When Shawn Whiting and Hayden Lee decided to create a social VR application, they decided to create the simplest minimal viable product. It was literally just a cube and a name that was tied to head movements, but they had a dance party where over 50 people showed up for at least a half hour each. Even though they were simple blocks, knowing that they were tied to the movements to a real human being on the other side proved to be extremely compelling.
That is a perfect story that encapsulates the iterative approach and rapid feedback that has been the driving philosophy for Convrge. Known for it’s minimalist floating heads, Convrge has adopted a low-poly aesthetic that has proven to be lightweight and super compelling.
Shawn and Hayden have found a number of ways to keep users engaged with social applications ranging from dance parties, VR developer talks with notable speakers from the VR circuit, virtual campfire hangout sessions, YouTube watching parties, and watching livestream events of either VR meetups or breaking news and press conferences from VR companies.
As a particularly salient example, here’s a reaction video of over 73 people in VR watching the livestream of the Oculus CV1 press conference where it was announced that the Rift would be shipping with Xbox controllers. This was clearly disappointing on some level for the VR enthusiasts who really wanted to see 6DOF controllers ship with the Rift, but then there’s another moment later in the video where Palmer announces the Oculus Touch, and there’s clearly a lot of excitement that this is something that is coming in the future. Note that there’s a recording error in having two tabs open as to why there’s an echo in the sound.
Shawn and Hayden even were livestreaming the VR mixer afterparty onto the theater screen in Convrge while at the same time projecting that scene onto a screen at the party. Here’s an excerpt of a little dancing that I did at that party that Hayden mentions within the interview
Convrge has also recently added the ability for users to play games with each other in VR, and that was by request. They talk about some of their future plans, and what some of the most popular feature requests have been.
Finally, Shawn gives the advice to anyone creating a social VR application to get people involved as quickly as possible so that you can start to get their feedback for what they want. In other words, don’t spend a year and a half developing a polished social experience without ever once having people involved with using it.
I’m looking forward to seeing how the community and Convrge platform continues to evolve, and encourage anyone who hasn’t made time to check it out to definitely drop by sometime. It’s a very welcoming and open community.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.972] Hayden Lee: My name's Hayden. I'm the developer at Converge. This is my co-founder, Sean.
[00:00:16.293] Shawn Whiting: Hello, I'm Sean. I'm another co-founder at Converge.
[00:00:20.675] Hayden Lee: So, Converge is a virtual reality social world where people come and hang out with their friends and go to meetups. And just today, we introduced our first game into the world. So, we're showing off that SVVR. You can play other people at the conference and there's other spectators from all around the world watching you play.
[00:00:37.660] Shawn Whiting: I can describe the game for a second. So we called the game Snow Crash after obviously the Neil Stevenson novel, but the point of the game is it takes heavy advantage of the DK2's positional tracking. So you're moving your neck around a lot and you're hiding behind a block, which is essentially an ice block, and you're in a kind of winter landscape. And as you move around, you can kind of peek and see the player on the other end of the field, and you're throwing snowballs at them. You're just trying to clock them in the head pretty much as fast as you can and deplete their life before they deplete yours. And you're kind of, you know, hiding, taking cover, peeking back out again, whipping some snowballs at them. So, yeah, that's the experience. And then there's people from around the world in the Converge community kind of watching you, possibly heckling you to really complete the experience.
[00:01:20.025] Kent Bye: So yeah, Converge has come onto the social VR scene, been in there a number of times, and it seems to be like a low-poly experience that is really focusing on just simple head tracking and being able to be performant. Maybe talk a bit about how you started, some of the first events that you've had, and then what type of other things you've had since then.
