I just know GLaDOS would have something funny to say about this
When it comes to gaming these days, I feel like I’ve kind of seen it all. Any kind of crazy trick shot you can think of? Check the Call of Duty: Warzone compilations. Someone hacking into a meeting of the Italian senate and playing Final Fantasy porn? That’s just the normal news cycle. Bugs that turn characters into spaghetti monsters in the middle of a dramatic cutscene? That was my day job. At this point, it doesn’t feel like anything can surprise me anymore — which is why it’s nice to get a reminder of how far the industry has come every once in a while. That’s exactly what happened when I logged onto Reddit today and saw a post of a guy juggling through portals (a la Portal) in VR.
It’s not something I’ve come across before, but it certainly didn’t surprise me to see. The title of the post, as well as the comments, point out just how impressive this video is, and reading through them made me take pause and think a little bit more about how much gaming technology has advanced, even in the past few years. Juggling is hard enough as is, but doing it in virtual reality through a set of portals — well I imagine that took a ton of practice.
This guy being able to juggling through portals in VR is a neat look into how far gaming has advanced from gaming
Apparently this is actually a Portal mod of Half-Life: Alyx, which also isn’t surprising considering how well received that game was, especially for its physics simulation.
Once you get past the awe of this guy being able to do this without hitting his controllers together, you get to thinking about how complicated the whole thing is — the simulated physics of the balls that he’s able to juggle in real time, the added complexity of the portals, the fact that he’s able to do this all in real time with his actual hands because of the VR of it. It’s a bunch of small things, but they add up into something that the earliest game developers couldn’t have even dreamed of.
As tired as I am of seeing asinine content on the internet, sometimes it just takes something simple, like a guy juggling through portals in VR, to remind us that we have it pretty good, as far as video games are concerned.