Joel Green is a producer and audio director at Cloudhead Games working on the The Gallery: Six Elements adventure game. He talks about the process of being invited to a secret meeting at Valve to experience the HTC Vive for the first time, and then going home with a development kit to create room-scale VR experiences.
Cloudhead Games has been working on consumer VR for a long, long time, and they’ve tried out a number of different hardware solutions. They see that the HTC Valve have really solved the input and tracking problems for the first time in a viable way. Up to this point, it’s been a lot of incremental progress and half-steps, but Joel says that Valve has really nailed this solution and it will take VR to another level of immersion and presence.
Joel talks about the process of collaborating with the other development shops who were invited by Valve to develop a demo for GDC. They were going through the process of debugging the hardware and software together because Valve was still developing the underlying SDK as they were already building experiences. There was a private forum that the developers used in order to share their lessons learned for developing a room-scale VR experience.
Joel also says that Cloudhead Games intends on still supporting as many different VR experiences as they can since they know that not everyone is going to be able to experience the full room-scale VR experience. He talks a bit about the Lighthouse tracking solution, and what’s involved with setting it up. And finally, he says that room-scale VR and this new tracking solution from Valve has the potential to bring in a lot more physical interactions into VR and that he’s excited to continue to experiment and develop more experiences that explore the realm of what’s possible.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.017] Joel Green: My name is Joel Green. I'm the producer and audio director at Cloudhead Games. We work out of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. And we're working on a game called the Gallery Six Elements. And lately, we've been working on a demo with Valve for the new Vive HTC headset. And that's what we're doing here is showing that off.
[00:00:34.173] Kent Bye: Great. So yeah, tell me how that came about with, you know, collaborating with Valve on this cutting edge software that is just being announced here at GDC.
[00:00:42.546] Joel Green: Yeah, sure, they basically came and asked us to come to Valve, you know, a while ago last year and show off the last demo we had made. And so we went and showed it to them and we kind of established a relationship over the course of a few months and then one day they just, you know, invited us to come to their studio for a big secret conference and didn't tell us what it was about, just said, we'll pay for everything, just show up. And we did and That was us and all the other developers who are developing the demos for this headset. And they basically just had a big meeting with us and told us what was going on, and showed us all the gear, sent us home with gear, and asked if we were interested in making a demo for GDC. So we were, and here we are.
[00:01:33.387] Kent Bye: So tell me about your first experience of what it was like to step into this next generation virtual reality.
[00:01:41.470] Joel Green: We've been working on VR games for years now. We're one of the early people doing it. So we've worked with a lot of different kinds of hardware. We started with the Razer Hydras and the TK1. the kind of older VR sets and when Valve showed us their solution we were all floored like as people seem to be when they walk out of that room we were just so so excited that finally they had made the thing that we all wanted VR to be really you know because it's always been these kind of half steps up until now with you know seated and all these things and We're still looking to support as many kinds of VR as we can. We realize not everyone's going to be able to just have the ultimate full-on VR experience right off the bat. It's really, really exciting for people like us to see that they managed to solve the biggest issue, which was tracking and controllers. Input, really. Because we're game developers, we need a way to input the user's intentions into the game, right? So Xbox 360 controllers and those kinds of things work, but when you're in VR, it just doesn't really feel right. And we all know it's a half-step. It's not really where VR needs to go. So the fact that Valve solved that problem, Valve and HTC I should say, solved that problem so elegantly was just incredibly exciting to us.
[00:03:06.979] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so talk a bit about the space that you have set up. It sounds like it's designed from a 10 by 10 or 25 by 25 foot room. And so you just imagine this big, large space that you're able to walk around. In designing a VR experience for that, how did that change the way that you are creating experiences for VR?
[00:03:27.607] Joel Green: Well, it is kind of a new way to think about developing for sure. Room-scale VR is a very new thing and we're all still figuring out exactly what it's going to mean and how to develop for it. A big part of this last three months has really been a whole bunch of different small teams trying to figure that out in collaboration with each other, but a whole bunch of different varied experiences that are all kind of approaching it from a slightly different angle. And room scale, it's an incredible tech, but the thing with room scale is not everyone's going to have the same size room, right? So we have to account for that. And we're going to need a way to move that volume around the game world, because you can't just keep walking forever in your limited room. Really, the next step is designing a new language for gaming where we find comfortable ways to move that volume around and still let you explore physically within the volume itself. And we have a lot of ideas. We've tried a few things. We've been mostly focusing on this demo since we've had the hardware, so we haven't done a whole lot of experimenting with that kind of stuff. But we're confident that we'll find a good solution for it as soon as we get to actually do some experimenting with it.