[00:01:42.000] Hayden Lee: Yeah, so the initial idea was just having a floating dance floor in outer space. We did that in like December and then we kind of revamped it in January and it was now in a forest. And then the dance parties kind of got old and then we were thinking, alright, we should probably do something else too. We had a campfire in there and people really enjoyed just hanging out by the campfire so that was really cool. And then we integrated a web browser so now you can go and watch YouTube videos so we've had like I'm
[00:02:28.210] Shawn Whiting: Leap Motion come in and talk about the Leap Motion controller. A bunch of devs came in and talked to them. It's a really good way for people to hang out with and talk with people that they normally wouldn't have a chance to. So if you can't come to the SVVR Expo and meet all these people, if you can just log into Converge and get 10 minutes alone with a guy from Unity and talk to him about your project and get some feedback, that's really valuable. And that's some of our more well-attended events, I would say, is stuff like that.
[00:02:57.208] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you had also something really interesting at GDC that I had never seen before in terms of like this streaming from a VR mixer of a live event into VR while at the same time projecting that VR experience while that stream was being broadcast on the large screen. So yeah, maybe you could talk a bit about that and how that went in terms of broadcasting live events into a VR experience.
[00:03:22.538] Shawn Whiting: Yeah, so that was a trip. That kind of came out of people wanting to broadcast their meetups that they were having, like their VR meetups. So I helped organize the Nashville VR meetup and there were a bunch of people that were saying, hey, we're having these people come speak and, you know, other people want to watch. So they would broadcast it on a YouTube or a Twitch or a Hitbox live stream and we just throw it up in the theater zone and converge. and all these people rather than just sitting in like the twitch just like texting each other you know it's not as cool as if you're watching like a VR meetup in VR discussing it with people actually turning around and seeing their avatars and kind of joking about what people are saying so that evolved into okay well we're going to GDC like how can we bring GDC into VR for all these people that can't make it because you know we've got a lot of converged community members that are abroad in like Germany and Australia and all over the place and they're like please guys like just stream us in like all the lectures and as much content as you can we're like all right fine we'll try it so I just went around the GDC floor with my laptop just live streaming YouTube live streams in into the theater and I would even like I'd be like calling Hayden on the phone and like Hayden's in the world like taking questions live from them and like telling them to me And then I'm like communicating it to the person I'm interviewing. So it's like this super hacked together system of like putting people remotely into the GDC experience. And then like you were saying at the GDC after party type thing, we had a live stream of the after party with people kind of dancing in front of the camera. And then the people on the actual dance floor in Converge were kind of co-dancing with them. It kind of created a nice collaborative experience there.
[00:04:54.681] Hayden Lee: Kent, you definitely won the dance off there.
[00:04:58.042] Shawn Whiting: Everyone find the video of Kent dancing. I don't know what that video is called, but it's incredible You should post it with this podcast or wherever it is Yeah, a lot of fun The only bad thing was is that there was like a 30-second delay?
[00:05:11.036] Kent Bye: Between when you were dancing and when you would actually see it So the feedback loop was a little long to be able to actually get that real-time interaction, right?
[00:05:18.203] Shawn Whiting: You could see the people recoil. So we had a few people come up and And I believe that Deep Rifter, or Chris from Road to VR, did this. Him and a few people came up, lifted their shirts up, and kind of give themselves a nice nipple rub in front of the camera. And, you know, like nobody reacts for a while. They're all crowded around the screen. And then this happens 30 seconds later, and you see everyone kind of like back away, and like look away from the screen. And you're like, oh, OK, it just hit. Like, there's the stream. It's like a 30 second delay, clearly. Yeah.
[00:05:44.862] Kent Bye: No, but the other impression is still really early days in terms of live broadcasting things into VR. But the thing that I find really interesting about Converge is that because it's so low-poly, you can have these high efficiency of the performance. But I'm curious, where did that aesthetic of just floating heads and no body kind of originate?
