David Bowman is Director of Production at Crytek, and he gave me the inside story of how VR went viral within Crytek to the point of having well over 50 developers and multiple triple AAA quality VR projects in development for the Sony PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. He’s been doing game development for over 20 years now, and he’s never seen this much excitement internally about a new technology. There were developers who were willing to work for free on VR because they were so excited to help discover the new game mechanics and emotions that were only possible within VR. I caught up with David at the VRX conference where the told me about integrating VR into the CRYENGINE as well as Robinson: The Journey and their latest Back to Dinosaur Island 2 tech demo.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.073] David Bowman: My name is David Bowman. I'm the director of production at Crytek. And Crytek is both an engine company and a game development studio. And we have an engine that does amazing things in VR. And we have teams which are now working to make complete games and projects in VR. Today we're showing Back to Dinosaur Island 2, which is our second technology demonstration of VR in the CryEngine.
[00:00:34.698] Kent Bye: I see, yeah. So the first one was, I guess, Back to the Dinosaur Island that was showing at GDC, right? So maybe you could talk a bit about the demo and what you're able to do in the Crytek engine.
[00:00:44.261] David Bowman: Okay, sure. So, Back to the Dinosaur Island 1, you were a young dinosaur in a nest. And it was all from that perspective. And it was very safe, you didn't move, there was very little to do, but the dinosaur mom would come back and she'd get right in your face and it was intimidating. That was for GDC, and then between GDC and E3, which was about three months, we put a team on creating the next technology demo, which is back to Dinosaur Island 2, which is what we're showing here today. And that demo was to prove that we could draw long distances with real high quality, like the amount of resources that were in the scene, the amount of detail was really high. Because we wanted to do a game called Robinson the Journey. And in order to prove that, that it would work, we had to go and do a tech demo in our own personal play session area that we could prove out all these concepts. And that's what this is that we're showing today.
[00:01:35.356] Kent Bye: I see. And so, yeah, maybe you could tell me a bit about the CryEngine and, you know, how people get access to it, and then why should somebody use it?
[00:01:42.977] David Bowman: Oh, of course. So the CryEngine is our internal game engine. It's what we use at all of our studios. So we have right now, I believe that's seven projects under development being used internally. Plus we license the engine out. And what it's famous for, what we're famous for as a company, is making the type of high-quality visuals that make you amaze your friends and show off really what hardware can do today. And what we're doing in VR today is we're supporting both the Oculus, which is right now already released, and we are supporting the Vive, HTC Vive Next, and we've got PlayStation VR coming. We're using it internally right now. It'll be rolled out in a new release. So we'll have all three of the major platforms for VR supported. Our engine itself needs to run at 90 frames a second in each eye in order to support the Oculus. And we need to run 60 frames each eye on a PlayStation VR. So what you're looking for is the power to do that while really getting a rich scene. And so our engine is designed for our purposes, for making games and the content of it really very dense. The vegetation, the foliage is extremely dense. There's a lot of characters moving in the scene. The complexity of what you're trying to do is where the strength of the CryEngine is. Where can you get it? Well, if you want to license the CryEngine, it's available. Go to Crytek.com and you can learn all about the CryEngine from there. And we're right now in the process of evaluating how to make it even more accessible. So we're creating documentation, we're creating tutorials and videos. We're doing a lot of stuff right now to make it much more accessible to the indie game developer. Because it's a high-end engine. It's a powerhouse. It really, really makes beautiful scenes. But the historical critique is, well, but how do we use it? How do we get it to do that? So now we're answering that. We're going really, as a company, focusing on making the material available to support that and to make sure that indie developers, beginning developers can use our engine.
[00:03:37.249] Kent Bye: I see. And within the last year, we've had both the Unity and Unreal move to more of an open licensing model. Is that something that the CryEngine is considering as well?
