Patrick O’Luanaigh founded nDreams based out of Farnborough, UK in 2006 originally creating content for the PlayStation Home. After seeing some of the early consumer virtual reality head mounted displays, he quickly pivoted to focusing exclusively on creating immersive virtual reality content.
One of the first games that nDreams announced is called The Assembly, which is a sci-fi adventure game that presents the user with a number of different moral dilemmas. They’re not ready to talk too much about it yet, but Patrick did give some of the background story, intention and motivation behind exploring the medium of virtual reality through the process of making this adventure game. They’re planning on having it as a release title for both the Project Morpheus on the PS4 as well as for the Oculus Rift.
Patrick talks about the wide range of different initiatives ranging from developing for the Gear VR to helping AMD make some announcements about Liquid VR at GDC.
Patrick also talks about providing the seed funding for VRFocus.com in order to build excitement for virtual reality by posting very frequently about all of the latest developments and announcements in the VR space. I had the chance to interview VRFocus editor-in-chief Kevin Joyce at the Immersion 2014 gathering in Los Angeles. VRFocus has established itself as the AP of the VR world posting 6-7 updates per day on all of the latest incremental developments, and Patrick talks about the editorial freedom that he provides to Kevin and the rest of the VRFocus team.
Patrick is certainly a key figure in the consumer VR space, and so I was definitely glad that I had a chance to catch up with him at GDC and hear more about his background and to hear where he thinks the overall virtual reality space is headed. nDreams is definitely focusing on the gaming market at first, but he sees that there are a lot of really exciting opportunities for education in VR.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.978] Patrick O_Luanaigh: My name's Patrick O'Looney. I started off in the video games industry making boxed video games, so things like Tomb Raider and games that you pick up in a game store in a box. About eight years ago now, I decided to leave Eidos, the company I was working at, and set up my own company. I always wanted to run my own studio. So I set up nDreams, it's myself in a little tiny office in this place called Farnborough in the UK where they have a big air show every couple of years. And we've kind of grown from there to about 30 people now internally in the studio. We started off doing stuff for PlayStation Home. So PlayStation Home is this virtual world on the PS3. It's quite a niche area, but it's one that we did really well in and we became a leading publisher in the world inside PlayStation Home and did a lot of apartments and games and motorbikes and dances and all sorts of crazy stuff. And, you know, it was a nice area, we made quite a lot of money in it, but it wasn't where we wanted to be. And about 18 months ago, just over 18 months ago, I saw the DK1, and I got an early look at the Sony Morpheus, I've been working with Sony quite closely, and basically fell in love with VR. You know, head over heels, just thought, this is so cool. For the kind of games I love making, which are games that immerse you in other worlds, VR's brilliant. You know, it's about teleporting you somewhere else, and that feeling you get with a great VR experience of actually being somewhere, I just thought, wow, that's something special, this is gonna be huge. So we basically pivoted the company away from PlayStation Home to just focus totally on VR. So we spent the last 18 months doing a lot of experimenting and prototyping. We've got a number of games, launch games, in development at the moment. We've got a couple for the Gear VR, Gunner, which came out yesterday, I think, actually in the paid store, finally. And we've also got a game called The Assembly, which is a big adventure game for Oculus and Morpheus and hopefully the Steam VR headset as well. And a few other bits and pieces in development. So we've basically been expanding and growing, focusing completely on VR games and experiences. And our aim is really to have a few launch titles for all of the big headsets. We got a bit of investment recently as well, which is great. It's allowed us not to stress too much about the fact that, you know, that Morpheus is Q1, Q2 next year and not this year. But, you know, that's fine. We're just focusing on making the very best games and experiences we can and really enjoying it and learning a lot because it's a completely new area. Nobody really knows So we're learning fast and trying lots of stuff out all the time.
[00:02:18.832] Kent Bye: And so tell me about some of the lessons you learned in terms of doing what looks to be a bit of an adventure game with the Assembly. So just talk a bit about that process of designing and developing and prototyping some things that worked and maybe some things that didn't work.
