Minecraft VR was released on the Gear VR this week, and it completes the long journey of making one of John Carmack’s dreams come true. If you haven’t watched John’s Oculus Connect 2 keynote yet, then now is a good time to go back and check it out because his passion, drive, and vision is crystal clear. John believes that bringing Minecraft to VR will be a significant milestone and inflection point in the overall consumer launch and mass adoption of virtual reality.
Minecraft has already played an important role in social VR within the consumer virtual reality community. The Minecrift mod was the first modern social VR experience for a lot of DK1 early adopters including Cymatic Bruce, D from eVRydayVR, Aaron Davies, Gunter S. Thompson, Cris Miranda, OlivierJT, and many others.
I had a chance to catch up with Jesse Merriam at GDC, who is the lead producer for the Redmond Minecraft Team at Microsoft to talk more about bringing Minecraft to VR.
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John Carmack has never been as excited to give a keynote as he was at Oculus Connect 2, where he was able to share his enthusiasm and passion about Minecraft VR to the world for the first time publicly. After hearing John’s story, it’s really quite an amazing that this even happened.
I think this tweet perfectly captures some of the new types of experiences that family and friends will be sharing with each other in Minecraft VR:
Me in @Minecraft @Oculus VR with my son, filming him building because even in VR, I'm still a dad. pic.twitter.com/jXNHKlCoin
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 28, 2016
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. Today, I talked to Jesse Merriam, who is a developer on the Microsoft team working on Minecraft VR. So this interview happened at GDC at Oculus' space that they had rented out for a number of different press events, including the Oculus Game Days and this event, where they were showing Minecraft on the Gear VR for the first time. So I had gone down to the basement where they were doing the demos. They had these white swivel chairs with a minder to help guide you through the experience if you were not familiar with Minecraft at all. And I hadn't really ever played it before and so it was a little bit of a challenging experience to have somebody who couldn't see anything that you were seeing try to guide you through an experience on the Gear VR. But eventually I got the hang of it and got to kind of experience it. And then after that I walked upstairs and there was a crowd of people that were surrounding John Carmack. And so Carmack was basically the guy responsible for Minecraft happening in VR. You know, at Oculus Connect 2, go back and listen to his keynote where they basically announced Minecraft and VR for the first time. It was this kind of crazy partnership where John Carmack was essentially like, no, really guys, we have to do this. And in fact, I'm just going to go do it. And even if it doesn't really work out in our long-term best interest, I just think that this absolutely needs to happen. There's something then in the passion that I heard in John Carmack's drive towards getting Minecraft in VR, because I think he sees from his children and his own experience that Minecraft is something that is super compelling. But also from his own personal experience, he's talked about how it's just an experience that's really well suited to the affordances of VR in terms of world building and exploration and social dimensions. You know, when I talk about a lot of different early days of social VR, there was somebody who made a mod of Minecraft called Minecraft and so if you trace back social VR it goes all the way back to Minecraft of people kind of experiencing social VR for kind of the first time in this modern manifestation of consumer VR. And so anyway, Carmack was just kind of like going on as Carmack does. He can just talk and talk and talk. And I got a lot of contextual information about the technical details of the process of getting Minecraft and VR working. And so after that, I actually decided to go back downstairs and find somebody from Microsoft to get on the record to kind of talk about some of these things and kind of mark that moment in time. So this week they've actually released Minecraft in VR where you can go and download it on your Gear VR and you know personally I think it is going to drive a lot of adoption. There's a ton of different Minecraft players out there across all sorts of ages so I would not be surprised if this really drives up sales on the Samsung Gear VR because I think there's just a lot of people who are super excited about Minecraft. And so today's episode is brought to you by the Virtual World Society, which, you know, if you go back and listen to my interview with Tom Furness in episode 347, he actually calls out Minecraft as one of the examples of a video game where there's all sorts of different educational opportunities. And so the Virtual World Society wants to use VR to help change the world and they're really looking to recruit both funders to be able to finance this vision at scale, as well as contributors. So at the individual scale, if you want to participate and become a future subscriber and figure out how you can get involved. as well as content creators, people who want to help create and build the future of educational experiences that can help change the world. So check out the virtualworldsociety.org. So with that, we'll just go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:01.968] Jesse Merriam: Hi, I'm Jesse. I'm one of the game devs on Minecraft. So in