Elyse Bromser-Kloeden is a 3D environment artist and VR developer who is working on a 360-degree video streaming site called Vrideo. Vrideo is focused on making VR streaming work, and they’re doing some special optimizations provide a better quality VR streaming experience.
Elyse also has her own personal educational VR experiences including Meso VR and Painted Cave. She’s worked in the games industry as an environment artist and art director on games like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Til Morning’s Night. She’s also been freelancing in working on different projects where she’s able to create real-time VR environments.
Elyse is working on the user interface at Vrideo so there’s a consistent cross-platform VR experience from web to mobile to PC. She’s noticed that text-heavy content needs special attention in VR because it can be overwhelming. Other questions of how real to make the environment versus how abstract it should be so that the focus should be on the video content.
She talks about her educational experiences with Painted Cave and Meso VR. She used Autodesk’s free 123D Catch photogrammetry program to capture textures and 3D models at Vasquez Rocks to create Painted Cave. In the process, she learned the importance of starting by optimizing your VR experience from the beginning to create a comfortable VR experience first, and then focus on making things look good from there.
Elyse talks about how she’s using photos from online combined with Google Street View’s photo sphere captures of Mayan Ruins in order to create her Meso VR experience. She’s has some educational features that she’ll be adding to her experience, including a lot of historical insights based upon working directly with archeologists studying Mayan artifacts.
Her favorite educational experience is 6000 Moons, which is a guided tour of all of Earth’s satellites. She makes the great point that a lot of the iOS educational experiences are geared more towards youth, and the VR educational experiences tend to be more targeted towards an older adult audience.
For more information, be sure to check out Vrideo, which just launched yesterday as well as Elyse’s portfolio site.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.025] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: My name is Elise Bromser-Gloden. I'm working on a number of VR projects right now. The big one for me is I'm working with a startup called Vrideo, which is a company focused on immersive 360 video content. So they're building out a platform so users can upload their own videos and create their own user accounts and playlists and things like that to experience the video content. Aside from that, I'm also working on a number of personal projects when I have time to do so. The big one that I'm currently working on is a virtual tour of the ancient Maya world, which I'm tentatively calling Mezzo VR. And I'm creating that with Unreal 4.
[00:00:49.060] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. And so what is your background then?
[00:00:52.812] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So I worked in the gaming industry for about the past five years. I started out doing 3D environment art, and then moved on to art direction more recently. The first game I worked on was Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, and the latest was called Till Morning's Light, which is a mobile game developed by WayForward and being published by Amazon Game Studios. And that should be coming out in the near future. And then more recently than that, my partner and I relocated from LA to Dallas. And around that time, I decided to kind of take a little bit of time off, focus on freelancing, and learning a lot more about creating content for VR.
[00:01:31.157] Kent Bye: Nice. And so tell me a bit about that path of actually getting into VR and some of the first things that you were able to do.
[00:01:37.615] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Sure, yeah. I think VR is kind of something I've always been interested in growing up as kind of a nerdy, artsy kid. I read a lot of cyberpunk stuff like William Gibson and Neil Stevenson novels and I love The Matrix. So it was always kind of this cool futuristic thing in the back of my mind. And I think that it's actually partially why I was so drawn to gaming in the first place because It's the same idea that you're creating these real-time environments that you can go and experience as a place that didn't exist before the game developers created that place. So I've always been fascinated with this idea of creating real-time environments and that was what initially drew me to environment art as a career. I just think it's such a cool thing that you can go make these places and millions of people can go experience them and they have really vivid memories of being somewhere that they're only seeing through a computer screen. So the idea of being able to experience that as a more realistic place in VR where this virtual space is completely surrounding you has always been like the coolest thing ever for me. I've seen it as the ultimate medium to work in and I never thought that it would be something that I'd get a chance to work in so soon.
[00:02:48.008] Kent Bye: Wow, yeah. So it sounds like you're doing it full time. Are you doing environment art for your day job at Vridio, or is this something that you're kind of doing more on your personal projects?