[00:02:32.588] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, first of all, we decided we wanted an adventure game because I have a real strong belief that adventure games would be a fantastic genre in VR. When people put a VR headset on for the first time, they don't start running around at top speed, spinning around. They stop and they look and they explore and they look up and down and gaze at the cobwebs and they try and bend under the table and, you know, it's fantastic for exploration. And therefore, I think adventure games are perfect for that. You can have a great dialogue, a great world, lots of exploring at a fairly slow pace, solving puzzles, figuring stuff out. It's an ideal genre for VR at the moment. So, having decided we wanted to do an adventure game, we came up with the idea for The Assembly, which is this kind of mysterious underground bunker, scientists gone rogue. It's a really nice story, with a couple of different playable characters, and started doing a lot of prototyping and experimenting. So we tried all sorts of crazy things out, you know, what happens if your avatar's wearing glasses and you can see the frames at the edge of the screen? What happens if you look into microscopes in VR, how would that work? What's it like to play as two different characters, one that's tall, one that's short? and how does that feel as a user when you're suddenly a lot smaller than you normally are in real life or a lot taller and a whole host of other things like that and some of the experiments were truly horrible and we would never use them in a game ever but you know that's part of the fun of experimenting but also quite a lot of them work really nicely so we try to put as many of those things into the assembly as possible And it'll be our first adventure game, it's really beautiful, it looks great, got a great story. It's not a 20 hour long game, it'll be probably 4 hours or something, but it's a really nice experience, a really great story, and really, I think, a great first VR adventure game. So we'll learn from that and then build onwards and upwards over the next few years, but it's a genre that makes sense for VR.
[00:04:03.851] Kent Bye: And so what were some of those things that just did not work in virtual reality? I'm curious.
[00:04:08.536] Patrick O_Luanaigh: We tried lots of solutions for positional tracking is quite an interesting one because obviously you don't really want to stop. So for example, we tried stopping the player from moving if he gets close to walls and things and wants to stick his head through objects. But there's nothing worse in VR than being artificially limited. You know, you want to move your head and not see the view move. So we tried that and thought, oh, that's horrible. So we ended up with a solution that works quite well where you stick your head through and things kind of fade to black if you're somewhere you're not supposed to be. But you're still allowed to move, and so you're still given free movement. Tried things like head bobbing, you know, which you also tend to have from traditional video games when you walk around, and head bobbing really sucks in VR. And camera movement. We obviously tried the obvious first things like cut scenes and things, and we went, oh, that's really horrible. It doesn't work well. We learned a lot about how to tell story and how to tell story whilst you're walking around. I think influence by games like Half-Life quite a bit as well, which do that really well without cutscenes.
[00:04:57.467] Kent Bye: Yeah, tell me a bit more about, with virtual reality, I think it's a little bit like a new communications medium and we have video games to learn from, but when you're immersed in the world, what type of lessons do you learn in terms of storytelling within an immersive environment?
[00:05:12.192] Patrick O_Luanaigh: I think we've tried lots of different ways of getting, we love the idea of giving lots of narrative and lots of dialogue to the player and given the budget we've got for Assembly we haven't been able to have hundreds of characters that you get really close to and you see in beautiful detail because we've got a place for our strengths, we've got a place for what we're working with budget wise. So we're trying to figure out ways of telling the story, telling the dialogue without having lots of close conversations with characters. We also try to use the environment to tell the story as well. So I think that's one interesting thing you can do with VR particularly because you're able to look up and look around and look down and you notice things. So you can use the environment in a clever way. Games like Gone Home have done very well if you played that on Steam. Use the environment to tell a story as well as dialogue. So we have lots of great dialogue, a bit of a rollercoaster storyline, but we also use the environment nicely rather than just having characters talking or your character monologuing all the time. And that balance works pretty well actually.
[00:05:59.276] Kent Bye: And so tell me a bit about Gunner and that type of gameplay.
