Robyn Gray and Michael Murdock talk about the spectrum of experiences that they’ve created at Otherworld Interactive, which includes horror, music, social, educational, and room-scale.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.997] Michael Murdock: I'm Mike Murdock, and I'm the creative director of Otherworld Interactive.
[00:00:14.900] Robyn Gray: I'm Robin Gray, I'm the chief designer at Otherworld Interactive.
[00:00:18.703] Michael Murdock: And we just finished up a couple pieces for the VR Jam that we're going to be showing off today. One's an educational piece about ocean acidification, and the other one's a networked social experience where you get to jump online and play small games with another person.
[00:00:32.603] Kent Bye: Great. And so maybe you could talk a bit about how this educational experience came about. It sounded like you had some foundation support or some place where this is going to land once this jam is over.
[00:00:43.069] Robyn Gray: Yeah, so for the educational piece, we're working with a nonprofit foundation. The goal was to come up with a piece about climate change that would be suitable for families, possibly for something, say, I went to a museum. Now I can continue my climate change education experience by downloading this VR app. So the goal for that was really keep the science simple, keep it manageable, make sure to illustrate it well, and make sure that the VR is accessible. So we tried to really make sure that the controls are very simple so that kids and parents that don't do VR can actually just jump right in.
[00:01:10.978] Kent Bye: Great.
[00:01:11.735] Michael Murdock: Yeah, the idea behind it when we were designing it was how do we spatialize science? VR gives us this ability to see 3D spaces and know how big things are and how far away they are. So we wanted to bring some of those ideas into education in VR. So instead of the audience having an abstract number in their head of like, oh these cars emit this much CO2 per year, we can just show them the volume of it and then they kind of understand instinctively the space in a way that, you know, works with how your brain stores information instead of the abstractness that a lot of science is taught in right now.
[00:01:42.676] Kent Bye: Nice. And yeah, maybe talk a bit about this social experience and what you were trying to kind of prove out there.
[00:01:48.153] Michael Murdock: Yeah, so I directed that, and what we were trying to do is really make a great experience with just two people. About a year ago we made this piece called Café Om, where you're sitting in this café, you're a lonely robot and you can see your reflection, but we had real-time head-tracking data driving that character rig. So you actually felt like you were there, and that you were that character. And Starport, the new piece, is the next level of that. So if we can make one person feel present in the virtual space, the next step is two people. So now we're using the head rotation data to drive an entire character rig that feels natural and you feel like there's another human in there with you. And then we made two small games that you can play. One of them is kind of like Minecraft. There's this platform spinning and you can place blocks. And we adjusted the spin speed so that you can build enough and then by the time it rotates, the other person has to deal with what you've been building. So we instinctively made it collaborative where people can build and then like, oh, well, what did this person build? Now I have to engage with them. And the other experience is kind of like asteroids where you have to lock onto these asteroids floating around this play field and destroy more of them than the other person. And we moved the scoring mechanism in between the players, this personal space between you and me, and that's where the asteroids are floating. So it felt really great in 3D, but we also engaged with the other person in there.
[00:03:07.262] Kent Bye: Nice. And you guys have also been doing some cardboard apps. I know Sisters has been pretty popular. Maybe you could talk a bit about that.
[00:03:14.900] Robyn Gray: Sisters just crossed 125,000 downloads, I think, on Google Play. We also have it up on iOS, where it's kind of chugging along really well. We're super proud of that. And we just announced a sequel in the works, on demand, I guess. We get a lot of emails from people asking us to make a second one and trying to throw money at us, which is pretty exciting. So Sisters is a little VR horror app that we originally made for the Google Cardboard that uses absolutely no controls because we didn't want that to be a barrier to bringing it to other platforms like iOS. It's essentially we know where you're looking, we know where you're not looking, so therefore we can have things pop up in your face and right behind you and we can kind of keep track of where you are in the story based on that so you won't miss anything just because you're not looking the right area.
