For all of modern gaming’s advances, conversation is still a fairly unsophisticated affair. Starship Commander, an upcoming virtual reality game on Oculus and SteamVR, illustrates both the promise and challenge of a new paradigm seeking to remedy that—using your voice.
In an early demo, I control a starship delivering classified goods across treacherous space. Everything is controlled by my voice; flying the ship is as simple as saying “computer, use the autopilot,” while my sergeant pops up in live-action video to answer questions.
At one point, my ship is intercepted and disabled by a villain, who pops onto my screen and starts grilling me. After a little back and forth, it turns out he wants a deal: “Tell you what, you take me to the Delta outpost and I’ll let you live.”
I try to shift into character. “What if I attack you?” I say. No response, just an impassive-yet-expectant stare. “What if I say no?” I add. I try half a dozen responses but — perhaps because I’m playing an early build of the game or maybe it just can’t decipher my voice — I can’t seem to find the right phrase to unlock the next stage of play.
It’s awkward. My immersion in the game all but breaks down when my conversational partner does not reciprocate. It’s a two-way street: If I’m going to dissect the game’s dialogue closely to craft an interesting point, it has to keep up with mine too.
The situation deteriorates. The villain eventually gets fed up with myinability to carry the conversation. He blows up my ship, ending the game.
Yet there is potential for a natural back and forth conversation with characters. There are over 50 possible responses to one simple question from the sergeant — “Is there anything you’d like to know before we start the mission?” — says Alexander Mejia, the founder and creative director at Human Interact, which is designing the game. The system is powered by Microsoft’s Custom Speech Service (similar technology to Cortana), which sends players’ voice input to the cloud, parses it for true intent, and gets a response in milliseconds. Smooth voice control coupled with virtual reality means a completely hands-free, lifelike interface with almost no learning curve for someone who’s never picked up a gamepad.
Speaking certainly feels more natural than selecting one of four dialogue options from a menu, as a traditional roleplaying game might provide. It makes me more attentive in conversation — I have to pay attention to characters’ monologues, picking up on details and inconsistencies while coming up with insightful questions that might take me down a serendipitous narrative route (much like real life). No, I don’t get to precisely steer a ship to uncharted planets since voice control, after all, is not ideal for navigating physical space. But what this game offers instead is conversational exploration.
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Source: Engadget