[00:03:46.801] David Bowman: Well, I can't talk about it today, but I will say that we as a company know from listening to our consumers and the people who have approached us and said, hey, this is what we want to do. We love your engine. We see the visuals. We see the power of it. Back to Dinosaur Island 2 shows us that VRs, if we want to do high-end VR, this is a great engine for it. but we have concerns. And so we're listening to all those concerns, we're addressing them, we'll be rolling that out as soon as we reach our... I wish I could speak into detail right now, but I can't. But as soon as we can, I'll be glad to talk about the detail of that information. But we are very, very much aware. of what the customers want, what our customers-to-be want as well. So, yeah, I don't want to talk about other engines, but we know what we need to do with our engine.
[00:04:27.920] Kent Bye: And so, I've heard reported at some point that there was up to like 50 people working on virtual reality projects at Crytek. Maybe you could talk a bit about the size and scope of the different investment that Crytek is making into virtual reality.
[00:04:40.574] David Bowman: So originally we started off trying to just make our engine available for people who wanted to license it to do VR. In that process we discovered there was a lot of work to do, a lot of things you have to do in order to make VR right. I mean it's easy to do just stereoscopic rendering where you take a single image and you split it and you present it to each eye. And that's sort of the cheap and dirty shortcut version. And it works really great in traditional pop-out 3D, where stuff is coming out at you. But in VR, your eyes tell that difference. And so we had to create a different, basically, visual rendering system to support VR properly. While we were doing that, the engineers got excited because the hardware was actually performing. This wasn't like the 90s when we were like, oh, hey, VR is going to be real. No, it wasn't. This time everybody's like, oh, yeah, it's really going to be real. So we started putting developers on it. They got really excited. So the team went from three engineers to over 50 people now, well over 50 people working in VR. Our Frankfurt studio has the already announced project, which is Robinson the Journey, which is a full flash AAA level quality visual extravaganza. I mean, it's really beautiful. And that takes a full team. That's a full game development team. We also have other studios starting to work in VR as well within the Crytek family.
[00:05:51.705] Kent Bye: And yeah, maybe talk a bit about the lessons you've learned in terms of what makes a good VR experience, a good game. What are some of the lessons you've learned in that journey so far?
[00:06:02.705] David Bowman: So the way you think about developing a game changes when you start working in VR. The biggest, most obvious thing is you no longer control the camera. The player's head is the camera. And so getting the player to look where you want them to look, when you want them to look, is a new sort of stagecraft. It's a new way of not having direct control but only having influence. So we learned a lot of lessons about how to get people to look where we want. The audio system helps with that, the lighting system helps with that. And a lot of how you stage your content is really important in that. Movement is a huge barrier in VR. How do we get people to move without getting nauseous, right? The inner ear not agreeing with what the visual system is telling it is a big problem. And it was a problem in the last generation. In this generation, what we have found is with the higher frame rates, 90 frames a second in each eye for the Oculus, it removes the physical part of it. But you still don't want people doing strafing motions, where the body and the inner ear are in disagreement. The visual cortex is telling the body one thing's happening, and the vestibular system's telling it another thing's happening. The further that separation is, the more nausea it gets induced. So you, as a developer, have a responsibility to your customer not to get him sick. I mean, that's not a good experience for anybody. So we learned a lot of lessons about that and we're applying them into all of our VR projects. We did about 20 different experiments where we tried to fall. How do we fall in a game? We've got a game right here where you're up on a cliff and you let go, what happens? Well, originally if you fell all the way to the bottom and you hit the rocks, almost immediately everybody got sick. And so we did 20 different experiments. We ended up going back to about experiment two or three, where we just fade to black gently. After letting people fall for about 2.3 seconds, they're like, OK, I'm falling. They get tense. But then we fade to black before they get discomfort and before they hit anything. As soon as you stop that motion, people get sick. There's a whole bunch of other lessons, lighting, the depth of the field, where you want to put how much foliage you put into the scene and where you put it. A lot of things that we do as shortcuts in traditional games you just can't get away with VR because in VR the person's going to be looking at it and if they want to they just tilt their head to the left or the right and suddenly they're getting a different angle on it and you can't hide some of the things that you get away with in a traditional game.
[00:08:10.229] Kent Bye: So are you aiming to have a launch title in the spring for Oculus Rift? What's the timeline for some of these VR experiences that you're making?