[00:06:04.659] Shawn Whiting: I'd say, like Hayden said, it started from our first experience. We were like, what is the, like, hackiest piece of garbage we can throw together in, like, two days? And we were, like, cubes in a box with music playing and lights. And the cubes are tracked to your head because you've got, you know, a rift on. And it was super compelling, like, just watching people, like, headbang and then, like, their name shows their orientation so you know if they're facing you or not. The cubes had no faces on them. They're just gray cubes. But you actually got a sense of presence with these people and we're like, oh, so you don't need like super high quality avatars. You just need like really good head tracking and just a floating head because that's all you're tracking right now. Anyway, most people don't have hand tracking or full body tracking or anything. So if most people are just head tracking, we're like, well, let's just go with heads and. That's why people are like, Converge, that's that one where you're just a floating head, right? And we're like, yep, that's all you need. So that's kind of where the minimalist aesthetic came from. And then the polygon landscape came from this awesome Unity store asset that we used called Polyworld. And we actually had Peter, the guy who created that asset, come in and give a talk on it. within a poly world we had created, and he was like, this is trippy, man, this is nuts. Yeah, it just, the low poly world looked really good, I just liked the asset. I think I was just looking for a forest asset, and it was just one of the first top ones that came up, so that largely determined the aesthetic choice to some extent. But it was always gonna be a forest.
[00:07:29.463] Hayden Lee: We also saw the Crescent Bay demo that was really low-poly with all these forest animals. And we realized how cool that was. We definitely went home. We were at CES when we tried that. We went home and we were like, yeah, that would be sweet to do it with other real people. So that was definitely another inspiration.
[00:07:48.856] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think it's a bit of an inspired choice in some ways if you look at the uncanny valley of a deliberate choice to go to low fidelity and you can still communicate a lot of information for the social cues and in some ways having a body there that's not actually moving around can actually lower the amount of coherence and plausibility illusion there and so I think by just focusing on those social cues of the head and focusing on the interactions in a low-poly world, it sets the expectations to be a little lower or different. You're in kind of this fantasy world where my experience of it is that it's way more engaging than something that looks hyper-realistic with like full bodies that are zombies.
[00:08:27.192] Shawn Whiting: Yeah, we've had that experience of trying a few games where you come in and like maybe the figure's in like a T pose. It looks like a guy was just encased in concrete up to his neck and then like he's just moving his head but his whole body is just kind of like rigid and like you walk forward and you know you're just skating on air essentially just hovering and that just feels weird. We kind of noticed that right off the bat so we were like well yeah our motto is just kind of only show that which is being tracked so as more people start getting hand input and leap motions and connects and all this will start to roll out and converge more kind of tracking features where you can actually start seeing some floating hands in front of you and you can gesture. I've seen that in alt space and it looks really nice. It's really cool to be able to signal to someone or give them a high five or flick them off or slap them in the face or something. Just having your hands in there is nice. It's going to be really fun.
[00:09:18.722] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious what some of the biggest future requests that you've had. I'm sure you get lots of different things that people want. So what are some of the biggest things that people want to do?
[00:09:28.857] Hayden Lee: So probably the number one request. And this is mainly from non-Rift users, because you can come into Converge without a Rift as well. But everybody wants to be able to jump and run faster as well, because we kind of limit you. Like, I get really motion sick myself. So anything that jumps just destroys me. And I don't know. I want Converge to be a place where you don't get sick, because we have people spend, I mean, the first night we ever did, we had somebody spend eight hours in there. Plus us, I spent 10 hours in the Rift. So you can't do that. Even if something's making you a little bit sick, it's game over. So that's definitely number one. Then the second one is probably custom avatars and being able to customize the world yourself. And we just launched that, so people are loving that. There's some really cool avatars already getting put in.