[00:02:57.513] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So right now with Vridio, I'm actually focused currently mostly on the UI side of things, although I'll also be working more on the environment in the coming weeks. So that's actually something that's been a new experience for me. I haven't done a lot of UI and UX work in the past. And since it is, you know, Viridio is a crop platform experience, right? So they have the mobile site, they have the website, they have the VR experience. So the idea is to create a really cohesive feeling between all those platforms. So a big part of that is the UI and having, you know, the same copy and everything between all these experiences. So taking what they've created initially for the website and translating that into VR and presenting all of that information that you get on the site in a way that's not overwhelming to the user in VR has been a big challenge. And it's something that I've been focused on most recently.
[00:03:47.240] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. And so does that mean that you are kind of doing a web VR enabled website as well? Or is this an app that people would download in order to kind of experience it on their computer or on their mobile device?
[00:04:00.637] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So the website right now supports WebVR. It should be launching really soon, hopefully by the time this podcast is released. So if you're a 360 content creator, you can go check that out super soon. On my side of things, I'm focused on the VR app and designing specifically for a VR experience.
[00:04:20.368] Kent Bye: I see. Wow. What kind of lessons have you learned in terms of what tends to work in a user interface within VR, and what are some of the challenges?
[00:04:30.995] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So I'm still fairly early on in the project right now, but one of the big things that I'm noticing as I'm going forward with UI stuff especially is that when you have something that is really text heavy and has a lot of information that you need to get across to the user, you have to be careful. with how you're placing that content and how much you're displaying on the screen. Because it's one thing to read a bunch of text on a website, but to actually see that in VR and be surrounded by that, it can be a little bit overwhelming if there's too much going on and it's not well designed in the way that things are placed. So that's been a big challenge is kind of working around how much information we need to get across versus how much a user can really comprehend in that space.
[00:05:13.224] Kent Bye: I see. Yeah, that was actually something that Josh Carpenter had mentioned as well in terms of like, they tended to reduce the amount of text just because it was hard to read with the lower resolution, but also just create a design problem to have to create these low information density environments, but kind of still create a sense of place. And so have you been doing that in terms of trying to create a sense of going into another world while you're kind of interacting with this user interface and navigating through all these different video thumbnails?
[00:05:43.393] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Yeah, definitely. So that's going into the environment side of things. And that's the other challenging aspect of this is, you know, how realistic do you create an environment like that? How much of the real world do you want to pull in versus how abstract do you want to go with it? And how like, what does that look like when you're creating that place? And especially for an application that's focused on video, where you want to get the users to be able to get in to watch that 360 video as soon as they want to be able to do that. It almost can be fighting with the environment sometimes, because if you make the environment too interesting, maybe they might be more drawn to that, to the background than to the actual content.
[00:06:26.138] Kent Bye: Now, have you guys also been doing video streaming? I noticed that sometimes in the MilkVR, they try to do streaming a video, and it just looks so resolution that it's just like, oh, wow, I just want to just download it and watch the video rather than have it stream. So it seems like a tricky balance of wanting to have instant access to something, but at the same time, the quality may not be as good. So I don't know if you've found that kind of trade-off.
[00:06:51.285] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Yeah, I've definitely experienced that in things like the MilkVR app. Video is focused on streaming content, and we have some ideas of how to work around those problems. I don't know that I can say much more than that at this point, but it's definitely an issue that's really important to what we're developing.
[00:07:07.556] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. Yeah, sounds like you've got some optimizations there. That's cool. When it comes to some of your VR apps that you are putting together, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the Painted Cave and what you were trying to do with that.