[00:08:18.694] David Bowman: We're definitely going to have a launch title for Sony because Sony has already announced this Robinson the Journey. They haven't announced yet exactly a specific date for that because they haven't announced the hardware date as well. So they've got a window and we're in the same window as that launch. We have other projects that we can't talk about at this point, but they're intended to be early VR projects as well. Again, it depends upon the hardware manufacturers and when the window is and when they actually release their hardware. What does the launch title mean in VR where small numbers of units come out first and then sales will expedite over the year? It's a little different than traditional console cycles where they push out millions of units in one fell swoop just in time for Christmas. That's not how it's going to work with VR.
[00:09:04.735] Kent Bye: And maybe you could tell me a bit about the history in terms of at what point did Crytek decide to really integrate virtual reality headsets into their engine, but also start to see that it was viable enough to start investing more resources into it?
[00:09:20.308] David Bowman: So the engine itself, that development was about a year and a half ago now. It was the initial experimentation. We wanted to do something for Gamescom in 2014. And so we showed behind closed doors only our engine running an extremely dense jungle experience where you actually walk through the scene on a trail and there's creatures playing around you. And we were doing it with our old stereoscopic rendering system, right? We did it, we updated it to work in VR, but it wasn't doing it properly. So it was interesting, it was really exciting and visually stunning, and people went crazy who saw it behind closed doors, business partners, etc. But it wasn't the right solution. So that's when we first started looking at getting the engine ready for VR and what does it really take to do that. Our commitment was we needed to be relevant for VR because we really believed VR was going to be real, just iteration, right? So 2016, first hardware comes out, early adopters, 2017 starts to grow a bit and get bigger, and by 2019 consumers are doing VR. It's going to be, you know, we don't know who the hardware winners will be in all of this. Hopefully it'll be plenty of hardware winners, but... The next four years are going to show this really growing up. So we needed to be relevant. And if you're not playing in that space right now, you're going to be too late. It's like the mobile wave, right? If you didn't catch that mobile wave, getting in later was hard. So we decided to invest resources in engine development for our licensees, because a lot of licensees were saying, hey, VR, this time it's going to be real. We're like, yeah, we agree with you. So that's where we started investing in that. As far as content, as we were developing content like this demo, just to show off what we could do with the hardware and the engine itself in that space, the headsets, our developers got excited like they haven't in years. I mean, we do game development. It's been almost 20 years of game development for me. You get a little jaded after a while because you're like, okay, I've seen this game before, right? It's that game plus that game, and they made that twist. But in VR, you get suddenly a whole new media, a new palette. It's like the early days of Bungie, where you're like, wow, we're inventing brand new stuff. No one's ever made a game like this before. And VR is like that right now. And so with the young guys, getting a chance to work in that kind of a space, and getting so excited that they wanted to stay, like, I'll work for free. I just want to work on this. They got so excited by it. We responded to that. And we knew if they were that excited by it, that the audience is going to grow and so let's start building. We started building small and then got bigger and bigger and now we're well over 50 people working on our projects.
[00:11:47.745] Kent Bye: And so what is it about the experience that you're making for Sony that gets you excited? Or what can you say about what the content of that actually is?
[00:11:55.813] David Bowman: So Robinson, the journey, it's a classic story inspired by Robinson Crusoe. You're a shipwrecked young man, in this case a 12-year-old boy. But it happens in the future, it's space as opposed to the ocean. and the Esmeralda, the ship that brought you across the vast distances, was full of people and they were all with you and you were supposed to be a colony and all of a sudden you wake up and you're alone and there's parts of the Esmeralda all around you. There's a story there, there's the shipwreck story of survival, exploration, hopefully the emotional rollercoaster of isolation versus hope. You know, these are strong emotional themes that are hard to do in traditional gaming. In VR, there's intimacy, there's a sense of scale and wonder. The words we hear when we show off this demo right here is amazing, awesome. Well, truly awesome. We want people to be, oh, I came around a corner, all of a sudden I saw something, I'm going to have dreams about it tonight. We can do that. We can do that for the first time. So what gets me personally excited about that is that joy that, wow, we're going to touch people emotionally because games are fun and games are exciting, but rarely have we been able to really touch people emotionally. So let's combine fun with emotion and let's make some stuff that people will be talking about for 20 to 50 years, not just, oh, last year.
