Otherworld Interactive recently announced that their horror experience Sisters just surpassed one million downloads for Google Cardboard. To celebrate, they released a compilation of reaction videos of people screaming and slamming VR headsets into the ground.
While doing horror in VR by yourself may be utterly terrifying, experiencing horror in VR while other people are watching you can be a lot of fun. Your terror and screaming is immediately following by a lot of uncontrollable laughter, which can be really contagious. Overall, it’s such an peak emotional experience that people want to capture and share online. These videos of visceral reactions are in part what has fueled Sisters to become one of the first VR applications to reach one million downloads.
I had a chance to catch up with Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Tong Gray to talk about why people like to be scared, using indirect control to trigger action in VR narratives, cultivating emotional presence, and creating an ambiance and soundscape to amplify your VR story.
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Here’s the reaction video compilation celebrating a million downloads of Sisters
Here’s Robyn’s talk from the Unity VR/AR Vision Summit titled “Emotional Presence in Virtual Reality: The Making of Café Âme and Sisters”
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. The other week, my partner had some of her friends come over and try out some of the different experiences on the Vive. And I was downstairs working on my computer when I suddenly started to hear these screams and shrieks coming from upstairs, which was then immediately followed by some uncontrollable laughter. It was so captivating that I had to just stop what I was doing and go upstairs to see what they were experiencing. And it turns out they were watching Sisters, a horror experience. And these are people who are not necessarily into watching horror experiences, so I was really surprised and I hadn't guessed that this is what they were doing. But it turns out that they were just all together in the room having a great time, getting really scared, but then just enjoying the reactions and laughing together. So on today's episode, I'm going to talk to Robin Gray, one of the co-founders of Otherworld Interactive, which released Sisters first on the Google Cardboard, then on Gear VR, and now it's on the Vive as well. So Sisters just recently crossed a pretty big milestone where it's been downloaded on the Google Cardboard over 1 million times and so it's one of the most popular experiences that are out there and so I'll be talking to Robin as to why do people like to get scared in VR and what is it about what they did into this experience that makes it so compelling. Some of the storytelling techniques that they use, orchestrating the pacing through different emotional beats and triggers and indirect control, as well as what they're doing with the soundscape in order to create this ambience that really feeds into this sense of emotional presence. But first, let's have a quick word from a sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Virtual World Society. The Virtual World Society was started by Tom Furness, and their goal is to become the Peace Corps of VR. They want to transform living rooms into classrooms, and so they're in the process of trying to recruit potential subscribers, as well as content creators who are interested in creating educational experiences that help solve the world's problems and help make the world a better place. So if you're interested, go to virtualworldsociety.org to sign up and get more information. So this interview happened in the hallway outside of the demo room in the Lowe's Hotel in Hollywood during Unity's VRAR Vision Summit that happened in February. And I had just come back from Sundance, where I had a chance to watch Sisters for the first time, both on the Gear VR and the Vive. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:49.199] Robyn Gray: I'm Robin Tangray. I'm the co-founder and chief designer over at Otherworld Interactive. We're a content studio located currently in South Culver City. And we make a combination of contract work, everything from music videos towards most recently an educational piece on climate change, as well as internal projects. So most recently we showed two of our pieces at Sundance, both from the Sisters franchise.
[00:03:11.071] Kent Bye: Great. So, yeah, I had the chance to experience Sisters. So, like, how would you explain to people what Sisters is?
[00:03:18.603] Robyn Gray: My partner likes to say, think about Tales of the Crypt. It's kind of like being in that, which I think is a little bit cheesy, but it is a fun horror movie experience of the Rift. Paranormal horror movies like The Ring or Annabelle or that kind of thing where you are essentially being haunted by scary dolls.
[00:03:34.404] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that, you know, I've experienced a number of different things that explore change blindness and, you know, like sightline and had kind of like an academic understanding of it. And when I actually went through Sisters, I did feel like moments where my rational mind felt completely safe and fine, but then there was moments that happened that just sort of sent chills up my spine. And it was surprising because it was like a Gear VR experience and then a Vive experience. And I kind of had that experience in both of them. And so it was surprising, yeah.
