Free Range Games is bringing tennis and ping pong to the court with Virtual Sports for HTC Vive. VR enthusiasts can now partner up, grab a “paddle” or a “racket,” and get their rallies in without leaving their rooms.
The game features three different experiences — single-player, multiplayer and career, in which users compete against other players in increasingly advanced leagues. It also packs in a “Fun Mode” where users learn to keep the ball in play, and competitions against bots that help users refine skills such as spin, speed, and power.
The gameplay mirrors realistic physics, as opposed, say, to the version of tennis on Nintendo’s Wii Sports, and includes eight environments, including a mountaintop ski lodge, a garage lounge, a piano room, and a beach with flowing palm trees. The physics, though, is what sets Virtual Sports apart.
“When you shovel the ball back and forth over the net, the immersive illusion is pretty great. But, as you actually start playing the way you would in real life, the illusion often falls apart,” Burke Drane, the president and CTO of Free Range Games, said in an interview on Vive’s blog. “We discovered, when studying pro-level players who were really smashing the ball, that we had to run our collision simulation between ball and paddle over 10,000 hz in order to maintain the sub-millimeter level precision you expect from the Vive.”
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According to Drane, the system also uses a peer-to-peer design in its multiplayer mode to eliminate any glitches that may affect the game’s timing and realistic feel. And to make two similar games feel different, the game is programmed to reflect the way both ping-pong’s solid-surface paddle and tennis’ stringed racket interact with a ball.
The game does require Windows 7 or newer to work, along with at least three gigabytes of space on the computer and both the HTC Vive headgear and a virtual reality motion controller. The game is available for purchase through Steam.