[00:03:56.085] Kent Bye: And so how are you moving around in this? If there's no controls, is it kind of like look and you're moving or are you in one place? And maybe kind of describe what the locomotion mechanism is in this experience.
[00:04:07.980] Robyn Gray: Right now it's completely non-locomotive. You are seated on a couch for the entire experience. Because initially we were like, oh, people are going to sit on their couch and play VR. This was created back in, what, October, I think? It's one of our earliest apps and our most popular, I think. But really, we intended it to be a very good entry level for VR or is ever popular. And as we've discovered, it kind of instantly takes care of itself because we have all these people who are making YouTube videos of their mom playing sisters or their grandma playing sisters. And that's incredibly popular, obviously.
[00:04:38.709] Kent Bye: So yeah, what kind of reaction videos do you get from people playing it then?
[00:04:43.072] Michael Murdock: We had some kids put their mom in it and she was sitting on this chair and like clutching a pillow and screaming at the top of her lungs. It was amazing. She almost fell off the chair when the ghost came at her. And we've been getting a lot of videos from international, so in Portuguese and German, all sorts of stuff. And we love that, you know, we made this experience that is getting out there and to a ton of different markets. We're like blown away by how far it's gone.
[00:05:09.530] Robyn Gray: I think our best reaction was someone tweeted at us that we owed them a screen replacement because they flung their phone across the room and just cracked the screen.
[00:05:18.695] Kent Bye: Wow. And so Otherworld, it sounds like a kind of a development shop. I know that you're creating your own original content, but you also, I saw at GDC, were doing kind of experiences for like haptic and what used to be Striker VR. But yeah, maybe you could talk about some of the other VR experiences that you guys have been creating.
[00:05:36.110] Michael Murdock: Sure, so like you mentioned, we are a development studio, we're an entertainment studio. We work with clients, we bring their ideas into VR, we do consulting. And when we have free cycles between that, we like to push our own ideas along and develop some of what we see the industry is doing. We're working on an animated series that you get to be in the middle of a cartoon kind of thing and interact with those characters, kind of looking towards episodic content. So if we set up all the characters and the environments, let's tell a few stories with them instead of just one three-minute thing. But what does an ongoing virtual world look like? And so all those ideas are coalescing in the Galactic Wrecking Company that's going to feature games, animated episodes, and kind of this full world to explore. So, that's more of our internal project, but we've been doing some work with the automotive industry. The Frameworks Institute was one of the members behind the science piece that we did. Oh, the music piece, yeah. So, we did this music video called The World's a Mess for Steve Jordan and his wife, Megan Voss. Steve plays drums for the John Mayers Trio. So, we were super happy to get this thing and put it together and make this like mind-blowing, weird music video, but really show what interactive music can be like. So the entire piece is driven by the audio. They gave us the tracks broken out, and we drive the whole experience with that audio.
[00:06:57.415] Kent Bye: And it seems like a pretty broad range of different VR experiences. As a development studio, have you kind of settled in as like, this is our mission for what types of things that we really want to create and bring into the VR space?
[00:07:09.253] Robyn Gray: We try to tell stories with every single piece we make, even with client work. World's a mess. You can watch this kind of dystopic reality unfold around you as the music lyrics match the story that we're telling. So I think no matter what client products we've taken on so far, we always try to make sure that we're telling a story throughout them and creating a world that you want to be in.
[00:07:29.267] Michael Murdock: Yeah, what's important to us is that the market in VR hasn't been proven really yet. And so with everything we release, we have the story. We want people to remember the feeling of our worlds that they go to, to remember that there's something special about it. And so we don't know the market yet. We're pushing at it in a lot of different directions. We've proven that horror is a great genre. Right now we're going after social and education. We've done the client automotive work. The music industry is going to be huge, and we have a piece in that. So we're making sure that we're making all the right connections with everybody, and we have proven that each market is a viable direction, so that when clients approach us, we can say, oh, absolutely, we've done that. Here's how we approach it, and really making ourselves experts in this emerging field.
