I can juggle. But in Half-Life Alyx… not so much.
I managed 2 in one hand. I managed 3 balls and a few tricks.
And I could attempt several catches with 4 balls.
Unfortunately, juggling in VR doesn’t look very good because you’re seeing it from
the juggler’s perspective instead of the observer’s. You won’t know what the pattern’s
meant to look like. As an example, this is the mill’s mess! This is one of my FAVOURITE
patterns in juggling. It’s so smooth, so beautiful. It’s one of the first that you’ll
learn, yet remains one of the best. And kids love it. It can be done with any number of
balls, which is unusual. I’m still not sure how 4 ball mills mess works but I like it
even more. But here is how the 3 ball mills mess looks
in VR. Eugh. A big part of the trick is to curve the balls in the air which requires
some last-moment hand twitches before launching the balls, and I simply wasn’t able to replicate
that in VR with any degree of consistency. You know the way that people who can’t juggle
try to juggle? It looks a bit like this. This is actually a proper juggling move known as
the shower. No one will take you seriously with just 2 balls, but it can get pretty impressive
once you reach 3 balls, or even 4! I could manage 3 in VR, but I found the pattern ‘slowed
down’ and got a lot larger than it would do normally. And I was painfully aware that
my hands weren’t visible on-screen so you’d be unable to see the pattern’s shape. But
I’m happy to say that quickly passing objects from one hand to the other in VR is easier
than I had expected, though you still don’t know if you’ve managed it or have dropped
the item until you try throwing it and it isn’t there.
Beyond the basic levels of juggling, several factors kick in to make VR juggling harder.
For a start, you can’t hold more than 1 ball in a hand! That makes even basic 3 ball
juggling a challenge because you’ll have to start with one on the floor next to you
which you hastily pick up after chucking the first one.
This leads to ANOTHER problem- if you need to be able to reach the floor in VR then you’re
probably sat or crouched down, which makes juggling harder because a lot of it is being
able to make small ‘correction’ steps to reach badly thrown balls. Juggling sat
down is a LOT harder. Which is why it’s better to find a virtual
table to place your balls on. You’ve traded the ground for another virtual object you
can’t feel, which is harder, but at least now you can juggle standing up. Your play
space is the limit. That and all the other limitations with throwing stuff in VR.
Probably the best way to juggle in VR is to do one-handed juggling. The number of balls
is usually lower with this, so you don’t run into the problems with VR juggling quite
so quickly. And you only have to use your dominant hand, which shows your abilities
at their best. And juggling 2 in one hand is a respectable move- I’d consider this
about the same difficulty as 3 ball juggling. And if you can do 3 in one hand, that’s
about the same difficulty as juggling 5 and so on.
I was able to do one-handed juggling quite easily in VR, even managing several different
patterns. If you try VR juggling and get annoyed by objects colliding in the air, WELCOME TO
MY WORLD! That’s a problem for jugglers everywhere, and while you CAN avoid that with
a clean pattern, it still feels like it’s not quite your fault when the balls collide
and it messes up your juggling. And there are variants of standard 3 ball
juggling that you can do, like where one hand throws the balls higher than the other, which
is called the half-shower. And if you do that with both hands it’s called the ‘inverse
cascade’, which I think is an ugly style of juggling but I knew a girl at university
who could ONLY juggle like this. She was able to do 5 and everything!
But in VR, 4 balls was as far as I could go. Did you know that 4 ball juggling is a bit
like one-handed juggling, but in both hands? Look closely and you’ll see the balls don’t
even pass over the middle of my body. There are many 4 ball patterns that will, but ‘vanilla’
4 ball juggling is just 2 balls in each hand, even though I’ve been told that doing it
this way is cheating. Okay random bystander who’s making up the juggling rules, if you
think it’s cheating then YOU do it! Like a wise man once said, you punch them in the
face… and they stop laughing. It’s not that juggling 4 in VR is hard.
It’s just inconsistent and unrewarding. Any success I had felt like a fluke series
of lucky catches. Even more so than with proper juggling! Either I chose to keep the pattern
smaller, which led to things colliding in the air. Or I made the patterns larger and
they soon got messy, and after just a few throws would fail spectacularly as the tins
would be launched across the room and out of my play space. You can keep the pattern
smaller by making the balls cross over in the air. Again, I think this is an ugly way
of juggling especially cos if you do perfect throws then they’ll hit in the middle. But
I’ll leave the experimentation to you guys. I think that’s about as far as I’ll go
with VR juggling. At least, in Half-Life Alyx. I tried for about an hour, so there is a chance
that I could get better still. But I don’t have much interest in going any further, because
VR lacks all of the things that help me to juggle, and that help me to ENJOY juggling,
in reality. Maybe the biggest problem when it comes to
juggling in VR is the lack of feedback. To understand what I mean, try throwing something
in VR. Even if you get it right, it’ll feel weird and… unreliable. I think Half-Life
Alyx must help you to do this because it’s quite a bit easier than in a game like boneworks.
But even in Half-Life Alyx you’ll feel that it’s quite a lot harder without knowing
the weight of the object you’re throwing. Fun fact, I’ve also noticed this in dreams
where I try throw something. I never manage it- it just lands on the ground right in front
of me. But it’s this weightlessness that makes
it so difficult to juggle in VR. When you start juggling, you’re making mistakes faster
than you can correct for them. Most people throw too far forwards and end up running
into a wall. As you improve, you gradually get better at throwing, and better at correcting
the mistakes you make. When you’re REALLY good, you’re still making small mistakes
with your throws but have the ability to neutralise that with a good correction every throw. But
these corrections aren’t something you’re thinking about. They’re something your hands
do without you telling them to. They just get good at knowing from what they’ve just
caught, how they’re meant to throw it again. In VR I ended up getting worse and worse,
making larger and larger and wider and wider throws until the juggling failed. That’s
the kind of mistake you make when you first start out with juggling!
I have no interest in VR juggling. Maybe because I can do it for real. And I’m sure there
are a few people out there who will show me up by managing ridiculous juggling tricks
and numbers in Half-Life Alyx now. But I ask… why bother? Do it for real. It lasts longer.
Or wait for a proper VR juggling game. You mark my words: there’s going to be a mega-popular
one made at some point. It’s perfect! One where you don’t have to hold all the balls
to start the pattern off. One where it assists you with catching and throwing, and where
the balls don’t collide in the air. Maybe there could even be a low gravity option!
There would be so much assistance I don’t think your skills in this game would carry
across to real life, but I could imagine it would be an extremely therapeutic workout
and would lead to mesmerising patterns as the number of balls increases.
I at least see the potential. Also check out this video here where I show off.