focus on nearby objects, or locking eyes with someone else in the room, or subtle design cues such as properly reflective mirrors, developers have numerous ways to make you want to spend more real time in virtual spaces.

I’ve become so accustomed to increasingly well-designed, immersive VR that I forgot how broken experiences can be when a game hasn’t been designed or executed properly. As Oculus said, a player’s inability to focus on up-close objects means that most games have been designed for objects to be manipulated at distances — that’s just one of the precautions many developers have taken without players even realizing it.