the VR experience we're sharing today, we're showing the new experience on Gear VR. It starts you out in our living room experience and then graduates you into the full immersive experience. Minecraft is an innovation platform and we're just trying to find new ways to introduce players to the content they already love. So with VR there's a lot of different ways that people react, much like when you go up to the top of a tall building and look down, you're with four friends, you're going to have four very different reactions. We find with VR, it lands different with people. So we've put forth a number of experiments for players to try out to either relax back into like the living room where you can put the game up on the wall, but with a quick tap, you can jump in, be immersive, and if you're in there and a creeper comes up and starts to explode behind your head, you can tap back out, jump back, reorient, and dive back in. Also, there's a lot of different ways you can turn and experiment. So you'll notice there's a 22-degree turn when you're in the immersive experience. That's configurable in settings, but we find that that's really helpful for people to be able to orient and understand exactly which axis they're on. And it helps their brain have a visual cue just to understand what movement they're experiencing. So we're having a lot of fun trying new things, getting feedback. Minecraft's belonged to the players for a really long time and so we're just throwing out some of our ideas for VR and seeing how they land. So far we're getting really positive feedback about the different opportunities that exist and the different configurations so that everybody can experience VR the way they want to. And Gear VR as well as Oculus Rift are great platforms for that.
[00:05:49.305] Kent Bye: It seems like an ambitious port because it feels like it's almost like the entire game within a mobile version. And so, is that true? Is this going to be equivalent to the desktop version of Minecraft?
[00:05:59.653] Jesse Merriam: So, it's actually not a port. What we've done is we've enabled the existing code base to also use this platform. So, you're essentially playing Windows 10 Edition, Pocket Edition, when you're playing the VR editions. So you can actually have a multiplayer game with your Gear VR version together with the Windows 10 user, together with an Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or Kindle Fire. So all those people can play together in a multiplayer session because we didn't port the game to VR. What we did is we expanded the existing game to also allow VR as an input. But you're playing with the exact same feature set you've always had, the exact same trials and tribulations and all the fun and all the invention and discovery that Minecraft is known for.
[00:06:44.717] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when you first start out the experience, you're sitting in a living room and you're watching the Minecraft screen on a 2D screen, and then you have the option to tap the side of the Gear VR and literally step into the world of the Gear VR. And I think, to me, that was one of the most amazing moments of going from that transition from the 2D into 3D and then completely being immersed and surrounded.
[00:07:05.489] Jesse Merriam: I agree. It's very magic. It was magic for me as well. And, like, walking up to a sheep and realizing how big they are. Seeing a spider come down from above your head. Those moments take something that you've experienced maybe for hundreds of hours and now you get to see it all over again, new. And so, yeah, I definitely encourage everyone who loves Minecraft to give this a shot because it's a very new way to experience something you love in an exciting new fashion.
[00:07:33.469] Kent Bye: I think one of the biggest challenges with VR is locomotion and being able to move around in a VR scene. And I'm someone who's fairly sensitive to VR locomotion, but I felt pretty okay in the Minecraft experience. And so I'm wondering what type of specific optimizations you had to do in order to make the locomotion in Minecraft comfortable.
[00:07:51.696] Jesse Merriam: Well, I'll say that it's a combination of a lot of different things. That living room mode certainly is a great place to reorient yourself when you need to. You'll notice for jumping, we've kind of glided out the path there. So just to make that a little less of a jarring experience when you go up and then come back down.
[00:08:09.782] Kent Bye: So just to clarify that, it sounds like what you're saying is that as you're moving up, instead of jumping in a parabolic curve, you're just jumping in a straight line.
[00:08:16.666] Jesse Merriam: No, it's more blended than that, but we softened it a bit. We also made it so you don't go above and then fall back down. You just go up to the level you were going to. You'll feel that softness. Again, that's configurable, but it's something that we've found. So the defaults you experience today are what we think are some of the best options between the stutter turn at 22 degrees and the jump curves being adjusted a little bit and just generally the movement. But there's just a lot of different VR settings that we're letting people We have the things that we think are working for most people, but we're also learning that everybody's different, and what works for one person may not work for the next person, so we're leaving a lot of the things in there, a lot of our prototypes or experiments in as configurable items, because, again, this game belongs to the players, so they'll let us know over time what works and what doesn't.