[00:04:34.580] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, maybe tell me a bit about some of the user interactions that you're able to do with, you know, now that you have your hands in the game, what did that allow you to do then?
[00:04:42.528] Joel Green: Well, yeah, that's kind of the thing we like to think we specialize in because we've been one of the developers that's really focused on motion control for a long time. And so we have a whole interaction system in our game where you can pick up objects, you can turn them around, look at them, throw them, put them down. You can reach out and grab levers and pull them up and down. You can basically all the kinds of normal things you do with your hands in the real world. We're trying to find ways to translate that into VR. And that's a big challenge because you're not literally reaching out and grabbing a lever. So when that lever doesn't push back, how do you handle that in VR? And the answer is, it's a whole bunch of different complicated solutions that kind of go into it to make it feel like that's what's happening. And it's a lot of smoke and mirrors, which is what game development always is. And at the end of the day, when you play the demo that we created, we're pretty confident that you feel like you're pulling that lever up and down. and that lets us have an input solution that allows us to have gameplay, right? All of a sudden, you can interact with the world. Because VR, up until now, in a lot of ways, has been looking around at pretty things, right? And this is the next step, where you can actually reach out and grab things, touch them, and interact with the world. So it's time to make some games.
[00:06:00.315] Kent Bye: And so what was that experience like, getting very early prototype software? You're really the alpha testers of the bleeding edge of the technology. And so I'd imagine that there'd be a lot of thrashing of just working out the bugs.
[00:06:12.543] Joel Green: There was a lot of thrashing, for sure. It was a really interesting process, because that was really building the API and the SDK for this hardware. They had already done a lot of work on it, but this was the first trial run for it with actual developers using it. They were kind of building the foundation while we were building the second floor of the house and it was a lot of back and forth and the usual kind of hardware and software problems that happen anytime you're creating something as groundbreaking as this, but overall it was an amazing experience because we We got to work really closely with Valve and also all the other teams who have been great. And everybody kind of collaborated on a forum, a private forum, and really just worked through a lot of the problems together. And yeah, it was pretty amazing to be part of, actually, because very hard for us to keep our mouths shut about how exciting all of this was.
[00:07:03.180] Kent Bye: So what kind of setup did you have to do with setting up the lasers and the lighthouse system that was up in the room and everything?
[00:07:12.291] Joel Green: Yeah, so to set up, it's basically, you know, you have these lighthouse units that they've shown and you kind of just have to find the best spot in your volume for coverage, right? So it seemed like pretty much everybody ended up putting them in the top corner of the room, looking like in kind of opposite ends of the room, looking down sort of at the space. So you just want to make sure they're covering as much of the room as you can. And as long as you have two of them set up correctly, You're pretty much getting tracking from all angles, and there's no occlusion issues. So that's all you really need. At that point, you have full tracking on anything that has the sensors on it.
[00:07:46.604] Kent Bye: Finally, what are you the most excited about the future of this new technology, and what you wanted to see it enable, and what kind of experiences that you want to see?
[00:07:56.247] Joel Green: It's a big question. I'm not entirely sure where this is going to go. None of us really like to pretend that we know what VR is going to look like in 10 years because it's so intensely game-changing for a lot of different industries. Personally, I'm most excited about how we can translate current experiences that we have into Physical experiences that we've never been able to do before so if you think about how to make music in a 3d space When there's no restrictions on physics or gravity or any of the things that you know or expense of you know How much an instrument costs or how an instrument has to work in order to physically make a sound? When you can just make whatever you want and make it behave the way that you want but still be using your actual physical body to interact with it and to be moving around in a space doing that. It's an incredible thing to think about what kind of possibilities that could open up for all kinds of applications, not just games. So we have a lot of ideas at Cloudhead about different things we want to try doing with all of this, but it's really that. It's really just about being able to finally use your real body to interact with worlds that you create yourself.
[00:09:09.603] Kent Bye: Great.
[00:09:09.985] Joel Green: Well, thank you. Yeah, no problem. You're welcome.