[00:06:03.059] Patrick O_Luanaigh: So Gunner was our first VR game to come out now for Gear VR. We wanted to do something super accessible. So we love the idea of not requiring control and not even using the touchpad on the side of the Gear VR, but just allowing you to control everything, the menus and the whole game just by looking. We thought it'd be a really nice first experience for people for VR. So that's what we did. It's basically a turret shooter, a little bit like the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, you know, when you're in the guns firing away at the TIE Fighters. It's very similar to that. We've got all sorts of enemy ships and other ships. You can look around inside the turret. There's dialogue. Your character gets spoken to. different planets and different worlds you go to but it's basically a really fun arcade shooter that fits VR very nicely and what we like about it the most is that you know anybody can use it because you're static in a turret it's super comfortable for people you're not having to get used to kind of rotating and moving in a world and because there's no control to get used to anybody can pick it up and look and everyone knows how to turn their head so it's a really accessible game and we're really proud of it actually so it's a really fun first VR project.
[00:06:59.495] Kent Bye: And one of the other things that InDreams has done is fund the news site of VR Focus. So maybe you could talk a bit about your involvement with VR Focus and where you hope to see that go.
[00:07:10.258] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah, sure. So I mean, basically, when we started thinking about VR, and we did pivot very early, there was no VR site out there that was updated regularly. There were a few fan sites. I think Road to VR was doing some stuff. But there was very few updates at all. And it felt like there was a real need for a site that got regularly updated with all the latest news, that you really covered VR well. So we thought, well, we got some money, why don't we set it up and get it going? Because we want to spread the word about VR, we want to get people excited. And so we set up VR Focus, got this guy Kevin Joyce in, who used to be editor of Electronic Theater, did a really good job there building that site up. And the site's doing really well. I mean, it's run completely independently. So Kevin does whatever he wants. He doesn't cover our games any more than anybody else. He treats us just like any developer. And that works really nicely. So it's completely hands-off. But we're really proud of how the site's grown. And the numbers have been getting really, really big recently. We've got lots of things planned in terms of revamping the site and lots of new stuff coming. And the guys are doing a great job. We've got a good team now. There are three people working on the site, getting six to eight-plus news articles out every day. And it's growing well. So yeah, it's something I'm really proud of. And again, it's not there to make us money. It's not there to benefit us. It's really there to get people excited about VR. And it seems to be doing that. So I'm really pleased with how it's growing.
[00:08:19.044] Kent Bye: And maybe you could comment on the growth of virtual reality up to this point at GDC, which it seems to really be exploding, from my perception. How do you look at it from the last two to three years and how far virtual reality has come?
[00:08:32.700] Patrick O_Luanaigh: I think it's really, it feels to me like if you watch the Olympics and you watch the cycling races occasionally where they cycle around really slowly waiting for somebody to make a move and you know there's a few riders all kind of looking around and then somebody will go for it and they all go and suddenly there's a sprint to the line and it's a little bit like that for VR I think you know lots of people playing around and looking and talking about you know Oculus obviously with the DK1 a long time ago, but it's been ages to get even remotely close to a consumer launch. And suddenly now, a few people have said to me, look, this is GDC VR. That's what it feels like to them. And I think it really is. There's so many great announcements with Steam and HTC and Sony announcing a launch window now finally, which is great. And lots of great stuff happening with Oculus and all sorts of other guys. I think it's a really exciting time for VR. It feels like the momentum's finally, it's happening now. Everyone's been talking about it for ages. And a lot of developers I know have said, Yeah, you know, it's quite fun. But is it really gonna take obviously just gonna be a gimmick, you know And I've been convinced all the way along. It's not a gimmick because it makes things better You know for immersive virtual world experiences, you know put you into another world. It's so much better than watching on a TV So I think most of the guys are finally beginning to realize this is actually happening now. This is gonna happen this is gonna be big and there are so many big players in there now with a lot of money behind it that it is going to happen. And the hub is great. The hub works really well. You try the Crescent Bay and you look around and it's a fantastic experience. So I'm really optimistic. I think, you know, finally, that's it. We're in the sprint phrase now, running towards the line. And, you know, with the Steam HTC headset due out end of this year, you know, that's really the big starting point for high quality VR. You know, Gear VR is brilliant, but it's never going to be quite as high quality in terms of visuals as Steam and Oculus and Morpheus. So it's a really exciting time. I'm so, can't wait to get some of our games out to start showing off the assembly and, you know, in real detail now that we've I've done a lot of work on it since last E3. And just, yeah, getting more and more games out and seeing how VR grows.
