Virtual Reality’s Potential Displayed at Game Developers Conference Photo SAN FRANCISCO — For game designers, virtual reality became a real business last week when the virtual reality equivalent of Apple’s app store for iPhones and iPads opened its digital doors. If you make a game in virtual reality, or V.R., now you can sell it to customers instead of giving it away free. It’s the biggest step yet toward discovering what kinds of creative works will prove most successful in this new medium — an immersive, sensorially isolating experience that is either the art form of the 21st century or the biggest fad of 2016. Last Monday, the store inside the Gear VR, a headset powered by a fancy Samsung phone and the technology of Oculus VR (the company Facebook acquired for $2 billion last year), opened for business at the start of theGame Developers Conference here. Samsung and Oculus don’t advertise the Gear VR as a consumer product. They prefer to call it an “innovator edition” for early adopters. But you can buy it, and if you own it, you can spend your money — for now all the games are $10 or less — on the first wave of virtual reality games to hit the marketplace. There’s only one catch: No one’s sure what virtual reality goggles are good for just yet. “That is definitely the million-dollar question,” said Levi Miller, an engineer at Valve, a game developer and distributor, when I asked him what experiences would work best in virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg might say it’s more like a $2 billion question.
“The truth is, we still don’t know what the best applications are going to be,” John Carmack, the chief technology officer of Oculus, said during a speech at the conference. I tried on my first virtual reality headset two years ago, when people waited in line for hours on the expo floor at that year’s Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center to check out the Oculus Rift. At this year’s show, virtual reality transitioned from a glimpse of the future to a plausible holiday gift. Sony announced that its headset, Project Morpheus, would go on sale by the middle of next year as a PlayStation 4 accessory.