[00:04:04.024] Robyn Gray: Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite moments in the new one is we actually put the doll within the realm where you can actually walk up to it. And you get two kinds of people. You get the kind of person that's like, I'm not walking over there. I'm going to keep my eye on that. And they just stare at it for a while and try to stare it down. And then you get the other kind of person who walks up and starts trying to kick it and smack it, which you can't really do much with right now. Yeah, you get this weird gut feeling that you're just like, I know I'm safe, and this is like a fun scary, but my body is totally reacting here.
[00:04:29.399] Kent Bye: Yeah, so why do you think people want to experience a horror experience in VR?
[00:04:33.893] Robyn Gray: I mean, I think the same reason people like to watch bad and good horror movies. Like, it's a fun, safe way to be scared. And with Sisters, we very much aim not towards the gore, but towards the, like, ghostly things and things popping up, and maybe a couple of jump scares, which, like, everyone screams and everyone kind of bitches about, and they're like, oh, God, you know, jump scare. Like, it's so lame, but people laugh. Like, they have fun doing it. It's just fun. It's one way with it, you know, getting hit by bus to experience some thrills.
[00:04:59.569] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it does feel exhilarating on a certain level to have that. And I'm curious, like, how you cultivate that, though, because, you know, like, I'm imagining that as you're developing it, you kind of become immune to the element of surprise to a certain extent. And so, like, how do you iterate on that in terms of being able to craft kind of an environment and ambiance of this tension that leads to these moments that are exhilarating through fear?
[00:05:25.776] Robyn Gray: In other words, how do I make sure that it's still fresh for me even though I'm playing it over and over again I should be kind of bored with it and I should not know if it's working or not. It's actually still really effective on me. Like I know there's a scare at the end that I know is coming and every time I'm like start flinching and I'm like I know it's coming and I don't want to see it. We also use my partner Andy as a guinea pig so he gets put through it a lot and he is not a horror movie fan. He's been pretty good about it. Finally our composer Phillip will scream every single time at the end of it so far. So you would think you would get used to it but I don't know if it's like an instinctive response for everybody seeing things in the peripheral and knowing you're kind of in danger even though you're really not in danger or what but it's awesome. Like every time it's kind of like almost the first time.
[00:06:04.909] Kent Bye: Yeah, there was a moment that I turned around and literally went, ah! And to me that was surprising because I knew I was in VR and there wasn't anything that actually made me feel like I was there, but it was, I don't know what it is about that element of surprise that something in my primitive limbic brain must have felt like that amount of presence that then was disrupted in a way that was so jarring that it invoked this vocal screen.
[00:06:34.488] Robyn Gray: We really encourage that, too. We get people who are like, oh, man, I'm so sorry. I was screaming so loud. And we're like, no. No, that's awesome. You do that. And it's, I don't know, there's something really exhilarating, too, about being able to be afraid and being able to express that in a safe environment.
[00:06:48.203] Kent Bye: So we're here at the Vision Summit and talking about emotional presence. So what were some of the big points that you were trying to make here?
[00:06:55.200] Robyn Gray: Yeah, so I made up this term, emotional presence, as a way of saying, hey, we always talk about presence in VR. I'm a little sick to death of hearing presence in VR. It's becoming, like, immersive, where it's just like, but what does it really mean? Like, it doesn't mean anything anymore. But anyways, Wikipedia claims presence is just the visceral feeling of being in a simulated world. So my argument with emotional presence is like, okay, cool, I'm in this virtual world that's awesome. What else is there? Like, I don't want to just stand on a billion virtual beaches. What's the hook that keeps me in there? What's the emotion that you're trying to draw on me? What's the story you're trying to tell that makes me want to keep going in there and stay in there? So really we talk about a lot of just basic techniques, things like designing a proper soundscape using things like binaural audio, directional audio, and even non-diegetic things like background music, which we are now used to and don't question even in VR. I also talked about crafting an ambience. So how do we get a nice mood going? What are kind of technical tips to make sure that your environment feels great and feels intriguing? And also what's kind of the conceptual design and what's the story you're telling? Keep it simple. focus on a feeling or focus on a target desire to show your audience something in particular. It doesn't have to be a huge epic. It could be something super small. VR, I think, will always be fascinating even if it's a small thing because you are seeing someone's world that they wanted to share with you. I guess my last two points were talking about embodiment. Ways to kind of cheat embodiment since currently peripherals aren't really up to speed. So like how can we give someone a body, how can we not give someone a body in a way that feels great, in a way that enhances what you're trying to do. Last point was on indirect control. So now that you've brought someone into this 360 environment, how can you ensure that they see the things you want them to see, that they're not being dragged along helplessly, missing all these cues and all these story beats and all these moments for engagement? And what ways can you make sure that they never miss anything?