[00:10:18.211] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about virtual reality is that you almost have to kind of see it to believe it. It's kind of hard to really wrap your mind around it until you're actually in virtual reality and see what it's like. And so maybe you could talk about your first virtual reality experience and then sort of how you went from thinking about, this might be a good idea, then deciding to do this big pivot.
[00:10:36.715] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah. Actually, my very first virtual reality experience was back in the 90s in a place called the Trocadero in London, where they have all sorts of crazy arcade-y things and fun places. And it was one of the really old VR headsets that weighed about a ton that they rested on your head. And it was super simple and very basic. And the latency was probably about half a second, and probably about 10 frames a second in wireframe. It wasn't great. But you know what? There was something magical about it even then. I remember the demo very clearly. I haven't figured out which headset it is, I think it may be a VFX or a virtuality or something, but you crawled around the floor as a baby and there were these giant mum and other people walking around and you had to avoid their legs and crawl through the kitchen and it was just such a powerful first experience, but obviously it was rubbish as well in many ways in terms of the technology. And then when I saw the DK1, it took me back to that and made me think, wow, you know, the thing that I loved about that is there, but actually, this works now. It's quick and it feels right and it doesn't make me feel uncomfortable and the graphics are good and now when you look at the latest VR headsets, you're like, oh, the DK1's horrible and old and pixel-y and doesn't work well, but actually, at the time, it was incredible. So, yeah, that was it. I played, actually, Dreadhalls, the demo of Dreadhalls, which I loved, I thought it was great, because it generated fear in a very powerful way and it just showed to me, you know, VR is an emotion multiplier. not just horror, that's the easy one that lots of people are doing, it's the kind of low-hanging fruit, but for all emotions I think VR just makes them more powerful, stronger, because you feel like you're actually there and therefore everything's much, much more powerful. And I found that playing Alien Isolation actually and the Oculus at I remember when it was Gamescom or GDC, E3 last year, and God, it was scary. I mean, absolutely scary. When this alien comes to you in VR, you just wanna, I mean, literally, I ripped the headset off because I just had to get away, and it's your primeval instinct just to get away from this thing, because you believe you're there. And I think the same is true with other emotions, you know, love and happiness and fear and all sorts of other stuff. I think you're gonna get some really nice experiences in VR. So yeah, fell in love with VR at that point, saw Morpheus, saw some of their early demos, went, wow, this is so cool, and that was it, I was hooked.
[00:12:35.045] Kent Bye: And what would you say is the emotional profile of The Assembly?
[00:12:39.200] Patrick O_Luanaigh: It's definitely not a horror game, but it is very mysterious. So I don't want to say too much because we're not really talking about it until E3. But we're trying to put a lot of different stuff in there. So like I said, we've prototyped and experimented a lot in VR. And there's lots of different things that we found works well. So you're never going to quite know what's coming up next. The way it's been designed, it's been designed to have lots of interesting different VR challenges and techniques in there. So hopefully, it's going to be a game where you never quite know what's happening next with a great gripping story, really interesting adventure game, just showing how well adventure games can work in VR. And yeah, I can't wait to start shining it up.
[00:13:10.656] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things I found interesting is like this ability to create sci-fi futures. And, you know, there's a bit of a dystopian twist to the assembly. And, you know, I'm just wondering if, you know, you see the medium of virtual reality to be able to kind of put people in these sci-fi worlds to be able to see like, oh, if we're not careful, this is like the extent to how bad things can get if there's any of that sort of intent behind that.
