When the Vive first launched, and thus was everybody's first experience with things like Roomscale positional tracking, one of the very first things released was a demo of a game called budget cuts. It became a sort of VR right of passage to experience a common situation in the game:
at one point in the demo, you need to crawl into the space above a drop-down ceiling to move from one room to another. When you get into the ceiling, the game makes you actually crawl on the floor -- if you stand up you are technically "going through" the roof and thus the game blacks out and doesn't let you proceed until you're physically on the ground. You crawl forward to the other room, where the exit is a tile that is removed that allows you to drop down into the room. But, budget cuts is a stealth action game, kinda like splinter cell or MGS (except cartoony, and with portal guns), so naturally your first reaction is to peek down below the tile into the room to make sure there are no robot guards in the way.
And literally every single time I saw someone do this demo, they wound up lightly slamming their face into the ground, because they were already on the floor, and expected to be able to peak their head down into a hole on the ground that didn't actually exist. Nobody gets hurt doing this, mind you, it's like a light tap, but it's a moment that sticks with you because, holy shit, you were totally convinced that was a real hole, and that was a real natural reaction. You didn't think about it, you just did it, because VR feels 100% natural to you. It's one of the best moments this entire generation, I guarantee you someone will chime in to say they did this when they got their headset ITT.
My dad is 70 years old, he hasn't really played video games since Doom and Sim City 2000 on our PC way back in the mid 90's. Back in the 80's he used to play video games a lot, he had a 2600, and then an intellivision, and played my Sega Master System and Genesis with me frequently. But once controllers and games started having 8+ buttons, two thumbsticks, a d-pad, plus home, start, and menu buttons, and 4 triggers - two analog, two digital, etc -- it became too much for him. He can't play video games anymore, they're just too complex and confusing for him.
He has an HTC vive and Oculus Rift, however, and frequently plays VR games. He does so, because VR controls make sense to him, it's natural. They're the most intuitive controls he's ever used. When you go to open a door in a game, you don't need to remember which button combinations make the door open. You just reach out with your real hand, grab the knob, and twist, like you do a thousand times a day IRL. When you want to aim down your scope in a gun, you don't need to remember which trigger to hold to bring it close, which button to press to hold your breath, which other trigger to hold to fire the gun, which thumbstick to move to change your aim, etc. Instead, you just pull your gun close to your face with your real hands, actually literally hold your breath, and pull the only trigger on your index finger.
VR Controls work so, so well. When done right, they are incomparable to conventional controls, not just in their utility (there are TONS of things you can do in VR that are outright impossible with a conventional controller), but also their ease of use. You don't need a tutorial to learn how to aim in VR, you already know how. The only things that need a tutorial are locomotion, as there are 3 major forms of locomotion currently in VR, and even then, once you pick them up, you can move from game to game as the entire industry has basically settled on those locomotion options.
Regarding interactions in HL:A - nobody is doing VR like valve yet, they are the absolutely leaders in VR game development. Their flat structure allowed them 6 years of non-committal experimentation. Talking to many of their VR developers, just having half a decade to play around with concepts without needing to ship a viable game in that time was a godsend. It let them experiment and figure out what works, and what doesn't. The Lab, for example, was their first example of their tests after 3 years, that was already 3 years ago. Expect HL:A to blow away any and all video game interactions you've ever experienced. Boneworks is super, super cool, definitely my most anticipated game this year, but I don't know how they can compete with what Valve has cooking.