[00:08:49.035] Kent Bye: Yeah, and because you've done essentially a similar experience with the Sisters franchise in both, like, Google Cardboard and Gear VR and the Vive with RoomScale, what were some of the big differences in terms of how you designed and orchestrated the experience, given that you were able to, in some, just be in one location and others be able to roam around?
[00:09:09.305] Robyn Gray: Yeah, I mean, I would say the soundscape thing is pretty much the same. The indirect control thing is the trickiest part, because now you've given them not only freedom to look 360, but also freedom to, like, walk around. And that's just been an interesting experience. Right now it's come down to playtesting and running in new guinea pigs and seeing what path they take, where they choose to hang out. Like, coming up with ways that almost universally will make sure that they walk over to this thing, will make sure that they turn over here. There's just been a lot of trial and error in figuring out the appropriate cues and the appropriate expectations you set, essentially. So if they expect to see something or they expect that the doll is scary, so they expect to not want to hang out with the doll and to hopefully mostly avoid that doll. And these kind of expectations allow you to rope in your users properly.
[00:09:55.721] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that was very striking to me was that this wasn't just kind of like a 360 video narrative linear experience, but that seemed to be triggered by where I was looking and kind of the timing in that way. So talk a bit about that orchestration of how are you triggering the sequence of events, that it's a linear story in some aspects, but the pace at which those get triggered could vary pretty widely between different people watching it.
[00:10:19.763] Robyn Gray: And as you watch it, nine out of ten people will do pretty much the same thing and get a very similar experience. So a lot of people who go into a Sister's experience, if they're not super familiar, probably if they're not a developer, won't really think of it as interactive, because it's very discreetly interactive. But we always constantly keep track of where you're looking, especially in both experiences, so we know, like, oh, they haven't seen this thing, or they have seen this thing, and we can appropriately decide, like, do we move the story along? Do we need to get their attention some other way? So a lot of the things we'll do is use a sound cue or use a visual cue, for example, a door opening or footsteps to make sure that you're looking in the right direction. And once you've actually looked in that right direction, then we will continue it. So it's kind of a double shot of making sure it's paused and then also doing things in the area we want you to be looking to continue on.
[00:11:04.983] Kent Bye: Is another way of thinking about indirect control by saying, for example, in an experience you may have local agency to control your experience of the environment, but no global agency, so you're not really necessarily changing the outcome of the story?
[00:11:20.719] Robyn Gray: Um, a little bit. Indirect control doesn't necessarily mean that, although because our experiences tend to be linear so far, that is ultimately a lot of what it comes into. Indirect control to me is just making sure... I mean, it's just guiding the player in a way that you know they will probably do things, unless they're being a jerk and trying to break your experience. And I mean, they could ultimately affect the outcome, so say The Walking Dead promises that when you do these things, your ending will very much change, but they still direct you towards, like, well, how do I actually do those things that will make this experience change? So I don't think it necessarily ties in with, like, a linear story versus a nonlinear story, but it's definitely just a way to make sure that your users have, like, a satisfying experience and that they're not just left stranded and going, I don't know what to do now. Nothing's happening.
[00:12:10.677] Kent Bye: And what kind of insights do you have in the process of telling stories within VR?