[00:13:33.497] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah, I'm a huge sci-fi fan, as are most people in the office, and I think that's one of the nice things. You don't have to go photorealistic in VR. You can have a Tron-style world, you can have very different graphical styles, and people accept it. When they're in there, they feel like they're there and it works fine. So not everything has to be gritty and realistic in modern day. You can really go off and place people in places that they wouldn't be able to do in real life, and that's part of the fun of VR. Why not go visit Mars? back in time and see what the ancient wonders of the world were like for real, actually, and look around or visit the dinosaurs or whatever it is. And I think that's super exciting for me. In terms of using VR to sort of show possible futures if things go bad, yeah, that'd certainly be fun. The Assembly has a lot of moral messages in there, and there's a lot about moral choices as well. So you have to make a lot of moral choices about what sort of person you are. It might be very well saying, well, if I could kill one person to save 100, yeah, of course I'd do that. It's a sensible thing to do. But if you actually then had to pull a gun on somebody, would you do it, even if you knew it was right? There's a lot of much more detailed concepts than that, but there's a lot of deciding where your morality lies in a really interesting way in the story. So we're trying to put a pin of that in the Assembly, and I think it'll be quite interesting for people to play through and figure out which decisions they want to make.
[00:14:43.610] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. You know, there's Kohlberg's model of the theory of moral development. So, you know, it's like in some ways, the more moral you are, you're trying to make decisions that are more encompassing of more and more people and not just yourself. And so I do think that virtual reality has the potential to help put them into situations to kind of grow and evolve them. So that to me, I think, is an exciting potential to use virtual reality, actually improve yourself psychologically.
[00:15:08.249] Patrick O_Luanaigh: I think so and you know that's a great example of one of many many areas that VR makes a lot of sense for outside of games you know starting off with games but you know what there's learning and training staff and teaching people and figuring out getting over phobias and all sorts of other areas you know you could go on and on you know just for education how amazing would it be to be in a you know World War One trenches and look around and explore in VR you know so much better than reading a book on World War One and I think it'd be incredible and the price of headsets means that schools will be able to afford them So I think education is just one area where VR is going to be super exciting and that's why I think VR is so cool for me. It's not just games, it allows different types of things, like experiences. We've got a title launching in a few weeks called Perfect Beach on the Gear VR. And it's not a game, there's no score, there's no goal, you don't get to the end. If you've had a stressful day, your traffic's been bad, your boss has been giving you grief, you stick the headset on and you're on the most beautiful beach in the world. And you just look around. You can listen to an audio book or a meditation track that tells you to breathe deeply and really relaxes you, or just some music. And you can just chill. And there's no goal. And you might just do it for two minutes or five minutes. But the aim is it takes you back to when you're on your holiday. It just makes you feel, get away from the stress of the real world. And that's the kind of project that wouldn't work on any other platform. On a TV, that would make no sense. But in VR, when you can look around behind you and see the waves and the birds, actually, it's really nice. And people are really enjoying it. We've had some great, great feedback on the user testing. It's fun that you can do new types of products as well.
[00:16:30.399] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's interesting. You know, a lot of times when there's a new communications medium, you tend to port over whatever's happening in the previous medium. And so with gaming, it seems like there's going to be a lot of games at first, but I imagine that it is going to grow beyond just games into education. And, you know, as a leader of a company doing virtual reality, have you started to seriously think about, like, down the road, would you foresee yourself possibly pivoting away from games and doing more and more of these types of experiences like The Perfect Peach?
