Survios’ First-Person Shooter Shows How Addictive VR Will Be

From DIY To HTC Vive And Beyond

Survios wowed me a few years ago with its game Zombies On The Holodeck. The guys built it after working in the University of Southern California Mixed Reality Lab alongside Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey. Though robots are cool, there’s something much scarier about the walking dead coming to eat your brains. Hopefully Survios will give the cyborgs saw-blade hands or something to make defeating them more urgent.

But what the startup learned from that Zombies game was how to build for any hardware. Way back in 2014 (VR moves fast), there weren’t any professionally-made systems available for doing full-motion virtual reality where you can walk around. Survios knew motion would make things much more fun, so it hacked together its own janky system. You had to strap on a massive backpack full of magnets for tracking location and a camera that hung above your head.

Fast-forward to today, and Survios has raised $4.2 million led by Shasta Ventures and grown its team to 35. Meanwhile, Oculus, Sony VR, and HTC have all built polished VR systems that are almost ready for sale. So rather than betting the company on one platform, Survios is using its hardware skills to bring Raw Data to all three of these headsets.

That’s no easy task when the headset launch dates keep getting pushed back. It’s hard to know how many people will buy them or how much they’ll be willing to pay for games. Survios expects to price Raw Data in the $10 to $25 range, and closely monitor reactions. Iliff believes that if VR games are about 10X shorter than traditional console games that cost $60, but is several times more immersive, around $20 will feel right.

People without VR headsets will be able to spectate Raw Data games on their computers from cinematic camera angles

Knowing that not everyone will be able to afford a premium wired VR headset, Survios has other plans to get people involved. It’s built the mechanics necessary so people will be able to spectate Raw Data games from their computer on Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and other streaming platforms. They’ll be able to watch from first-person or more cinematic angles.

“We trying to figure out ways to showing compelling VR experiences that don’t require a VR headset” Iliff explains. The theory is that once people watch someone else slice a robot’s head off with a lightsaber, they’ll be convinced its worth paying to hold the sword themselves. And they won’t want to put it down.