One of the challenges with a first-person VR adventure game is that locomotion causes some people motion sickness. People have a wide range of tolerances for how much they can move around a VR space with a controller, and room-scale VR helps to eliminate nausea because your real movements match your virtual movements 1:1 and there’s no disconnect within your vestibular system. However, there’s still the problem of how to move within a virtual space that’s larger than your limited room-scale VR physical space. Cloudhead Games has come up with a really elegant solution in their The Gallery experience for projecting your room-scale volume within your virtual space in a system they call “Blink,” and it does really lives up to the promise of 100% nausea-free VR locomotion.
Cloudhead Games has been working on their first-person VR adventure game The Gallery for over two years now, and they’ve been one of the leading innovators in solving this VR locomotion motion sickness issue. They came up with the VR comfort mode approach of incrementing in 10-15 degree increments when doing raw rotation with the joystick.
Cloudhead Games was showing off their latest Blink VR locomotion system at PAX this past weekend, and I had an opportunity to try it out. I’m someone who is very sensitive to motion sickness to the point where I can’t really even move around with a controller within a VR environment for more than 5-10 minutes without starting to feel some motion sickness. I was able to do a 15-20 minute demo of the first episode of The Gallery called “The Call of the Starseed,” and I wasn’t feeling any type of motion sickness symptoms.
I talked with Cloudhead Games producer Joel Green about their Blink new system, and some of his insights after using it for a couple of months. Joel says that there’s going to be a new skill that people need to develop within room-scale VR, which is to be able to have a dual awareness of where they’re located within their physical space as well as where they’re located within VR. He says that it takes some practice to learn this skill, but that after people can have this dual spatial awareness that they’re able to move much more quickly and confidently within a VR space.
I feel like I’m still relatively new at this skill, and so I found myself moving very slowly within the experience and was bumping up against the chaperone boundary system within the experience more often than I should have had I been more aware of where I was located within the physical space. Joel said that they decided to place a visual representation of the boundaries of your physical space within the experience to help people make this connection because they did find that people would blink teleport to a new spot and not really feel comfortable to walk around their room-scale volume if they didn’t have that spatial awareness and confidence.
There’s a system of volumetric blinking where you visualize and rotate your room-scale volume and place it more precisely around objects within an area that you’d like to explore. I found this to be really helpful because it did start to give me a better idea as to whether or not I’d be able to interact with those objects without worrying about if they were outside of the volume or not.
One other innovation that was interesting is that they were using a backpack as their inventory system. You have to reach over your shoulder and pull the trigger in order to take off your backpack and place it in front of you. It was something that felt natural and intuitive, and felt like another elegant solution to a tricky problem. It felt like a really good tradeoff for how to present a 3D representation of an adventure game inventory that preserves the realistic nature of VR, but yet also has an intuitive user interface that is efficient to use.
One challenge in an adventure game like this is figuring out which objects are valuable to solving puzzles, and which ones are just simply fun to play with but won’t ultimately help you advance through the game. Part of the logic that was implemented within The Gallery was a backpack inventory system where if an object was important enough to be used later, then you can put it in your backpack and it’ll automatically be stored there again if you drop it. If it’s not important, then it’ll just drop to the ground. This would allow you to pick up objects from one room, and then use them in another room.
Joel helped guide me through the many different puzzles within the experience, and I think that there’s going to be a lot of really exciting exploration, puzzles, and fun gameplay within The Gallery experience. They have a solid foundation with a VR locomotion system that is indeed 100% nausea-free, and so now they can focus on finishing up the content with engaging puzzles in time for the consumer Vive launch.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.035] Joel Green: My name is Joel Green. I'm the producer and audio director at Cloudhead Games. Today we're at PAX. We're showing off the first episode of our VR launch game, which is called The Gallery. And episode one is called Call of the Starseed. And so we're showing off a brand new part of that episode today that includes our new locomotion system called Blink, which is basically A new way to move around in the game world in order to allow for larger experiences within room scale so you're not kind of trapped in one spot.
[00:00:43.438] Kent Bye: Great. So yeah, maybe you could tell me a little bit about some of the innovations that you have with this Blink system and what type of problems you were trying to solve with it.