[00:16:56.385] Patrick O_Luanaigh: We've certainly talked about experiences a lot and I think our focus at the moment, because we're thinking about revenue in the first year or two, we try not to get too long term because we do need to make some money as well, it's quite important. So we're thinking about games and experiences primarily and a nice mix of the two. I think, yeah, we're very keen to try all sorts of stuff out and we in fact we announced a partnership with a company in the UK who are doing VR filmmaking and so we're sort of exploring with them what lies between films and games and what you can do in VR in between those two mediums that might be quite fun and so we're really keen to try lots of stuff out and explore so I think you'll see us move into other areas as well but games and experiences are absolutely where it's at at the beginning and we're We're going to try and figure out how to make those right for VR and not just copy, as you said, not just copy old games, but actually do stuff that works properly for VR right from the ground up.
[00:17:43.487] Kent Bye: And how have you been addressing input controls? You know, having been developing for Sony Morpheus, you have a sixth degree of freedom controllers with the Move and, you know, Steam that's coming out with their HTC. They're having input controllers. I imagine that, you know, it's unsure at this point whether or not, you know, Oculus will have input controllers as well. But if they don't, then that presents an interesting question of, like, how do you design a game that has, you know, a fallback?
[00:18:07.196] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah, so I mean we've designed the assembly in particular being our first sort of big game for these headsets to work on as many different headsets as possible. So it will run with just a controller and that works really nicely because at the moment Oculus doesn't have anything other than that and you can't, you know, even on PS4 not everybody has the move and I'm not convinced Morpheus will be bundled with the move for everybody. So whilst that'll be really cool and I'd like to support it for people that have got it, if you've just got a DualShock 4, you know what, that actually works pretty well. It's wireless, you can track the position and rotation of it, you know, it works quite nicely actually. We're we're trying to let anybody who buys a VR headset play the assembly We don't just want to support only gesture control and you have to have a leap motion to play it for example or whatever So we're playing around with a lot of different controls and we'll try and support those that we think are going to be successful Commercial but at the same time we're trying to make an experience for everybody and the minimum version of that is a controller and a VR headset and great 3d audio and you can play the assembly really well
[00:18:59.397] Kent Bye: And just yesterday, AMD announced Liquid VR. And you said that you're going to be going to the press conference and helping them make the announcement. What was InDream's involvement with AMD and the Liquid VR?
[00:19:09.641] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah, so I was one of three companies that spoke there, just in front of the press at the conference, just talking about basically how excited we were about Liquid VR. It's a really nice SDK, and potentially hardware later on as well, I think, that just works brilliantly with VR and PC. So it allows you to have two GPUs, one doing left eye, one doing right eye. It has incredibly low latency, it has some really clever stuff that does sort of time warping and allows that to work super quickly so they get the latency really down and it's all about getting super high consistent frame rates and what's exciting for me is that you know obviously with VR because you're drawing everything twice and you're drawing stuff at a high frame rate and high resolution it's very hard to do graphical quality that's the same as a traditional PC game or PS4 game without VR because obviously you're just drawing so much more and the nice thing about what AMD are doing is their hardware and their SDK is going to allow us to get a lot closer to that kind of really high graphical bar. So it's a really clever tech, and they're a smart company. So it's just quite nice for us to be there to be able to talk about what we're doing and why we think it's great.
[00:20:04.350] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it seems like you're a figure in the VR community that's involved in a lot of different areas of what's happening in the future of VR. And I'm sure that there's things that you're involved with that you can't talk about at this moment. But are there any things that we haven't talked about yet that you're involved with that you'd like to share?
[00:20:19.136] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Not really, no I don't think there's anything I can talk about. Part of the fun of being in VR is that it's so new and so fast moving and that's super exciting. Every day, every week there's some new bit of information or some new headset or some new piece of hardware or something else happens that makes you re-evaluate your plans and that's quite exciting. very frustrating I think for our board and investors because things are constantly changing but it's part of the excitement of being first in a new area and that also means we're getting great opportunities to talk with people like AMD and we know a lot of the hardware guys and the first party guys really well and we're having some great conversations about all sorts of crazy stuff. It's not much I can announce or say today, but I'm just so honored and so pleased to be part of VR. There's so many smart guys out there figuring out how to make VR games work well. So many smart guys making amazing leaps in terms of hardware and the quality and the latency and the frame rate. And it's really coming together now. It's going to happen. And I'm so proud to play a little part of that. So I'm just loving it.