[00:10:13.731] Shawn Whiting: Another large request we have is games. I mean, obviously, the Rift is a gaming community. Some people are like, we want to play some games in here. And it's already happened, without any features. We're having people play games so like people just start playing tag just like honor system tag and converge Which is really like it's really weird because you only move at a constant speed like there's you know So it's like you're just chasing someone forever like unless you cut them off like this game's gonna go forever You know and there's teleportation too, so You know, if you really want to get out of it, you can. But we've also started playing 20 questions. Just all you need is like voiceover chat, right? So we have some people come in that don't have microphones, and we just start narrowing in on where they're from by asking them 20 questions. So we're like, are you in Europe? And they're like, no. We're like, are you in the United States? No. Are you in North America? And they just nod their head, yes. It's all positional tracking. We're like, oh, is it Canada? And they're like, yes. And we're like, oh, like the western part of Canada? Like, yes. And we narrow in eventually that they're in Vancouver, like in this weird suburb of Vancouver because someone knows it. We actually got one guy all the way down to, we were trying to guess what his career was or what he did for a living and we got all the way down to the fact that he creates customized glass stemware for people. Like that took us like 10 minutes but we did it just with him nodding because he didn't have a mic. So yeah people are playing games and we're just starting to integrate games so what we're showing off here at the SVBR Expo is like I said that little snow crash minigame where you're chucking Snowballs at each other and that'll evolve into a lot more games that people can play and we'll have leaderboards and just kind of a arcade type environment and What about mobile and gear VR?
[00:11:50.372] Kent Bye: What kind of plans do you have there?
[00:11:52.476] Hayden Lee: So I would say we're about 50% done with the gear version. And we really want to take advantage of that because it's so low-poly. And we also have restrictions on the avatars, so everything is kept at minimum vertices. Yeah, we definitely want to get out on mobile as quickly as possible. And it's really cool. I tried a beta version we have with Sean, and I was up in my bed just lying watching the stars as we were watching a YouTube video. It's a really, really cool experience to be not in front of your computer, like on a keyboard. It definitely added to the presence and everything. Really looking forward to getting that out, but it's just a little bit tricky. The kind of last steps we have to do is working out how you move. I think we'll probably end up going with more of like a teleporting thing where you kind of like point and shoot where you move. We did play around with the controller, but it just makes you so sick whenever you're strafing or turning the joystick, so.
[00:12:39.008] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so does the microphone on the Note 4 work pretty well?
[00:12:42.673] Hayden Lee: Yeah, so this was one of the things. We actually spoke to one of the, we were emailing back and forth with an engineer who worked on the gear, because we were super nervous about that. We're like, how are we going to get all our users to get mics? Are they going to plug mics into their phone? And I guess we never really thought about it, but your Note 4 is a phone. I know we don't use phones for calling people anymore. But it actually works amazingly. So that's something we tested, and it works just so well. It actually sounds way better than our mics generally do. So yeah, that was something.
[00:13:13.555] Shawn Whiting: I think we were just unsure that it was going to go actually through the Gear VR holder. We knew there was a mic, we just didn't know that we would have access to it and that it would sound so good.
[00:13:22.680] Kent Bye: So even though it's like up near your eyes, not near your mouth, it still works.
[00:13:26.824] Shawn Whiting: Sounds crystal clear. It sounds almost better than our gaming headsets. Like, surprisingly good. Wow.
[00:13:32.750] Kent Bye: I think that if there's anything, that's the thing that I'm the most looking forward to, just to be able to take my gear and not have to worry about sitting in front of the computer. computer, and kind of jump into things a little bit more. And I expect to see a lot more people. And on that note, I think Converge up to this point has been kind of like, there's one world, and everybody's joined in there. What are the limits of scalability? And at what point do you have to start to split people out into different worlds?
[00:13:56.515] Hayden Lee: Yeah, so we definitely haven't got to the point where we have had to have multiple worlds. It's definitely cool to be able to explore new worlds, but we're really just focusing on, you log into Converge, and you find somebody straight away, and you talk to them, and you get to know them, and that's what we're focusing on. If we have multiple worlds, we'll feel like everyone lose each other, or it's just something we haven't really experimented with too much yet. The point where we have to scale, I think it will be when there's just not enough space in one world, and like you can't find a place to talk because we have the positional audio so if you want to talk to somebody you can just walk away from them walk away from the kind of circle and have a private conversation but if there's not enough places to have private conversations I guess we have to expand. We haven't decided yet if we want to go with kind of the instance model where we have lots of the same world or lots of different worlds or just kind of one big world and we kind of do some like algorithms to make it more efficient and things. That's something we haven't decided. We try to move really fast and play it by ear. So we'll make that decision sometime in the future, hopefully before consumer comes out. That'd be fun.