[00:08:12.164] Kent Bye: And so what type of experiences do you want to have in VR then?
[00:08:16.028] Michael Murdock: go outside away from the computer every so often. No, it's fun, like, because we're a really tight team, all of our ideas make it into all of our experiences. We don't say, like, oh, this is my idea, and I'm just going to make it. Like, these ideas wouldn't exist unless we were communicating and sharing our ideas through everything. So what we get to do is build exactly what we want to for our experiences, like these games, like these immersive stories, and like these thoughtful experiences like Café Om. But we would never get anywhere unless everybody contributed. And so we're really happy with our team. It's great.
[00:08:51.354] Robyn Gray: Things I want to experience? I don't know. I think we've made many of the things I want to experience already. Things I really want to experience are walking around in VR in a comfortable and budget-friendly situation. And once that can happen, we can make a whole lot of other cool experiences.
[00:09:06.103] Kent Bye: So you guys are really looking forward to the room scale, fully walkable, like Vive.
[00:09:11.047] Michael Murdock: A lot of our experiences are actually pointed that way, so the new social things that we made, sure they work with gaze input like the gear, but really if you had a wand controller in your hand, it would totally make sense more. Additionally, almost all of our experiences are designed for AR, so if you strip away the virtual world and just have the gameplay or the experience, they're perfect for augmented applications. And so we're kind of designing hybrid. We're looking forward to the next step and making sure that we understand that space as well. And so augmented kind of removes the problem with walking around because you use most of the real world. And so we try to respond to that with our design.
[00:09:47.761] Kent Bye: Are there things that you want to do while walking around in VR that you can't do without that now?
[00:09:54.070] Robyn Gray: not run into my coffee table. I mean, for me, VR represents the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe kind of situation, where you open the wardrobe door and you get to go somewhere you wouldn't be able to go in the real world. So anything that's not reality will be really fun once we can walk around in it.
[00:10:10.916] Michael Murdock: I'm excited to start breaking the laws of physics and the laws of geometry and everything. Like we can make zero-g things float up in front of you and they're fully interactable. And things like that are really amazing. You've seen them in movies, but the way it looks on the screen is different from the way you feel it. And so we're excited to take some of those things that Everybody dreams about being able to fly, having zero-g ability that you can teleport things and actually deliver that promise. So taking some of these daydreams that people have and actually letting them see what it's like to experience it.
[00:10:44.808] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:10:51.865] Robyn Gray: I think people are really worried about becoming more isolated in virtual reality. There was a study recently, though, because people were worried that teenagers these days are becoming more and more isolated with all the social media, and they discovered, however they did the study, that teens actually felt that they were less alone than maybe previous generations felt. So I think with virtual reality, you can continue that kind of social media spree, but rather than being isolated in a room by yourself, you get to be Isolated room by yourself in real life while actually surrounded by what feels like physical people and virtual reality So I think that's really cool.
[00:11:24.699] Michael Murdock: That's where we're headed Yeah, I'm really into the social idea of this the fact that you can turn a small screen into an infinite space That you can interact with your friends is really really exciting We can strip away a lot of the computing ideas that don't work I think the abstraction of like you're rubbing a mouse around on the table and somehow that's how you access files. That's a weird abstraction but it works and it's pretty effective. But we've got a lot of other things in computing that just don't feel really human, like emails I hate because they take so long and they're not how I converse with people naturally. And so VR allows us to move computing and data back into the way that the human brain is used to dealing with data. And I think that's going to help it a lot and that's going to make it feel more natural and less isolating because now we realize that It's about humans. It's about making it best for people, not just the way that computers like to store files or deal with information.
[00:12:20.005] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Anything else that's left unsaid that you guys like to say?
[00:12:23.206] Robyn Gray: I like the idea of playing games where I'm not sitting on my butt the whole time. That's going to be great. Yeah, very true.
[00:12:29.648] Michael Murdock: Awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah, thank you so much.
[00:12:31.689] Robyn Gray: Thank you.
[00:12:32.725] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
