专注于增强现实（XR）和虚拟现实（VR）技术的创业公司波尼福（Bonifoo）最近宣布完成了1000万美元的A轮融资。这笔资金将用于加速公司的研发、市场推广和全球业务扩展。波尼福的技术使用户能够通过将数字内容叠加到真实世界中来获得沉浸式体验。这种技术在教育、培训、娱乐和企业应用等领域有广阔的应用前景。波尼福的创始人兼首席执行官表示，该公司已经建立起了强大的技术团队，并与一些大型公司合作，为用户提供具有创新性的解决方案。此轮融资由一家领先的风险投资公司领投，还有几家机构和个人投资者参与。波尼福计划利用这笔资金进一步发展自己的产品和服务，并在全球范围内扩大市场份额。他们也将继续与合作伙伴合作，提供更多创新和实用性强的XR解决方案，以满足不同行业的需求。"Half-Life: Alyx" (2020) is a stunning VR game developed by Valve specifically for virtual reality. The game was released last month on SteamVR compatible headsets, receiving global acclaim. If you don't have a VR headset but still want to play the game, I would advise against using unofficial PC monitor mods for your first experience. Instead, purchase a VR headset and avoid spoiling the game for yourself.
Regardless of your opinion on the details of "Half-Life: Alyx," it is truly a VR game, unlike some experimental mods we have seen in the past. While there is nothing wrong with enjoying VR modded games (such as "Alien: Isolation"), it is safe to say that we have surpassed those experiences from a game design standpoint, after four years of consumer VR.
Valve specifically designed "Half-Life: Alyx" to align with intuitive inputs from head tracking and motion controllers. Many of the interesting elements they designed around these inputs would be lost if you removed them. It's like playing "Just Dance" with a gamepad instead of dancing on arrows. This philosophy of full-body VR design makes the game not play well on traditional displays. Although there seems to be a keyboard and mouse mod available for "Half-Life: Alyx" now, as seen in the developer's promotional video.
I wouldn't say that the mod is completely terrible. Undoubtedly, making such a mod takes time and dedication, but it completely overlooks the purpose of VR. It disregards inherent issues like renderer lag when the user's view moves too quickly. By skipping the entry point of virtual reality and playing "Half-Life: Alyx" on a monitor, you will miss out on a lot.
Motion controllers are not just for you to carefully examine your virtual hands in VR. They actually enhance immersion in other, more important ways. While the controllers have fewer buttons compared to a keyboard and are closer to gamepads in terms of construction, this shouldn't lead you to believe that VR controllers are a simpler input method.
Despite the lower "mechanical" complexity of motion controllers, VR game designers focus on creating "virtual" complexity through shooting and reloading weapons, throwing objects, gesture commands, resource management, etc., tasks that would otherwise require scrolling, hotkeys, or floating 2D menus. This doesn't mean that using motion controllers is necessarily easy from the start, but if you've been using your hands since you were little, reaching out and grabbing something may be instinctual for you.
For example, reloading a magazine, aggressively grabbing a grenade with a "gravity glove" and throwing it into a broken window while smoothly killing a headcrab with a series of actions, is a completely different experience compared to rotating the view with a mouse, pressing "E," "1," scrolling the mouse wheel, and left-clicking. For hardcore PC players accustomed to complex key combinations, executing a set of insane key presses might be familiar, but when it also involves your virtual arm moving with your face and grabbing objects with your left-click, it reaches an almost cartoonish level.
Although motion controllers are the foundation for interacting with these kinds of objects, you can technically abstract these tasks with a cursor and a few buttons. However, when faced with 3D puzzles in "Half-Life: Alyx," dexterity and natural exploration abilities are key. This is where this mod fails, and it's when you really wish you had a VR headset.
Immersion is paramount. Like fun, fear is subjective, and it's hard to argue that you would be more scared of an enemy when sitting in front of a monitor. Contrary to facing off in stereoscopic 3D, I've played plenty of flat horror survival games that made me almost too scared to blink. But nothing compares to the terrifying immersion of feeling something on your neck for real.
Watching Twitch streams of "Half-Life: Alyx" in VR doesn't do justice to the actual experience of the game. Compared to the endlessly respawning enemies in the "Half-Life" series, "Alyx" has relatively few enemies, which may seem ludicrous. It seems that Valve's intention in creating "Alyx" was "less is more," as each enemy requires more attention and effort to kill in VR. Conversely, playing the game with a mouse and keyboard makes it less engaging on a computer monitor. But in VR, it's a different story. There's a name that comes to mind (no spoilers), phonetically similar to "Reff." Simple and to the point.
Rectangular screen videos only show a small part of the game environment. However, I'm not underestimating the visual effects of "Half-Life: Alyx," which include various interactive objects and intricate interiors and exteriors. As a new VR user, you might be surprised by the immersion provided by positional audio. When you turn your head and the audio matches your head's position, your brain gives you a sense of "I'm really here." This feeling is even stronger when the sound comes from a headcrab lurking above you.
Wearing a VR headset is crucial for synchronizing these perceptual systems, especially in games like "Half-Life: Alyx" where it makes you more on edge than when sitting at a desk. Check out our interview with game designer Robin Walker to learn about Valve's development process and their "room-by-room design" concept.
That being said, even if PC monitor mods could display finer details, "Half-Life: Alyx" would lose these fundamental immersion elements. It's not worth being limited just to say that you finally played a new "Half-Life" game that has been released for over a decade. You would miss out on complex spaces begging to be explored, constantly feeling frustrated as you struggle to pick up and throw objects that would be a split second in your backpack. You would miss what we consider to be a [10/10] VR game experience.
Here's some advice: buy a cheap second-hand headset. Look for something like Oculus.现在有一些交易可以购买价格更便宜的Rift S头盔。你甚至可以向朋友借用2016年的一款PC VR头盔来在VR中玩游戏。既然你已经购买了游戏，最好好好享受一下。
如果你对此感兴趣，可以在GitHub上下载驱动程序，里面包含了快速安装指南。但请注意我们已经提醒过你了。