[00:07:21.835] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Sure. So Painting Cave was the first VR experience, the first demo that I put together. And it was right around the time that Unreal 4 was first released to the public that I started working on it. And this was right after I had moved to Dallas and I had a lot of free time to be working on stuff. So my initial goal was to make something that looked cool and also ran well in VR and kind of used the cool aspects of VR like, you know, ray casting from where you're looking and things like that to actually interact with the environment. So I actually started out by going out to a place in LA before I left Dallas called Vasquez Rocks. And it's actually a pretty famous park where you might have seen it in Star Trek. That's kind of this crazy looking sci-fi landscape where they have these huge rocks jutting out of the park. So I went up there and I took a bunch of photos of just rocks and ground textures and things like that. And I imported that into 123D Catch, which is like a photogrammetry app that takes photos and creates models out of them. So I went up there, took a bunch of photos, put them through there, created game-optimized assets out of those and put those into Unreal and started building out the environment with that. And my goal again was really to learn about creating stuff for VR and learn about the new features with Unreal 4. So it's a fairly small experience. You can download it on Oculus Share now, but you basically go through this cave and you can look at the paintings on the walls and interact with them briefly.
[00:08:57.344] Kent Bye: And so what did you learn about your VR pipeline in that process then?
[00:09:01.671] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: The main thing I think I took away from that was that you need to be focused on optimization from the get-go. You need to be really cognizant of what you're putting in the scene, you know, what kind of post-processing you might be using, all these things that, you know, working on a traditional console or PC title, you would have a lot more freedom with. And coming off my most recent work on a mobile game, that actually helped a ton because I was very focused on optimization for that. And so it's definitely a lot about striking that balance between really high-quality assets that look good and hold up in VR and have enough geometry to look realistic versus the performance that you need to reach to make it a comfortable VR experience.
[00:09:45.970] Kent Bye: Interesting. And so with Meso VR, it looks like you're doing a virtual tour of ancient Mayan civilization. And were you trying to kind of reconstruct what you think the buildings would have looked like? Or are you trying to kind of put them in the state that you see them in?
[00:10:01.732] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So I'm doing both, because I think first off, one of the cool things that VR allows us to do is kind of go on virtual field trips, right? So you can go to places that you could never go to in real life. So the site I'm recreating is actually called Hocho. And I was down in the Yucatan visiting Maya sites a couple of years back, but it was so remote and out of the way that I never got a chance to go to it. But it always was this really cool looking site and has this really ornate stucco mask details. That was kind of the initial thinking is that, OK, well, I didn't get to go there in real life, so I'll make this in VR. So when I started making that, I'm mostly relying on photos I'm finding online. And actually, Google Street View has a photosphere capture of the site. So I've been relying a lot on that just to recreate the current state of the site. And then the next portion of that is to be recreating what it would have looked like originally. So if you were a Mayan and you're walking around the temple complex there, what did that actually feel like and look like?
[00:11:02.282] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. So with these photo spheres that Google has taken, it seemed like they're probably like just a 360 photo with no stereoscopic effects. And so you're able to kind of at least get enough of a size of a sense of the scale and then put it into VR to really feel like you're there. Is that sort of what you've been finding?
[00:11:20.548] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's been a huge help just being able to kind of toodle around the photo spheres and see the relationships between the different buildings. Because if you're looking at 2D photos you find online, you really don't get the same sense as if you can move around the scene. And even though it's not stereoscopic, that's been a huge help in determining like the scale of things and the placement and everything like that to make it really feel like the real place.
[00:11:46.810] Kent Bye: And you also mentioned that you're doing some information visualizations. And so I'm curious what type of things you're trying to visualize there within VR.
[00:11:55.375] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Sure. So the biggest part of that is that I'm trying to construct this three-dimensional timeline that takes you through kind of a brief overview of the history of the Maya civilization. So you have a 3D timeline kind of splayed out in front of you. And then beneath that, you have a map of Central America and kind of the timeline will take you through the different timeframes of the civilization. And then the map, it's going to show you what was going on during that time. So like what major cities were popping up, what was happening, who was at war with who, things like that.
