{"id":467,"date":"2008-11-18T12:44:26","date_gmt":"2008-11-18T11:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/2008\/11\/18\/mirrors-edge-gaming-with-proprioception\/"},"modified":"2008-11-19T13:27:34","modified_gmt":"2008-11-19T12:27:34","slug":"mirrors-edge-gaming-with-proprioception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/2008\/11\/18\/mirrors-edge-gaming-with-proprioception\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirror’s Edge – Gaming with proprioception"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should really make a list of all the games that would be terrific to play in Immersive VR..<\/p>\n

Along with Assassin’s Creed<\/a> vastness and beautiful graphics, Gears of War 2<\/a> with its violence and majestic landscapes, the latest game by the swedish editor Dice<\/a>, Mirror’s Edge<\/a>, would be a great way to feel freedom and wind on your face as you jump buildings :<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object>
Mirror’s Edge – trailer E3<\/a><\/b>
par ElectronicArts<\/a><\/i><\/div>\n

This Wired review<\/a> explains why the game feels so immersive:<\/p>\n

It doesn’t do justice to call the action in Mirror’s Edge<\/cite> “intense”: It quivers<\/em>, like a hummingbird, and your first-person view is constantly whipsawing like a paranoid cameraman hunting for the best shot. (…) What makes Mirror’s Edge<\/cite> so different? Sure, the action is swoopy and vertiginous, just as it is in many other games. (…)\u00c2\u00a0 Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? Why does it feel so much more visceral?<\/p>\n

I think it’s because Mirror’s Edge<\/cite> is the first game to hack your proprioception<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s a fancy word for your body’s sense of its own physicality \u00e2\u20ac\u201d its “map” of itself. Proprioception is how you know where your various body parts are \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and what they’re doing \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even when you’re not looking at them. It’s why you can pass a baseball from one hand to another behind your back; it’s how you can climb stairs without looking down at your feet.<\/p>\n

Most first-person shooters do not create any sense of proprioception. You may be looking out the eyes of your character, but you don’t have a good sense of the dimensions of the rest of your virtual body \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the size and stride of your legs, the radius of your arms. At most, you can see your arms carrying your rifle out in front of you. But otherwise, the designers treat your body as if it were just a big, refrigerator-size box.(…)<\/p>\n

When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot \u00e2\u20ac\u201d precisely as they do when you’re vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you’re looking at your thighs as the world spins around you. (…)<\/p>\n

The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception<\/strong>. It’s why you feel so much more “inside” the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror’s Edge<\/cite> is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it’s neurologically<\/em> realistic<\/strong> [Cb: I’d like to have a neurologists opinion on that!].\u00c2\u00a0 (…)<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting lesson of game physics: When you feel like you’re truly inside your character, speed suddenly means<\/em> something.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The opposite is also true. Without a sense of physicality, speed feels lifeless. In Halo<\/cite>, you’re playing as the cyborgically enhanced Master Chief, so your top speed at an open run is \u00e2\u20ac\u201d according to Halo<\/cite> nerd canon \u00e2\u20ac\u201d 30 mph or something. But it doesn’t feel very fast at all, because your avatar doesn’t appear to be actually exerting himself.(…)<\/p>\n

The combat in Mirror’s Edge<\/cite> felt more believable than doing battle in Halo<\/cite>, too. When the cops were shooting bullets at me and I was frantically racing to escape, I kept thinking: “Damn, I’m going so fast I might just escape!” In most first-person games, I usually wonder the opposite: How are these guys not<\/em> hitting me? So the brilliant physicality of Mirror’s Edge<\/cite> isn’t just a boon to the game’s physics. It also makes the narrative and drama more plausible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So you feel like you’re the character, this means more presence, so more immersion.\u00c2\u00a0 I have to talk to them.. Sweden is not so far from Paris and I guess I’d take less time to go to Stockholm than to go to Velizy =)<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I should really make a list of all the games that would be terrific to play in Immersive VR.. Along with Assassin’s Creed vastness and beautiful graphics, Gears of War 2 with its violence and majestic landscapes, the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,19],"tags":[367,366],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}