[00:12:16.351] Robyn Gray: Insights. I don't know about insights. That's a tricky one. I don't know if anyone has insights at this point I mean for us what I like to focus on to keep it small because VR as soon as you come up with an idea it just Explodes like the scope becomes outrageous and you're just like oh my god what I do like Persons walking all the way over here and my my visuals are also down and my sound isn't going so what I focus on is what is the feeling we most want to convey to someone and So we have an overarching story that encompasses that feeling, perhaps. But from the moment to moment, it's kind of coming up with, what should they be feeling at this moment? How can I achieve that? What's kind of the overarching interest curve that's going on? Do I want them to be most engaged here? Am I losing them here? Are they bored here? And it's really just like, what are they feeling here versus the next minute versus the next minute? And at the end, what's the huge thing I want them to feel there?
[00:13:07.597] Kent Bye: And so what type of projects are you working on now?
[00:13:10.242] Robyn Gray: So we're working on some client stuff, which you can't talk about. But we are pushing forward Sisters in the Vive, which I'm super excited for. We showed what essentially was a two-week demo that I put together really quick in Unity for Sundance. But it actually is the experience where you wander around and scary things happen to you. And I want to make the user ultimately a more active participant. So right now, it's a matter of expanding on the story. Like, why are you in the house in the first place? What the hell's up with these creepy dolls? And then it's also a matter of giving the player more agency in terms of giving them missions, giving them goals, and then letting that play out with the story.
[00:13:47.484] Kent Bye: Can you talk a bit more about what you were doing with the soundscape within Sisters to kind of create that ambiance?
[00:13:52.937] Robyn Gray: Sure, so Sisters Mobile especially, like I said, Sisters Vive was kind of a quick two week thing, so it was a lot of recycling assets and just reshaping them to fit well. I wouldn't say it's nearly as well done as the mobile. So for the mobile, we have a billion things going on that you probably don't notice. We have a very low unsettling bass track that plays and kind of amps up throughout the experience beneath all the sound effects. We have the subliminal heartbeat that, again, you probably don't notice, because if you noticed it, you'd be like, oh, that's cheesy. But because you don't really notice it, I think it's another one of those things you viscerally feel, where it starts slow and steady, and then as the tension rises, the heartbeat speeds up. If I think about it, I'm like, oh, that's why I'm feeling tense right now. The heartbeat's going crazy. We also, of course, have the usual directional audio cues, scary things happening, doors opening, et cetera, audio cues. We have musical stingers for particularly scary jump scare dramatic moments. And then lastly, we play a little bit with binaural audio, which works really well for the tiny girl ghosts as they circle you singing creepy songs.
[00:14:53.628] Kent Bye: Well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be able to necessarily even identify all those because I think the sound when it's done well, you don't really even notice it.
[00:15:01.365] Robyn Gray: Which is unfortunate for sound, because I mean, I talked in my talk earlier about how traditional games, it kind of always falls to the end where everyone's like, oh god, I guess we should get sound in, which is already a bad idea in traditional games, but is a horrible idea in VR where you really need it pulling for you. It's like 50% of convincing the user that they're there and that they want to be there. But yeah, again, it's like one of those things where if it's done well, you don't really notice, but you feel it. And if it were gone, you would really notice that.
[00:15:27.179] Kent Bye: What's some of the biggest mistakes that you see people doing in audio?
[00:15:31.358] Robyn Gray: No. Again, it's one of those things where if it's done really well, you don't think about it. So I probably don't notice when it's done really well. And I don't expect a ton from it too much at this point. A few things I have noticed is a few of the 360 video experiences I've been in, they tend to not seemingly use audio, which I think makes it harder to track what's going on in that video experience. Cause you know, if you had audio, I'd be like, all right, I need to turn and watch this guy doing his thing. But I don't have that audio cue. Instead, it's a general stereo audio sound. It's coming from nowhere, seemingly. And therefore, it's not helping me, as I'm lost at sea in this experience.
[00:16:08.036] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what that might be able to enable?