[00:12:32.661] Kent Bye: One of the things that comes up is that a lot of that information traditionally has been very two dimensional. So maybe it's text or I'm curious, how do you add a third dimension to some of this information visualization then?
[00:12:44.495] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So I think a lot of it, well, a big part of it is actually going to be voiceover. So taking away the text that you might see, you know, in an infographic in 2D or a textbook and making that into audio if it's not something that's easily displayed in 3D. But aside from that, creating 3D iconography for the map that kind of explains what everything is. So if you have a temple, you know, it looks like a temple on the map. If you have a cenote over here, it looks like a cenote. So just looking at it briefly, you kind of have a sense of what's going on and where things are.
[00:13:20.045] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I find it really fascinating too that you've never actually been there and you're creating it in VR. I just really wonder what it would be like for you to, you know, create this experience in VR and then actually physically go there. Are you planning to actually travel there and kind of see how, what the difference is?
[00:13:37.033] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So I don't have current plans to go to the particular site. I'm actually going down to Belize later this summer to work with an archaeological field school that's excavating Maya ruins in Belize. And so it's not the site I'm recreating, but I definitely hope to get a better sense of the types of things I should be including in the experience. by getting some hands-on experience in the field and working with real archaeologists to see what they're doing on a day-to-day basis and how they're excavating things and how they kind of reconstruct things to actually determine what they would have looked like originally.
[00:14:10.710] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. That sounds really interesting that you're kind of becoming this virtual reality archaeologist, bringing it back to life. That's really cool.
[00:14:21.216] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Yeah, I'm really excited about that.
[00:14:23.512] Kent Bye: What are some of the other virtual reality educational experiences that you've had that you find inspiring or to kind of take lessons from?
[00:14:31.093] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: So I think my favorite right now was 6,000 Moons. And it's kind of this visualization of the satellite system that orbits Earth. And it kind of seemed initially like a boring topic to me, but I downloaded it and I tried it out. And it's actually really, really cool. And they give you kind of a guided audio tour of the different levels of satellites orbiting and why they're in their different orbits. why they're set up the way they are and they kind of take you through each of these layers step by step. And I actually found it to be really, really cool. You know, it was really visual experience. Everything was animated to go along with the audio. And it kind of took a boring subject or for me, something that seems fairly boring and presented it in a way that was really immersive. And I really felt like I was engaged and I was learning something as I was watching it.
[00:15:24.197] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that being able to take these virtual field trips like this is going to be a huge part of the future of VR. And I'm sure that it'll take off in gaming, but if it doesn't live up to the potential of a lot of gamers, I'm sure that just the educational experiences alone are going to be where VR really excels as a medium.
[00:15:44.282] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think one of the cool things, too, is that it kind of lends itself to experiences and things that might benefit a higher age group. So if you look at a lot of the interactive stuff on iOS or Android right now, a lot of that is geared towards young kids. And, you know, obviously with the health and safety warnings from Oculus where they're recommending children under the age of 13 shouldn't be using this, it definitely lends itself to developing content for an older age group. And I think there's maybe a bit of a hole there right now with educational content that VR could start to fill.
[00:16:19.301] Kent Bye: Oh, yeah, that's really interesting. And so what other types of experiences do you want to have in VR then?
[00:16:26.664] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Oh, gosh. I would love to see a really great narrative-based game, something like Dear Esther or Gone Home. Those have been my favorite games to play recently. They just have really engaging environments to wander around in that really make you want to explore every nook and cranny. And I think taking something like that into VR is going to be really powerful.
[00:16:48.837] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it can enable?
[00:16:57.638] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: I think going back to my love of cyberpunk and that idea of the metaverse, once we get to a point that we can make a really engaging social experience where you can look around you and feel like you're in the room with other people who may be on the other side of the planet, and once that feels real, like you're actually in the same space with them, I think that's gonna be maybe the thing that draws in more people than anything else.
[00:17:24.837] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:17:28.020] Elyse Bromser Kloeden: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