[00:13:19.341] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's the thing that I've noticed about virtual reality is that you have a sense of embodied presence and that you do get to cultivate a sense of empathy in a way that you don't in a 2D medium. And so, in your explorations of the emotions, what kind of specific emotions or experiences have you found to be really resonant in terms of things that are very unique to VR?
[00:13:37.687] David Bowman: So, head tracking is an important part of it. Head tracking plus audio, those are the two sort of, when you combine these two things, we know precisely where your head's at and therefore we pretty much know where you're looking. Even without eye tracking, we can tell where you're facing. And we know where you think your visual presence is within the simulation. So we can have entities in that environment react to you in a way we've never been able to before. Eye tracking is part of it, like making eye contact. When I'm talking to you right now, I'm looking you in the eye, and you know I'm here. But if I were going to look off to the side and talk to you, you'd be very quickly irritated because I'm looking off to the side, not addressing you directly. In the game world, we've gotten used to the character talking to the screen. And if you're sitting on the couch, it's looking over your head, or if you're sitting at your laptop, it's maybe looking off to the side. It doesn't know where you are, right? But that's traditional gaming. In VR, we know precisely where you are. in relationship to the experience. And so we have the characters look you in the face. And if you look away from them, we can say, hey, look at me when I'm talking to you. And all of a sudden, you're like, whoa, this game really knows me. I'm not just controlling a character. I am a character in the world. So that's intimacy, right? Then scale, like when you're walking among dinosaurs, I hope you saw the Robinson trailer. In the Robinson trailer, we've got that working in VR, these elements where you're running along and there's brontosaurus legs coming down Allosaurus, or in this case, I believe Diplodocus. The 80-foot tall creatures surrounding you feel 80-foot tall. They're not just, oh, I'm looking at the screen, and my character's this tiny couple of pixels, and then there's these giant creatures. No, you really fear you're about to be stepped on. That sense of scale is partnered with the intimacy, gives you a range that we've never had before. These are things that we can inspire fear and awe and feelings of being insecure and small. At the same point, we can make you feel a giant. We can have you be much bigger than the creatures around you or the world around you. Or we can have it be very tender and intimate and emotional where you're actually seeing someone, you're trying to help them, and they're looking you in the face and responding to you. It's the whole range.
[00:15:54.391] Kent Bye: And so what kind of experiences do you want to have in VR then?
[00:15:57.568] David Bowman: I'm looking forward to the social experiences in VR. I'm looking forward to taking a few friends into a VR space and exploring it with them together in a way that you can have somebody's voice in your head over a voiceover chat while you're playing with them in an MMO-style environment. but you've never really, you see their avatar and you're your avatar and it feels like you're maybe playing together in a play space but not really. There's already VR experiences where you get to see another person in that space and watch what they're doing and they're interacting with you in real time and it feels so much richer. More of that, that to me is the future direction for VR.
[00:16:38.828] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:16:45.127] David Bowman: Well, you've got entertainment experiences, and there's a whole range of them, from passive VR movie type of experiences with a whole new lexicon that's going to happen there. Those will be really entertaining. You've got game at the other end of the spectrum, which is very interactive, very multi-participant interaction. That's going to be really exciting, but you also have big data interaction. The ability for architects, etc., to visualize space in a way they've never done before. Doctors to see medical information in ways they've never had before. VR is a whole new medium. It's going to change how everybody interacts with data. and experience. It'll change our culture, and I'm hopeful that it will change some of our social barriers, because it'll allow people to interact collaboratively across borders, across distance. We're a very dispersed society now, and it's hard to be with those friends that you've had over your lifetime. Especially, you know, I'm living in Germany now, and my family's in the U.S., and I've got friends from around the world. It's nice for us to get together. We can kind of do that in gaming, but in VR, it feels much more intimate again. That's going to be a big potential of it.
[00:17:46.588] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you. Thanks. 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.