[00:16:14.893] Robyn Gray: I'm really excited for telling stories, obviously, in VR, because that's kind of my thing. I'm really excited to bring people to new places. I think one of the interesting things is we see a lot of hi-fi experiences, like a lot of, like, these are really realistic graphics, and I'm just like, I don't really care. I see realistic graphics when I'm walking around outside of VR. So I really like seeing stylized, interesting worlds that can never happen in the real world. But I'm really, really excited to see what kind of non-entertainment possibilities it has. My grandfather was in architecture. I can't wait for architectural visualization to be just a common thing. I can't wait for all the uses that can help with training people to handle horrible situations in a safe environment.
[00:16:50.715] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you.
[00:16:52.076] Robyn Gray: Thanks very much.
[00:16:53.675] Kent Bye: So that was Robin Gray, one of the co-founders of Otherworld Interactive, who produced the experience called Sisters, which is available on Google Cardboard, Gear VR, as well as the HTC Vive. So a couple of quick takeaways about this is that, first of all, I'm not really into horror experiences beyond a phase that I went through as I was a teenager. But I really don't watch a lot of horror movies and haven't really been drawn to experience horror and VR until I was at Sundance and decided to just see all the different things that were there. And I was honestly surprised about how compelling I found it and the different types of visceral experiences it gave my body. I really also saw the social component that happens there when my partner and all of her friends were watching it together. There are also people who don't identify as people who are really into horror experiences and they would never imagine themselves doing a horror experience in VR, but when they were together and experiencing it as a group, then it's just something that they all just had a lot of fun sharing with each other and laughing. And so there's this kind of really interesting aspect here of the social experience of experiencing VR within a group, but watching one person who's only in the VR experience. And so It's this kind of like paradoxical thing because VR is very isolating. You're in your own world. The people who are watching aren't necessarily even seeing what you're seeing if it's in a gear VR. But if it's on the Vive, you can also kind of see what people are seeing and just kind of share with them and how truly incredibly fear-inducing it can be to be in these environments and to have these subtle things shift that there's just a part of your primal brain that's not expecting these change blindness things to happen and when they do happen you just really find it super creepy and scary as well. And so I think the sisters is a great example of a horror experience that just works really well and turns out to be a very social experience which I think explains why it's done so well is because people have videotaped themselves experiencing it and then showing it and then people see that and they're like oh wow I want to have that experience myself and then I want to share it with all my friends and see how they react to it. So it's been kind of like this, you know, extreme reaction from the experience has produced this natural desire to want to share it with other people. And then that becomes part of the grassroots marketing that has helped it reach over a million downloads now, which is arguably one of the first VR experiences to cross the 1 million download threshold. So a couple of other things that I think are interesting is that, first of all, the indirect control, the storytelling, the triggers, lots of really interesting prescient insights. And the thing about Sisters is that a lot of people could go through it and they don't really necessarily even realize that it was an interactive experience, that it was really reacting to what they're looking around. And so that's just an example of what Robin would call discreetly interactive. and not necessarily explicitly interactive, where you know you're making decisions at different points. And so I think this is a branch of narrative storytelling that works actually really well in VR, because based upon gaze and different triggers, then they can progress the story so you can make sure that you're not missing anything. So lots of good lessons there. And so the other thing is that in order to construct this triggered system, they just did a lot of different user testing and see what the most common paths were and they designed around that. And so there's always going to be people who are trying to break the experience and be the edge case of trying to not do the thing that they want you to do. But I think in most cases people behave in a way that's fairly predictable and they can start to just take those user tests and what the user is expecting and be able to create an experience like that. So I think this is actually a pretty viable approach for other people if they're trying to create a similar type of interactive experience. also just to point out the audio soundscape is something that is so subtle that i didn't necessarily recognize it the first time that i went through but in hearing robin talk about it i can see how important it is all the different subtle audio stingers and heartbeats and spatialized sound effects that are in the experience that help make it such a compelling VR experience. Even though in the Gear VR, you're just kind of sitting in one spot, you really get this sense of embodied presence and still was able to invoke this spine tingling experience in me when I watched it. So with that, if you do enjoy the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a contributor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
