Amid the hustle and bustle of Vive’s CES booth, there’s a war zone. It’s a hellish battlefield in which three brave brothers are making a last stand against a hive mind of silent soldiers, uniformly marching forward. The heroes twist and turn, covering every angle, ducking and weaving out of the line of fire — but it’s hopeless; the enemy never ceases in their conquest.
This memorable struggle I experienced was made possible by an HTC Vive, a couple of smartphones, and a lot of plastic.
The game, or rather the concept, was Master of Shapes’ Cover Me, a unique take on VR local multiplayer that adapts to the realities of current VR tech. You’re probably not going to have two Vives to play with and, even if you did, you’d walk into each other all the time. But why not take use smartphone and give a second player a window into the game? Better yet, why not attach the phone to the Vive’s new tracker peripheral with a gun and have it appear within VR?
That could be interesting.
Cover Me is in the very, very early stages of development right now, but on a conceptual and mechanical level alone it shows a lot of promise. One player is experiencing the everyday Vive shooter; enemies swarming in from all sides, using your two controllers to blast away at them. If others want to join in on the action, they can grab their smartphone, attach it to a plastic gun peripheral fitted with the tracker, and then use the screen to aim and move about in the world. They’re not seeing the world in VR, but they can interact with your world in a very meaningful way.
What you get is an effective workaround for local multiplayer, or at least a glimpse of it. This demo didn’t have any damage enabled so it was…