[00:21:15.430] Kent Bye: Well, yeah, just speaking of hardware, there's things like, you know, the Virtuix Omni, there's, you know, more specific hand controls to do finger tracking, leap motion, you know. Is there a plan to try to integrate as many of these things as possible or is there kind of a diminishing returns in terms of like, you know, trying to support everything that's out there without sort of a standard middleware to kind of mediate all that?
[00:21:37.354] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Yeah, so a little part of me inside my heart would love to support everything because a lot of people are putting so much hard work into this but the harsh reality is that we've only got so much time and money and we want to spend it on the stuff that we think actually a lot of people are going to play. So there's no point spending a few weeks implementing a piece of hardware that's going to sell a thousand units because it just doesn't make sense. So we're trying to pick and choose the stuff that we think is going to be successful and that's quite hard at the moment because there's an awful lot of hardware out there and a lot of companies saying a lot of great stuff but Is it actually going to see the light of day? Is it actually going to sell to half a million, a million consumers? And are they going to use it? So we're trying to pick our battles. We're certainly talking to a lot of hardware guys. We're playing around with it. But I'm not sure we're going to implement a lot of it. We're going to try and, as we think stuff's going to be successful, we'll support it. But we're going to try and wait to see which things we think are going to sell in decent numbers.
[00:22:25.110] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality?
[00:22:29.937] Patrick O_Luanaigh: Well, I'm convinced the form factor will get smaller and smaller. Ideally, a pair of glasses would be the dream for VR, just be so portable, so easy. And also, I'd love to think that we solve the augmented reality problem of pixel darkening, as well as brightening stuff up that you can see. You can actually shut out the real world, so you can have an AR VR headset that It's light, sits on your eyes like a pair of glasses. You can see the real world. I mean, you can go from AR into VR. So I could be looking at this coffee cup I've got here on the table, and a little doorway appears, and then I go into that, and then suddenly I'm in a VR world and look around, and then I come back out to the real world again. You know, that kind of stuff will be really fun. So ultimately, I think AR, VR in one headset that's light and easy and is wireless and portable, that's the dream. We're away from that, sadly. But some of the stuff that, you know, Microsoft are doing with HoloLens and Magic Leap rumoured to be doing as well. It's really exciting in AR and obviously VR is incredible in terms of what's coming. So I think we're getting there and that'll be really interesting but we're probably five, ten years away from that at least.
[00:23:27.749] Kent Bye: And what sort of impacts do you see it having on society then?
[00:23:31.210] Patrick O_Luanaigh: I mean, in terms of VR, the impact's going to be amazing, I think, ultimately, because it will spread into so many areas. You know, when you go check out a hotel room, you'll be able to just have a look around it in VR. When you're buying a house, you can do the VR tour, or, you know, you go to school, you learn about stuff in VR. There's going to be so many interesting areas. Business meetings, you know, virtual worlds make a load of sense in VR, so to be able to sit around there and see other people's avatars and see their faces and see them gesture and hear them talk is going to be really powerful. I think VR will integrate with a lot of stuff. AR, well VR's great at more than anything is creating new worlds and taking you to places, so it's brilliant for games. AR, I'm not so convinced is great for games, but it's amazing for apps, it's brilliant for walking down the street. And if I have an AR headset here at GDC and I could just see the names of people that I recognize, I can't quite remember what they're called, and oh, that's so-and-so from that company, that would be great. All that kind of fantastic data could be put in, and ultimately, I think if you get a VR AR headset that does the two, you can use AR stuff as you're walking around the world to make stuff better, and then, you want to sit down and just relax and go to a beach or go play a game, you can switch into VR mode and just do that. And I think that will be amazing. OK, great. Well, thank you. No problem. Thanks very much.