[00:09:05.852] Kent Bye: And I noticed that in looking in far distances, it seems like it's a little dialed down for mobile performance. I imagine that you can't see forever in the distance, that there's a distance that you can render stuff. So maybe you could talk a bit about what types of different optimizations you had to do for mobile.
[00:09:20.857] Jesse Merriam: And you're looking at it in early preview right now, so we're still having discussions about a lot of those things. There are different trade-offs we consider in regards to performance, sharpness of image, how jaggy do we want the lines to be. And so we're still playing with a lot of those things. I think that there's a lot more progress on the horizon, but I think I'm very proud of the experience today. And those vistas you're used to, definitely, I don't know if you saw, like when you were going across the bridge, you could see off into the distance and down to the waterfall. So there is a number of places where it pushes out pretty well, and we're continuing to review that.
[00:09:57.325] Kent Bye: One of the things I was surprised by and that I was told afterwards that this is actually a monoscopic experience. You're seeing the same image in both eyes and you know I didn't even actually even notice in the experience and so I'm just curious if that's something that going forward if you're going to keep it monoscopic in order to hit the performance.
[00:10:12.775] Jesse Merriam: This is a great day for us to learn things like that and how they're received. There are a lot of levers when it comes to experience. to comfort and to performance. And we're trying to pick the right settings for all of those things to give the best overall experience. So we're definitely listening a lot today. And I do think that the defaults we set today were pretty positively received across the boards. And so I'm optimistic we found at least a good set of settings, maybe not the only one we'll offer.
[00:10:44.052] Kent Bye: What were some of the reactions of people who've maybe played a lot of Minecraft to be able to actually step into the world for the first time?
[00:10:50.516] Jesse Merriam: I think the thing I heard most today is what we talked about earlier, which is the personal relationship between you and the characters in the game. When people see a spider in VR, they're by a spider. And the spider's big, and the spider's just that much more real to them. And that's been really exciting to hear. I personally did have a creeper come up behind me once, and heard the ticking and for me that was an incredibly real experience. It's hard to walk through Minecraft now like say by a rabbit and not chase it when it scurries away from you because it's so, you're so in the world with it.
[00:11:26.617] Kent Bye: Do you have any personal favorite memories or stories of being in Minecraft in VR?
[00:11:32.155] Jesse Merriam: Really, I think certainly getting blown up by a creeper is amazing. The first time I played VR in its early development, I came up and was immersed in the world walking through and I saw a sheep and I walked towards it and it ran away. And that was the moment where I realized it had seen me and in that moment Minecraft was real for me. And I started chasing the sheep through the forest. So, it can be pretty fun. It can be pretty fun and it can be new all over again.
[00:11:59.352] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:12:07.055] Jesse Merriam: So I think we're feeling it today. When you are able to take something that you've known, when you're able to take something that's already touched you very personally and experience it in a new way that becomes even more real, more visceral to you. I think virtual reality has the ability to let us expand our life experiences to some of those things we never would have otherwise been able to experience. And they are my experiences. They are personal experiences. And that's just amazing.
[00:12:35.208] Kent Bye: Great. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:12:38.230] Jesse Merriam: No, I just hope everybody gets a chance to give it a try. It's really, really amazing and a great way to try something you already love brand new.