[00:00:50.137] Joel Green: Sure. So room scale VR is amazing because you can physically walk around in the space, right? But the issue obviously is that you're now stuck to a certain size of room and that size of room is going to vary depending on how big your room actually is, right? Everybody's going to have a different size. So basically what we had to do at Cloudhead is figure out a way to let people move around a larger game world. without actually just kind of pushing forward on a stick. Because the issue with doing that, the traditional first-person locomotion in VR, is that it's very disorienting and can make you physically nauseous, which is something that we're very cautious to avoid because if you're getting sick from playing a game, you can't play it. There's no way around it. Your brain isn't just going to get used to it. It's very much something that we have to avoid as much as we possibly can. We spent a number of months recently highly focused on coming up with a solution for that, and what we call it is Blink, and it's kind of a version of a teleportation system. It's sort of inspired by Myst, because our game is very much inspired by Myst anyway. When we had this problem, we kind of looked at how you moved around in Mist, which was very much the same. You were kind of moving forward by specific increments through the environment. The difference is this is kind of the next level of that, because you're not actually tied to specific nodes in the environment. You can go anywhere. So it's more like you're blinking to a specific point forward in the world, but you can choose exactly where you want to be. And not only that, the best part is that Once you get there, you can physically move around within that space. So if you have a very large room, you have to blink less, essentially, right? So if you have a small room, you're going to be blinking a bit more. It's going to feel more like mist in that sense, where you're kind of blinking exactly where you want to go and then still using your hands. You can still crouch down. use your hands and throw things and turn around in full 360 and all that. But if you have a larger room, then you can kind of walk around physically. And technically, if you had a warehouse size room with fully set up with lighthouses, you could play the entire game without actually blinking at all, which is pretty cool. I can't wait till somebody actually does that. Yeah, so that's our system. It has a number of different features that I could go into, but it's kind of a lot of technical data. But the basic idea behind it is just kind of look where you want to go and press the button and you'll end up there. And then you can kind of play around in that zone until you need to move again.
[00:03:13.678] Kent Bye: Yeah, so with the Vive controller, there's kind of like a thumb pad and you push down on your left thumb and then you can move your head up and down and left and right to pick the point that you want to teleport to. But then you also have, if you press down on the button, then you're able to see the size of the room that you have to work with and you can kind of rotate your thumb around and then switch that orientation. And so in terms of that, maybe you could just describe different iterations that you guys came to in order to come to that type of blink system.
[00:03:42.082] Joel Green: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And when we first were trying to solve this problem, we tried, I think, four or five completely different solutions. And we just kind of had everybody throw out ideas, and then we implemented all of them really quickly and tried to see what worked. And it was pretty clear right off the bat that this system was going to be the one that was, like, 100% nausea-free. And we felt like it was very rough at that point, but we felt like if we built game systems around it to support it, that it would end up being a good way to play games. So that's what we were kind of focusing on over the last three months. And one of those systems is the ability to project the actual room itself, because that's what you're doing. You're not really projecting yourself. You're really projecting your entire room around the game world, right? So when you hold down that button, you're just going to see where you're going to end up. But yeah, like you said, we have this kind of advanced mode where if you then move your thumb around the trackpad, you'll see your whole volume, which is basically a projection of the room that you're in in the real world. showing where you're going to put that. So it's a bit of a mind trip to get your head around it at first, but we find people pick it up pretty quickly. And the benefit of being able to do that, to see the room when you're projecting, is that you can actually kind of decide where you want it to be in terms of what things are inside of it, right? So if you're kind of teleporting over to an area that has a number of things that you want to interact with, you can actually make sure that they're all within your volume as much as you can with the size of volume you have. And then that way, when you place it down, you know that now you're free to just physically walk around within room scale, and you don't have to worry about blinking again while you're interacting with those specific items. So it's kind of an advanced mode, but people tend to use it the more they get used to blink. And it's kind of a thing that you're not usually doing every single time. But if you're, like I said, if you're in that situation where you're like, oh, I see a bunch of things I want to mess around with, then people tend to use that and then make sure that it's all kind of in their space. And then they can just forget about Blink for a bit and just focus on actual room scale and walking around and interacting with things and just having fun.
[00:05:45.267] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's what I recognized when I was blinking around is that you can't really see what you can interact with until you actually blink to a spot. And then once you're in that spot and you try to walk up to an object and then all of a sudden you run into the chaperone barrier and you're like, oh, I can't reach that because it's on the other side of the wall. There's a bit of like having to almost backtrack and then reorient yourself so that you can actually form the room scale boundary around so that includes all those objects.
[00:06:10.995] Joel Green: Exactly. Yeah. And there's definitely a learning process with this. It's a brand new thing and it's fairly complex. So there's totally some tricks that you have to learn. Like you were saying, when you're right up against the wall and you blink forward, but then you're still right up against the physical wall. Right. So what people often do, if you watch people that are experienced with it, they'll kind of blink past the thing that they're trying to get to, right? So that way they have to kind of physically turn around and grab the thing. And then that way they're back in the middle of their room. So you can either do that, or you can physically kind of walk back into the center of your room first before you blink. There's a number of solutions to it. But the reality is with room scale, with these kinds of games in VR, is that people have to learn how to be spatially aware in two realities at once and it's really is something that takes a little bit of learning to get used to but I can attest to the fact that people do pick it up like after a bit of time right and I was saying to you earlier that it's it's just like if you hand an Xbox controller to somebody who's never played games before like it's a lot of brand new input and information and they don't know how to use analog sticks and it's a total nightmare to try to watch them play a video game right So there's going to be a new learning process with VR in the exact same way and I personally think it's exciting because it's really a new paradigm. There's going to be a bit of a learning curve but I think, well I know because I've watched people learn it, that it doesn't take all that long before it kind of becomes second nature. And if you watch us kind of play the game, nobody's thinking about Blink at all, right? You're just kind of going where you want to go, and you just learn the techniques to be able to get to the things you want to get to. And then all of a sudden, once those kind of technical abstractions are out of your mind a bit, then you're back to just being in the world and just playing the game.
[00:07:51.251] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really felt completely lost. I had no idea where I was in the physical room, which meant that almost every time I was blinking, I would want to see where the room was because I was so lost in my own space. So I guess what I hear you saying is that once you get really good enough, you don't need to do that advanced mode as much because you already know where you are at in the physical room and that you're just kind of blinking around with that in your awareness.
[00:08:11.545] Joel Green: Yeah, well and you can see your bounds at all times too, right? So one thing that you get used to is the fact that it actually doesn't really matter where you are in your room in terms of like where you actually are in the real world. What matters is where you are within your volume. Because the whole point of the volume is basically it's your safe space, right? So there's this kind of a climatization period with room scale where you have to learn to trust that. and once you learn that everything within those bounds is going to be safe for you then you get a lot more used to being able to just quickly look at where you are within those bounds and then be able to know that like when you project to a new place that you can just walk around within those and you don't really care where you actually are in the real world you just need to know where you are contextually within that volume. Again it's kind of a learning process to get used to it but once you do it becomes very freeing in terms of like You can just trust that you can move around within there, right?
[00:09:07.106] Kent Bye: Yeah, I find myself moving extra slowly because of that uncertainty, so I didn't want to like try to quickly grab something and end up punching the wall or something like that, so.
[00:09:16.025] Joel Green: Yeah, yeah, we see that every time we demo to new people, right? And it's because, you know, like I said earlier, you're not just getting introduced to a new game world and new game systems and all these things, you're actually getting introduced to a brand new controller that you've never used before that's prototyped currently and a bit awkward. And you're also getting used to a whole new medium with a whole new way of being inside of a video game, right? So it's just like an absolute ton of information coming at you at once, and it can be a bit overwhelming for people. We're doing our best today to try to ease people in with a little tutorial level. We're trying to build a game with depth to it. That's part of what Cloudhead Games is doing. We're not just building a little tech demo that's going to be the best thing to show. at PAX, right? We're trying to build an actual game. So if you demo StarCraft to somebody in three minutes who's never seen it before, how much fun are they really going to have? So we actually have depth in our systems, and we know that that's going to be something that people are going to want when the vibe comes out. So like I said, we're using people into it today, but I have faith as a gamer that people are really going to love, once they get used to it, they're going to love having that freedom and that depth.
[00:10:22.978] Kent Bye: Have you found that people have stopped kind of exploring the room as much and just kind of blink everywhere?
[00:10:29.424] Joel Green: That does happen, and that's actually part of the reason that we show the volume at all times now. So when we first started building this system, we didn't show the volume at all times. It was something that only came up when you got close to the edges. And so we found that with that system, once you start moving around in the game world with blink, like you said, you totally lose track of where you are in the real world. You have no idea after a little while, right? So without that kind of constant representation of the room, you're so not sure where you are that people tend to not want to move. And so they tend to blink everywhere, right? And then they're just kind of standing there not using the room. And so one of our solutions to that was to have the bounds always subtly present in the environment so that people always have that reference and they know that they can use them. It's kind of a reminder. We're still working on other ways to encourage people to do it though. It's a really tricky issue and some people are totally fine, like they don't have any problem moving around and kind of doing both things. Whereas other people will stay totally still. But I think there's a little bit of people have to kind of like engage and like learn and try to remind themselves to use it as well. You know, if you went through the trouble to like get a vibe and set up a room for it, you're going to want to use it, right? So, but like I said, we're still working on ways to kind of help people Learn that.
[00:11:44.184] Kent Bye: Yeah, I must have missed that boundary representing the real physical space within the virtual space. So what do you have? Yeah, I didn't see it. I didn't notice it. So that's part of the reason why I felt so lost, I guess. Is it on the ground? Or what do you have to kind of represent the space?
[00:11:58.329] Joel Green: There's kind of a glowing barrier around you. It's surprising to hear that. It makes me wonder if there was a technical issue. But it may just be that there was a lot of stuff coming at you, and you didn't quite know what was what. So that would be my fault for not demoing properly. First demo of the day, so it's something I'll look at actually right after this. But yeah, the whole time you're in there, there's kind of a subtle UI representation of the room you're in. So that would be completely my fault if you didn't see that.
[00:12:25.180] Kent Bye: Yeah, I may have just not noticed it. So great. Any other final thoughts as you're moving forward? And what's sort of next for you guys as you move towards the launch date of the Vive?
[00:12:34.623] Joel Green: Yeah, we're kind of in the mode where most of our systems are up and running now, and we're still putting a lot of polish on everything, but basically we're into that kind of final phase of production where we're just cranking out the rest of the content, making sure that we get as much fun stuff into the game as possible, and just make it the best first-time VR experience for people that we possibly can, while also giving it some depth. So yeah, we're just kind of head down after packs, just making the game as good as we possibly can before launch.
[00:13:05.097] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you. Thank you. 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.