[00:15:00.624] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's the thing I've noticed as well. It seems to be very iterative, a lot of iterations fast, minimal viable product continually putting out there. So you seem to be moving pretty quickly.
[00:15:10.272] Hayden Lee: Yeah, the word, well, the letters, MVP, I mentioned definitely multiple times a day in our office slash apartment. But yeah, we definitely think that's one of our advantages, that we can just move super, super fast. And yeah, we're really excited about that. Hopefully, if we can bring on some more people and stuff, that it stays the same way, and we can kind of just absolutely explode.
[00:15:31.940] Shawn Whiting: Oh, I got something to say on that point. If you're a baller at Unity or like modeling and you want to help build out Converge, just contact me. Sean at Converge.co. Let's talk. That'd be great. We have a lot of people just making custom avatars and kind of like volunteering time right now. And that's awesome. So yeah, if you want to hop on board and start making custom avatars for people that they can upload or eventually new spaces or helping in any way, that'd be great.
[00:15:58.572] Kent Bye: If you were to give some advice to people that were thinking about doing social VR, what would you tell them?
[00:16:03.816] Shawn Whiting: Start as small as you possibly can, because you're going to learn a lot just from making something with people in it. Get the people in there as soon as possible, because they're going to tell you what they want to do, and they're going to tell you how you start shaping the world you've created and the features you've created. I think a lot of people I talk to, they're like, oh, I want to do a social multiplayer thing too, and I've been working on it for like a year and a half. And I'm like, oh no, has anyone used it though? It's a social thing. And they're like, no, no, I don't want to show it to people yet. I'm like, oh, you're doing it wrong. You've got to put people in there and learn from how they behave. So that's what I would say, is get people in it ASAP.
[00:16:43.222] Hayden Lee: Yeah, and some of the design choices we made definitely make that easier. We literally built our first prototype in three days. And we had 50 people come in, each spend half an hour on average or something like that. It was pretty nuts. So you don't need that much.
[00:16:59.467] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:17:05.089] Hayden Lee: The Matrix. Yeah, people often ask like, where's Converge going? And I guess virtual reality in general too. But I definitely think in the next like, I really love the Arthur C. Clarke quote, where it's something like, if you're making a prediction about the future, and it doesn't seem weird, or it doesn't seem like really strange and unbelievable, it's probably wrong. And I really think that in the next like 10, 20 years, like we will converge into a sort of metaverse sort of state. And I think that's really cool. I think that's going to be really cool for kind of people that don't enjoy socializing in the real world, but also people that are like have loved ones abroad like myself. And I mean, distance is just such a pain in the ass for everybody. So not many people realize like how much something like a metaverse could solve that problem of distance. But yeah, that's what I think.
[00:17:54.816] Shawn Whiting: I kind of approach this from a hardcore gamer angle. So I've been gaming pretty hard since middle school and high school, mostly to escape middle school and high school, because they weren't that great. So I was in a lot of MMOs, like EverQuest early on, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies. And I've just watched gamer culture and nerd culture in general start to be all the rage. And now it's cool to admit you played D&D. Didn't used to be. So I just see that trajectory happening at the same time as VR. And I think as you see more people now start adapting to, like, you know, mobile casual gaming and, like, first-person shooters, Call of Duties-type stuff, I think you're gonna see that uptick start happening with, like, MMO-type experiences, like, very immersive, like, you're running a single character or two, and you're really devoted to that character. I think that sort of genre of game, especially once VR is in place to make it really immersive, is gonna start taking off way more than people anticipate. I've been watching a lot of documentaries recently on the history of MMOs and MUDs and all that. And I think once those collide with VR, it's going to be way more interesting than people are imagining it will be.
[00:19:06.364] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:19:07.945] Hayden Lee: Yeah, thanks. Cool. Thanks for chatting.
[00:19:10.326] 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 voices of VR.