[00:12:46.636] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. So that was Jesse Miriam of Microsoft. And there's a number of different developers for Manjong and Microsoft and Oculus, all kind of collaborating into making this happen. So some of the takeaways for me is that, again, that just Minecraft is going to be huge for a lot of people. You know, if you want to go back and listen to someone really geek out about it a little bit, go listen to episode 322. It's the GDC wrap-up that we did right after everybody had a chance to play it for the first time. And so Scott Hayden had a lot of really interesting insights of being a longtime Minecraft player, and he kind of geeks out a little bit into the specifics of kind of things that only Minecraft people would know. Also, go all the way back to episodes 56 and 60 to check out some of the interviews that I did at the Immersion 2014. This was an educational conference where people were talking about how to use immersive technologies for educational purposes, and so there's actually a couple of examples of people using Minecraft in an educational context. go and check out those interviews because there's a lot of really interesting ways that they were using Minecraft to be able to teach computational thinking as well as to teach them actual programming skills. You know, kids actually starting to code in Java, which to me is pretty amazing. But yeah, to me, in this moment in time, it's all these things that are launching in terms of all these headsets and all these things coming into being. I think this is important just to mark that this is a significant title that is going to actually draw a lot of people into VR for the first time. You can imagine that people who are long-time Minecraft players who have never touched virtual reality, never really interested in it, but they may have communities or things that they're building in VR. There was something really amazing and magical to be able to step in and to actually walk into your different creations that you could only really see before in a 2D screen. You're starting to really get this sense of scale and the power of being able to build things in VR. Overall, I think the process of world building and social and different dimensions of tapping into something that people already love, then this is just going to cause a lot of people to just get into VR and to perhaps buy a Samsung S7 or S7 Edge and a Gear VR headset and to be able to dive in and start to really experience some of their first experiences in VR. And there was just quite a lot of things that were very comfortable about this experience. And there's a couple of tweets that stuck out as I was looking through the news this week. And one was John Carmack was saying, just don't use the stick for yaw rotation. Just trust me, go use a chair that swivels. It'll be a much better experience. And that's what it was kind of designed for. as well as there was a father who was in minecraft and shooting this video of his son building things in minecraft and so he's in vr videotaping his son in vr also building things and so he's like i'm in vr filming my son building in minecraft because i'm a dad and that to me just kind of like summarized so perfectly The new types of connections that might be possible here with families doing things in VR in Minecraft I think we're gonna see a lot of really interesting things and this is really just the beginning and it'll be kind of interesting to see what type of experiences and stories people have of that So just to kind of tie things up, I've just gone through, finished Thursday at SCVR Conference and Expo. Today was a little bit of a slower, longer interviews. I think the average length of the interview today was probably 35 to 50 minutes. I've had some pretty epic conversations with CEO of Linden Lab and InterVR's Chris Miranda and just like a series of really extended discussions and I'm excited for people to kind of tune in and I'm actually kind of frankly my mind is a little bit blown. Here's an exercise if you want to sort of like recreate somewhat of what it might be like to come to these conferences and do these interviews is that you know from GDC to South by Southwest to IEEE VR I did about 87 different interviews so if you want to kind of stack up and listen to like a 87 interviews over the course of like 12 days then you could start to imagine what it's like from my brain just sort of by the end of it is just like kind of my mind is blown and It's an interesting process for what I do and how I do it and how these interviews come about and one leads to the next but it just kind of feels like this painting of a tapestry of of knowledge and information and different themes arise and then one thing kind of leads to the other and I it kind of chronologically makes sense but you know as I release these they're not in chronological order so that experience that I have is a little bit different than the ones that you have in the process of being able to receive these interviews and transmissions that are coming through and so I just got to say that you know today is kind of marking almost like a two-year anniversary like I launched the first episode of my podcast on May 4th of 2014 but It was at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference on May 19th in 2014 where I got up and gave a 60 second pitch saying, hey I'm gonna go and interview a lot of people here and so if you have something to say I'd love to talk to you. And then after that I proceeded to do about 46 interviews over that day and a half and so If you go back way to the beginning of the archive and listen from like episode 1 all the way up to like episode 50, you'll kind of see this trajectory of where this all began with the Voices of VR at the first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, which was kind of the first consumer VR event. And I had tuned in that there was something really big that was happening with this technology and it was revolutionary and I just wanted to be there to help document what was happening and it's kind of crazy to think that just two years later and 400 interviews that I've got in my backlog and about 353 now that have been published that there's just so much amazing information and knowledge that I can't wait to share and help contextualize and allow you to be a part of this unfolding journey of the VR revolution that we're in the midst of right now and so if you are enjoying this journey of these unfolding stories of VR and of each of these content creators as well as my story in the process of being here telling it and and sharing with you what's happening on my experience of it, then please do consider becoming a contributor to my patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR
