What are the game design considerations for creating a VR experience that will be compelling for not only the primary player, but also the spectators who may be watching it on a livestream with VREAL? This was the big question that I discussed with VREAL’s Director of Developer Relations Tadhg Kelly, who has been collaborating with VR developers to make sure that an experience works for both 3rd person spectators as well as the primary player.
The precise formula for the ingredients that will make a VR game that’s well-suited for streaming is still not known yet, but Tadhg suspects that it should be fun to play over and over again, and inspires competitions that have a near infinite number of outcomes. There’s also a lot of open questions around what the core competencies of a good VR streamer are going to be, and what existing PC and console streamers can teach VR streamers.
Tadhg and I explore all of what is known about VR streaming so far, and we talk about all of the open questions and make some predictions about the future of VR streaming with VREAL.
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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. On today's episode, I have Tighe Kelly, who works in developer relations for VReal, which is a virtual reality streaming company that I first covered back in episode number 378. So Tighe dives a lot deeper into some of the dynamics of streaming and What's it going to look like for streamers within virtual reality? What are some of the core competencies that might be helpful for being able to create this performance art of immersive experiences? But also some of the dynamics of what's it going to take for the types of games that are going to be really interesting to play within a streaming context? Are they going to look something like the traditional esports that are out there? Or is it going to be something completely new and perhaps less of a game and more of an exploration? So we'll be looking at some of the higher level design principles that will help guide a little bit for where the virtual reality streaming is going to head. But it's really actually the Wild West and nobody really knows, but we'll be taking our best shot at taking some informed guesses. So that's what we'll be focusing on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by The Virtual Reality Company. VRC is creating a lot of premier storytelling experiences and exploring this cross-section between art, story, and interactivity. They were responsible for creating the Martian VR experience, which was really the hottest ticket at Sundance, and a really smart balance between narrative and interactive. So if you'd like to watch a premier VR experience, then check out thevrcompany.com. Today's episode is also brought to you by The VR Society, which is a new organization made up of major Hollywood studios. The intention is to do consumer research, content production seminars, as well as give away awards to VR professionals. They're going to be hosting a big conference in the fall in Los Angeles to share ideas, experiences, and challenges with other VR professionals. To get more information, check out thevrsociety.com. So this interview with Tyga Kelly happened on June 22nd in Seattle, Washington at the Intel Buzz Workshop. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:25.326] Tadhg Kelly: Hi, my name's Tyga Kelly. I'm a game designer and writer, and I'm the director of developer relations at VReal, which is a streaming startup based in Seattle that's working on VR native streaming for games for the future.
[00:02:39.105] Kent Bye: Right, so you just had a talk about game design here at the Intel Buzz workshop that's here in Seattle. And one of the things that was the most striking to me is when you said that game developers should really be designing their game with streaming in mind, trying to optimize their experience for streaming. So what does that mean?
[00:02:57.398] Tadhg Kelly: Well it's two things really. One is making sure that their game is something that's visually viewable. Whether that's in terms of user interface or animation or graphical style or the way that the camera moves in the game or something like that. Something that when other people are looking at the game they can follow what's going on. Which when you're a player may not necessarily be a concern but when you're a viewer may well. But then the other thing is making sure that your game is one that isn't necessarily going to get burned by streaming. And that's a difficult word to use, but what I mean is that in being streamed, people will be more excited to try it and more excited to play it and really kind of engage with it versus a game where maybe they sort of feel like they've seen it and then it's kind of over. So it's kind of an important distinction to make sure that when a game is being streamed, it's an inspirational experience for people to then want to kind of convert into play the game further.
[00:03:51.359] Kent Bye: You can kind of get into this a little bit. If it's a narrative-driven type of game, it seems like that once you've seen the story, if there's limited agency, then, you know, what's the point? If you've already watched it, someone streaming it, then what is the real thing that's really going to make it a personalized experience that you are experiencing something different than what you already experienced from streaming is what I'm kind of hearing.
[00:04:11.748] Tadhg Kelly: Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of examples of games which have had that unfortunate experience. I mean, it's not to take anything away from those games at all. We talked about Dark Dragon Cancer, for example, and the way that the developer very publicly said that he felt that streaming had not necessarily been a benefit to them, that it felt like a lot of people maybe were deriving a lot of the experience, but not necessarily feeling that they then had to convert over. So it is, I am talking about that to an extent. I'm talking about ensuring that your game has, I guess, a more emergent sort of scope, perhaps something maybe, yes, more player expression, player involvement, viewer involvement, and those kinds of things. But it's not a one-size-fits-all. It's not necessarily the case that just because your game follows one shape or one size that it is therefore more stream-appropriate or not. It's more just to sort of be aware of and have that in mind as a kind of a part of what it is to be involved in the new streaming ecosystem.
[00:05:09.486] Kent Bye: Well, it seems like with virtual reality streaming that's different than, say, streaming within a 2D medium like on Twitch, is that there's a bit of a performative element of, as you're in VR, you can really see somebody's body language and them almost doing an actor performance within Jump Stabilator or Fantastic Contraption or Tilt Brush. And so when you think about some of the design principles of, like, how do you design a VR experience to make it really fit well with streaming, what are some of these underlying game design principles that you are finding in terms of what makes it interesting or compelling for spectators to watch?
[00:05:45.506] Tadhg Kelly: So on a personal level, and this is really my own opinion, I find that I think games that are showing a degree of verbal simplicity, like focusing on simple base actions, fun scenarios, maybe where the background, like say economics of the game is not that complicated, but the game's physical actions are kind of new and fun and interesting. I think that's really where a lot of the more early successful games are probably going to come from. And I also think the same is true for quite a lot of streamed games. I mean, I really want to see a streamed version of AudioShield just as much as I want to play AudioShield. Like I find playing AudioShield, it's just so root fun. I've got my man fists and I'm sort of like bashing red and blue blobs and it's in time to the music and it's very expressive sort of all by itself. And I think if I was a viewer sort of standing off to one side and watching that and it kind of had a club environment thing going on, I think it'd be fantastic. I absolutely agree that because VR gives you this much wider range of motion and much wider range of perspective, it is far more performative and it's differently performative than browser streaming is. With browser streaming, you know, you've got the game in one pane, you've got the smaller kind of streamer in the other, and there's a sort of a restricted sort of space effect there for the streamer sometimes. But what we're seeing with VReal certainly is so many people that come in, they're like playing with our preview, they're experimenting with it, and they suddenly realize that they can do things like wave, or that they can see each other talk, like they can see like lip-syncing kind of going. and they realize that they can bob their heads back and forth. With these simple things, suddenly, yeah, you should see what happens. It's amazing how many people just suddenly start larking about, or how you can actually start to tell. Even though they made the same avatar, you can totally pick out different people straight away. You can kind of get a really... a really different sense of their individual personality coming through. So yeah, so I feel it's quite where it goes is going to be exciting as hell to sort of figure out, but I think we're going to see almost like performance artists in games, like that we're going to see people playing games and streaming games and some combinations of those two. And it's going to be a very joined up sort of experience rather than maybe sort of a bit flat or whatever. So yes, there's a lot to be said for it.
[00:07:59.139] Kent Bye: Yeah, last week at E3, Palmer Luckey was doing some mixed reality streaming in the Oculus booth and he went to Twitter to ask for help because he said, I'm realizing that I'm really not all that great at hosting a live stream. And so he was sort of soliciting a lot of feedback for how to make it a little bit more engaging or interesting. And so from your perspective, what makes a successful virtual reality streamer?
[00:08:22.242] Tadhg Kelly: Wow, that's such an open question. I mean, are we even able to sort of define that yet? I don't think we can meaningfully. It's like, right now I think it'll be people who just take the risk and decide to set up a presence for themselves and to just really make a go of it. I think we're way, way, way far away from having fixed rules of the road around anything really to do with VR. We're not really in that sort of stage where it's like, okay, here's what it is, A, B, C, this is what you should do and stuff. It's much more like, oh, apparently I can do this. Okay, I'm going to make something of that. I'm going to play with it. I'm going to see where it kind of takes me and stuff like that. It's hard, I think, because the games market is very, the overall games market is very mature. And it has a lot of preconceived notions around what should and shouldn't be the case, right? And that applies from the design side, like PC gaming, mobile gaming, console gaming. There's a lot of tropes that are already sort of established. Browser. And the same is also true, I think, with a lot of gaming media. There's a certain kind of style, if you like, that's kind of established. There's a certain way of doing a YouTube show, for instance, which involves like a lot of animated enthusiasm or there's a certain way of doing a podcast which involves maybe sort of a kind of a more slow and elaborate and maybe more kind of homey conversation and stuff like that. Tropes evolve but we don't, I think with VR we don't and we shouldn't really be too quick to wonder about what those tropes will be. They will come in time but right now it's like free and open canvas material and that's a good thing. It's nice to be optimistic about gaming, it's nice to have that completely uncertain feel. It's nice to feel like everything is kind of new again, right? And I'd actually prefer if we kind of hold on to that sensation kind of as long as possible and let it see where it takes us, rather than, you know, just trying to lock it down or being like, oh, okay, well, it's like this, you know? I mean, that's just me. I'm very much enthused by the new kind of canvas that it sort of promises.
[00:10:24.072] Kent Bye: Well, if you look at browser streamers and the ones who are really successful, I haven't personally watched a lot of them do their full playthroughs of different games, but from what I can gather, there seems to be a certain level of emotional authenticity and passion and excitement, but also just the way that they play specific games that are able to be interesting for people to watch. And so from your perspective of kind of watching these different Browser streamers, what can we learn from the principles of things that seem to work within that medium?
[00:10:56.419] Tadhg Kelly: Well, I think the biggest thing is Authenticity and identity. Yes, they're absolutely key and that's been the case with social media and blogging and all the way back to like the earliest days of the internet and What people are doing with video with sort of streaming of games today is a sort of a new generation of in a sense maybe rediscovering that, but also like fashioning it sort of anew for themselves, right? They're realizing that, you know, it's like that personal connection, really you can't sort of get around it and that's great, but they're also realizing, they're also figuring out whole new ways of doing that, that a lot of older people, myself for example, are continually stunned by, like continually like a little bit like, wow, how does that work? So it's new but different, you know, something old, something new, that kind of thing. So those qualities, let's project forward, we assume that VR streaming, VR in general, will of course be personal, will of course be authentic, will of course reward and accrue to people who are doing those things, who are taking a lot of time to craft meaningful entertainment using the games that they're playing. and that are doing so in a way that feels connected to an audience. So that's the part we know. The part we don't know, and the great part, in a sense, is like how they will do that, right? The individual techniques that they will kind of use, the experiments that they'll conduct, if you like, within these platforms, the way that they'll try and figure out for themselves what the right methods and modes and all those sort of stuff will be. And yeah, and so like it's a nice mix of two very interesting sort of virtues, you know?
[00:12:34.738] Kent Bye: Well, for me, if I were to make a prediction, the thing that's different about virtual reality is that you have this capability to have highly dynamic and interactive engagement with your audience rather than from them just passively watching. And so perhaps if there's some way to, at scale, be able to have people interacting with the main streamer in a way, whether it's in actual kind of closed rooms and direct interaction with the people who are doing it live, Because a lot of the, when I think about streaming, to me it really gets into this move from, you know, like you were talking about earlier, this feeling old. It's kind of like this paradigm from desktop computing and information age and moving into the experiential age where it's all live, it's all in the moment, it's happening right now. Either you're there or you miss it. So people can record their streams that they have and then they put it onto YouTube for people to watch later, but that's some ways kind of like the information age. And I think that the strengths of virtual reality are going to be those things that you really have to be there in order to experience it. You'd have to be in the room with the streamer and have some sort of interaction that you really can't capture and record and then share to other people later.
[00:13:43.306] Tadhg Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I think definitely there is a question. about how we bridge, because everybody who's involved in this sector obviously wants the rest of the world to buy headsets and to get involved. Because you're right, once they pop them in front of their eyes, once they stand up, if they have a room scale set up for example, once they stand up and start waving their arms around and start drawing in Tilt Brush or whatever, it very quickly becomes apparent to them that their mental landscape has changed. I was on social media the other day and a friend of mine who's a game developer said, Does anybody else have this weird feeling now, having played a lot of VR stuff, that when you go back to looking at other games it seems weird, right? Like that you become actually way more aware of the abstraction that you've been dealing with for decades in some cases. Yeah, absolutely, right? I'm playing Doom on the PS4 at the moment and it's totally cool, it's a great game, but at the same time I'm kind of a little bit like, Okay, I have to like push my thumb on a stick. That's become strange again. That's like why am I not like just you know like The abstraction element is kind of an interesting sort of like almost like feedback loop that's kind of gone a bit wrong but again, it's very fervent on my part, but I just see a lot of different complicated and interesting use cases emanating out of all of this. I see a lot of slow evangelism going through and continuing to go through that is just going to convince everybody one after another to try it out. I see some issues. I forecast that we'll have Personally, I think we'll have leaner headsets in the future, maybe. I think we'll have... that it might not be quite such a technical hurdle or like a cost hurdle, maybe, to sort of like get on board. I foresee some combination with mobile or with at least free roaming, let's call it, be or whether that's free roaming within a room-scale environment or not. These are a lot of kind of hiccups, right, that are kind of in the space right now. But I don't think anybody who's really sort of had the experience, I don't think anybody views those as, like, blockers. I think it's all just a matter of kind of timing. It's a matter of adoption. It's a matter of, like, almost one at a time, like, grabbing users and go, here, try this. And then leave them with it for 20 minutes and have them come out the other side going, oh, now I get it. Right? The experiential end, it doesn't really come across until you've had the go. But it's not necessarily like as though that's a roadblock to it never happening.
[00:16:06.101] Kent Bye: And when I think about the future of virtual reality streaming, I think about games like Dota, which is a 2D eSport game, one of the most popular ones in the world, where spectators will be able to go in and watch this game in VR and maybe have a better experience than if they were watching it in 2D. That's one genre. But then with virtual reality, there's going to be entirely new genres that are coming about. And then some subsection of those are going to be particularly well-suited for doing VR streaming. What can you say from looking at a lot of these different games and people starting to integrate V-Real, what are the genres that you feel like are a really good fit that you suspect are going to be particularly successful when it comes to virtual reality streaming?
[00:16:48.437] Tadhg Kelly: Well, I think certainly anything that has the same sort of shape as an eSport, or has a, you know, a kind of a very active and replayable kind of framework like that, that's a kind of a natural fit, right? Anything where the outcome isn't fixed, pretty much, which describes an incredibly large number of games, and rightly so. Anything where, like, the audience can come in and see, and a hundred times they watch it, and a hundred times they play it, and they go, that was so different each time, right? My personal one, I mean, is I would love to see, and it's just a pure fantasy on my part, but I would love to see, for instance, if Valve ever makes a Left 4 Dead 3, I would love that, A, for that to be VR playable, but I would also love for it to be VR watchable. Because that kind of game, it's just so different and so fun and so exciting all the time that I mean, when I played the original Left 4 Dead a few years back, I literally solidly played it for six months, which I just was so enthralled by how every time I played it, it felt like a completely different thing. And for me, that's the, like, for a lot of streaming, I mean, you see it in the numbers, for a lot of streaming on existing services, it tends to be games that have that quality, that are very, as game designers would say, they're very emergent. And the same, I feel, will probably bear true for VR as well. At the same time, just going back to what I said earlier about the sort of the ride-along value of maybe more singular experiences, I actually see, I personally think that that kind of experience will pull in a lot more kind of spectator and a lot more spectator interaction. than has maybe existed for spectators within current formats. And so I kind of see that they actually have a large future as well. Like, I mean, even though a game may have, like, a very fixed line or may have only a few little, like, moments of variation or something like that, there's no reason to suspect that the fact that people can really be sort of be in that world more directly won't yield much more positive results. you know. For me it's a broad church, like I see thousands of different kinds of, maybe some of them not even games at all, like I see thousands of different kinds of virtual experiences all being enhanced by streaming and all being made much more social and much more participatory and much more communally engaging than you would otherwise sort of see, right. So yeah, there's so many aspects to it, there's so many dimensions to how awesome it can be and There's very few reasons to suspect why it shouldn't do that like a why it wouldn't go that way, you know So yeah, so it's good times.
[00:19:17.748] Kent Bye: It's good times ahead So you said that one of the key components of a game that is particularly well suited and optimized for streaming Is that it's replayable. So what does that mean within a virtual reality experience that you know? What are the different components that make the game replayable? I?
[00:19:34.862] Tadhg Kelly: Well, it comes down to game mechanics. I mean, a replayable game in general means a game whose basic sort of components, rules and actions yield a near infinite number of outcomes, right? Chess is very replayable, right? It's a very, very, very simple game, but it's highly replayable. And people play chess all their lives as a result because At one level, it's interesting, it's fascinating to sort of like experience the game and kind of work it out. And then at another level, it becomes sort of socially engaging. You know, you become part of the chess community. You try and become a grandmaster. You find yourself reading chess books like of you know, like you find yourself like digging through this whole culture that emerges around this system that is just nicely balanced to produce a lot of near-infinite outcomes. And you see the exact same thing a lot in sports. The game of soccer has near-infinite outcomes from a game that's actually very, very simple. It's a ball, it's a green field, it's 11 players each side, it's a couple of sticks and some lines and a referee who goes, you're not supposed to trip that guy up, right? That's soccer. This is the entire game. And yet, people have been following soccer for a hundred years, their families are like tribally involved, they have like supporters clubs and occasional riots and whatever, right? And it's all born out of a simple system, but a simple system that produces a lot of highly replayable outcomes. And the same is true in video games. That is what esports is built on. That's what Minecraft viewing is built on. That's what people who tag along and play and watch and just enjoy stuff like Rust or MMOs or whatever. That's where it all comes from is the game provides a base canvas and that canvas is robust enough that it just yields endless stuff. endless did-you-sees, endless stories that come out of the game kind of all by itself, endless high and low moments, whether it's, you know, the greatest battle that has ever been fought in EVE Online, of which there seems to be one every two years, or if it's like horrifically tragic stories like the famous World of Warcraft funeral that got mobbed by a bunch of players who came in to sort of grief everybody else, a whole lot of different stuff. or people who get married inside video games, like all of this kind of stuff. So that is what I mean by replayable. I mean that it's just got this incredible canvas opportunity that then essentially very easily lends itself to user-generated content and meaning and personal stories and all of those qualities that really kind of go into making a game sort of culturally long-term. And again, for VR, same thing, right? You're going to see games that capture that essence. They may be very simple games that just are highly, like mechanically kind of crazy and they just capture people, Angry Birds-esque. They may in time be mechanically more complicated, like some of the more elaborate kind of MOBA-esque sort of stuff, collectible card games sort of games, actual sports, I mean actual virtual soccer, like stuff like that. Who knows? There's so many avenues of exploration for that, that I'm certainly not the person to lay down the rules of what would be the right genre or not. Far from it. And then add other layers on top again. Add direct audience interaction. I'm very much a fan, for example, of the idea that you'll have virtual quiz shows. That you'll have simple things like, remember Microsoft's 1 versus 100 project? This was on Xbox a few years ago. And it was like, it's a quiz game. It's like one person is, say, one side, then a hundred other people are kind of answering on the other side. And it's to sort of prove, I guess, who's smarter and who's not, right? That kind of thing. In VR, I see a whole lot of that. I see a lot of people like kind of docking in and they're in like a, you know, in a virtual environment playing a quiz show, maybe, you know, or that they're doing stuff that maybe seems quite maybe in our cynical times seem kind of lightweight, but you kind of put a headset in it and you bring people into a world and it's all kind of graphical and exciting and you'd be amazed exactly how immersive that suddenly becomes and how actually the simplest interaction can be really joyful. So yeah, so I have no way am I going to say, oh, it's going to be this genre and that genre and that's it. What I'm going to say is it can be lots of different genres and whole new names for genres of games that we don't currently have.
[00:23:41.468] Kent Bye: So, we have Twitch, which is doing 2D streaming of games, and then V-Real is doing immersive streaming of games. And the first thing that comes to mind as I'm sitting here talking to you is, well, what about these first-person adventure games? It doesn't sound like that would necessarily be a good fit for somebody to ride along with somebody as they're exploring in an open world. So, can you talk a little bit about the challenges of first-person perspective as well as locomotion when you talk about streaming within V-Real?
[00:24:10.282] Tadhg Kelly: Actually, I don't agree with the idea that just because a game might be first-person narrative within VR, that that means that it doesn't work for VR streaming. One of the sort of distinguishing features of VReel as a system is that it allows spectator motion within a game. So as a spectator, I can wander around inside a game. It's a little bit like check my own camera angle, but I can also socialize with other viewers within the game. I can wave at them. We can talk and all that sort of stuff. And I think that there's something much more profoundly engaging with that at a root level. I talked a little bit, for example, about the game design communication that comes out of a game like Battledome, where just by virtue of simple gestures and hand movements, players are much more able to communicate and be with each other. And I very much think the same is true with V-Real, with the kind of streaming that we're providing. So it could very well be that a narrative game, like a first person or a first single line narrative game or experience, by virtue of the fact that people are much more able to be communicative within it, I think it may actually get over a lot of that sort of immersion gap anyway, if you like, all by itself. So I don't know. I don't know that the rule holds that just because it worked one way in browser or in Twitch or in YouTube Live or other existing services, that we'll see exactly the same shape in VR.
[00:25:27.644] Kent Bye: Well, just to kind of elaborate on that more specifically is that for me, when I go into virtual reality experiences, I'm very susceptible to motion sickness, which is just going in and seeing some sort of disconnect between what my visual system is seeing as well as what I'm actually physically experiencing. And so anytime I'm walking around and locomoting within a open world environment, I tend to get a little bit motion sickness. When I think about, as a spectator, going along with somebody else who's also locomating through a first-person open-world environment, to me it just seems like there's going to be a lot of different motion sickness issues that some people may experience if you're automatically dragging them along within an open-world exploration in VR.
[00:26:07.385] Tadhg Kelly: Well, certainly a lot of how our approach to motion within VR has worked so far has functioned more through teleportation. So you might have the viewers anchored to the player, but they're not necessarily, if you like, stuck to the rail in the same way. But in fairness, that may be different for different games. That might not necessarily be appropriate for some games and it may be very appropriate for others. We are as part of our development effort trying to figure out what the right suite of options for developers will be and what the right modes for spectators would be and we're very close with a lot of it and we've shown a lot of the kind of sort of ways that we sort of foresee the interaction sort of working at the moment. On a kind of a higher level though, I'm starting to, when I started working in VR a few months ago, I had a lot of the same sort of nausea issues that you described. But what I've noticed is with repeated sort of small exposure and with, if you like, almost kind of tentative toe-tapping out into a variety of games, I've personally noticed that it's getting less and less and that I think there's something about habituation that I don't know that it will 100% remove it in time, but there's something about habituation that I think helps a lot with the worries about these issues. There are points at which I feel like players maybe won't necessarily be quite so overcome with those kind of feelings anymore. Now, there will be some games that maybe still don't quite learn that lesson well, and there'll definitely be a lot of, I guess, experiments back and forth that are trying to find the right mix. Just as a random point, I played Adrift a couple of weeks ago, and I found something very interesting in playing that. I assumed, because it's fully three-dimensional, right, and I can kind of twist, pitch, and yaw, and all that sort of thing, I assumed that I might actually find it quite hard. But I found that if I kind of just pulled my head back a little bit so that I could see the frame of the helmet a little more, I found that very, very steadying in a way that was unexpected. So even though I'm sort of spinning through a spatial environment and by all rights maybe I should be feeling a bit rough, I wasn't. I actually was like, oh no, I can see my readouts and I can kind of, I'm trying to get over there and I'm trying to judge my velocity and maybe not hit that wall and stuff. And I found actually I wasn't nearly as overcome with it as I feared I might be. So that could be a combination of my habituation. It could be a combination of smart game design. It could be, you know, just lessons learned, like all of that sort of stuff. So there's definitely a ways to go and there's definitely more solutions to find. I actually have a lot of faith in the long run that we'll get there.
[00:28:31.972] Kent Bye: Well, just from my own personal experience as well as talking to different researchers, I don't think this, there's kind of like this concept of VR legs and that may be true for some people as anecdotal personal experiences but I think it's also true that some people just have it, there's certain triggers within VR experiences that it's kind of like a wide range of different levels of tolerance that people will have to different locomotion techniques and so I think it's important to point that out because there may be somebody who is very comfortable in doing a first-person locomotion experience, but yet if somebody is kind of being dragged along or going along with that, it may, as a spectator, give different levels of comfort. And so I think just from a VR design perspective, locomotion is one technique to get around that. However, that will break presence for certain types of experiences. It's a trade-off between maintaining a certain amount of continuity within the experience but also making it comfortable for people to actually experience. So, I think that one thing that I've seen just from the reactions from E3 is a lot of these 2D games that are being ported over with these open world explorations with not a lot of concern about some of these locomotion issues. And so I just see it as a kind of a flag for people to look out for as they're thinking about how to design a game that's good for streaming because locomotion and comfort I think is going to be a big issue when they're trying to think about what is the best mechanism to include spectators to come along for the ride.
[00:29:58.415] Tadhg Kelly: I mean, so when first-person shooters first got started, you would encounter a lot of the same issues. I mean, in the early days of Wolfenstein, you might be very easily able to sort of like get into this fast run-around sort of environment and sort of spinning around, but plenty of people who would try it, you know, would find it very dislocating or they'd find the abstraction maybe quite hard to sort of get their head around. And then when we went towards Doom and later Quake, like again, there would definitely be a large degree of just comfort and comfortability that maybe a lot of people didn't have. I mean, when it was in the late 90s, playing games like Descent, I remember being quite disoriented and all of that, you know, because you had so many degrees of movement and you were looking at it through a screen, but the game also sort of whizzed around very quickly and it could be very hard to, if you like, maintain a mental model within the game as to like where you were and all that sort of stuff. These are all issues I think that for the most part first-person shooter developers eventually overcame. And it was through a lot of sort of small and subtle things. It was things like varying the camera angle, the FOVs. It was things like just tweaking slightly how the controls felt or like response rates or providing a lot of sensitivity adjustments sort of for players of certain types. A lot of different stuff like that that kind of just helped to acclimatize. But then another part of it was, I think, part of it was just genuine, as I say, habituation. Audience habituation by itself sort of helps to sort of decrease these sort of factors. And there was an element of younger generation as well. I mean, I'm 42 years old. It's possible that I may always have some slight degree of kind of hesitance with certain new interfaces because, you know, I'm getting old. which is horrible to say but it's true. But I don't need to think that like a 15 year old kid who's trying VR for the first time, I don't foresee that he'll have the same degree of issues that old hands like me are maybe having at the moment. So that's why I say I have faith. I actually genuinely, I didn't a year ago and more when I was a bit more questioning about it all and I didn't really At the time I just wasn't sure. I had a lot of just questions around VR, but I've had a bunch of experiences since then and I've had a lot of time with it and I've had a lot of time to just sort of really kind of see it in action and see the full extent of what it sort of does. And it's just allayed my concerns a lot. Plus the tech's getting better. Like the individual headsets can do a lot more than say the first DKs that we saw a couple of years ago. the issues of things like frame rate and the kind of the draggy tearing that you might sort of feel aren't so strong. The sense of vertigo maybe is being handled a bit better by certain games. And you're right, there are certain maybe first generation games that are maybe a little bit experimental, I guess, to an extent, or they're trying to figure out and they don't necessarily have a lot of good audience feedback yet to know like what's quite right and what's quite wrong. But that'll come, that's already coming through forums like Reddit and Steam and like wherever, right? And it will adjust their development accordingly and it will kind of subtly sort of shift how they approach certain problems.
[00:32:50.296] Kent Bye: And so yeah, so we're all learning. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:32:59.400] Tadhg Kelly: On a longer term view, I think first of all, the distinction between VR and AR will probably meld. So we're talking essentially a lot about like eyeball computing, right? We were talking a lot about forms of interaction within a virtual space, which may or may not involve overlays with the real world, which may or may not involve complete immersion or some sort of like semi-immersion and everything in between. And then add into that, you've got precision with interfaces. So the big revolution in desktop computing 30 years ago with Apple was, of course, the commercialization of the idea of the mouse, and the invention of a user interface that worked with that, and the operating system that went with that, and then the ecosystem that sort of followed out of it. And I see something very similar with VR. Like, we've got a lot of ability in VR to do three-dimensional actions that, say, you didn't have when it was kind of more kind of Wii and Kinect sort of gestural action recognition. You've got a lot with the Vive system, for example. It's actually incredibly precise a lot of the time. It's incredibly interesting how much it's able to kind of read and the depth of motion and all that sort of stuff. And the same with Oculus. Same with others that will follow. I foresee a lot of entertainment applications. Simple stuff like watching a movie in full surround, all the way up to participating in like virtual reality clubbing. For instance, as a personal one, I'm like, wouldn't that be so cool? It's like, rather than I could just plug in and I'm like dancing like a fool, like yay, you know? I foresee a lot of productivity. I think, for example, 3D modelling will become a completely different career once the abstraction of mouse and mesh and keyboard is removed, and once it gets much more directly, like my hands. Put my hand on a model, I'll make an orc, which will now go into a video game, like that kind of thing. I see a huge amount of applications for industry. I see a huge amount of applications for medical, for education. I mean, even kind of crazy stuff, like I see a huge amount of applications for things like operating drones on Mars, right? Like, I mean, it's just, it's endless, right? And what we talk about today and the way that we talk about it today maybe seems quite specific or quite, you know, we're trying to sort of separate it up into types, you know, is HoloLens VR, is it AR? Is Vive VR or AR, you know, is mobile version VR actually ever going to work properly or not? Or is it like, does it have to be tethered to a computer or not? Like there's a lot of different parts to it. But I see all of those as essentially just kind of the pre-show. I think we're very close to like a grand melding of a lot of ideas. ultimately into, I wear it, I'm in it, and I use it, and I use it for everything. And I do so much stuff with this system, and it's comfortable, and I'm comfortable within it, and I can explore in a way that I've never been able to before. Think of how many billion things you could do with that.
[00:35:48.107] Kent Bye: Awesome, well thank you so much. Thank you very much. That was Ty Kelly, he's working as the developer relations at VReal, which is a live-streaming virtual reality company. So I have a number of different takeaways from this interview, but before we get to that, let's have a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Mind and Body VR Hackathon. The Mind and Body VR Hackathon is a 48-hour competition that's happening on July 22nd to 24th in Los Angeles. It's being sponsored by HTC and Quest Nutrition and has over $20,000 in gifts and prizes. Some of the areas of focus are mindfulness, brain training, education, as well as fitness, nutrition, and medicine. It's starting Friday before SIGGRAPH, and we'll have a community showcase on Sunday night. So for more information and to register, go to mindbodyvrhack.com. So I had a number of different takeaways from this interview is that, first of all, just from learning more about esports in general and the interview that I did with Riggs, which is aiming to try to be one of these VR sports games, but also within the general esports category is that nobody actually knows what's going to be like the next big esports game, because there's a couple of different components here. First of all, people have to play it and enjoy it and compete against each other. It has to be repeatable, and it has to be interesting to watch as a spectator. And so there's a lot of different things that have to come together in order to really make a successful esports game. So it's actually a pretty big open question in terms of what that's going to really look like within virtual reality. But we can start to look at what might be interesting to watch to get some sense of what may be leading towards that. I think the really interesting thing is the open nature of the games and so the many different possible outcomes. Look at something like chess or soccer. It's actually a very simple kind of rules but infinitely replayable and lots of different variations. And so something that's kind of open-ended enough for that to not have just like kind of one linear outcome to a game. I think I would make a prediction of something like Facade. If you look at Facade, that's something that's taking this artificial intelligent character, you're interacting with it, you have many different variations, you have lots of things to explore, you're constant testing things in order to find these one of five different possible outcomes of this narrative story. And so as we have more artificially intelligent types of bots interactions, I think the narrative part may be something that might be pretty interesting, especially if you can start to figure out a way to really incorporate the people that are spectators into the experience. I think that's going to be one of the things that's really interesting to watch. to have different subtle ways for the spectators to participate within the experience rather than to just solely watch it. I think something like vRule would have the capability to really scale that up because it's really just a matter of a lot of this metadata that's being sent back and forth. If it can find some way to have some tolerance from latency, I don't think that it would really be able to scale up with the network lag from being able to send information across a wire and integrate it back into a distributed fashion within the game. I think it's going to have to have some sort of lag or latency to be able to actually see it. But I think it's a really interesting idea to see where that goes. But I think it really starts to also focus, I think, the designers of virtual reality to start to really think about not just the first person perspective of the person who's playing it, but what's it look like for other people who are not that perspective of watching it? And is it interesting to them in some way? And that in some way, playing a VR experience is going to be like this performance art for the people that are out there to be able to actually come in and be one of these streamers that does really well within VR. I think that's another really interesting open question right now, what that looks like. What type of core competencies do people really need to have to be able to pull off a successful stream within VR? And I think authenticity is going to be a big one. Passion, entertaining, and just relatable, and have some sort of well-defined identity, I think, are all going to be just like we can take the lessons of successful streamers on Twitch and YouTube and beyond. then I think those same components are going to translate over. But I think there's going to be new things as well of just like expressiveness with your body or perhaps being able to really host events. Maybe a live streamer is more about like being a good event host than it is about being a performer. And so are you going to be able to actually kind of facilitate environments that make it fun for people to interact with? So the other thing that I just wanted to point out is that I actually disagree with Tig about some of the things he's saying about motion sickness, especially considering the last podcast that I just published in episode 402, really doing a deep dive into the five different major theories into motion sickness. Just because Tig may have had an experience where he doesn't experience some of these motion sickness symptoms, I think it's pretty short-sighted and perhaps dangerous to extrapolate that to the general population in terms of the real challenges in motion sickness. And so I just wanted to point out that it's an additional consideration to not only think about the teleportation mechanism for the main player, but what's that look like for the people who are also watching. So just a lot of different special considerations to think about in these larger open worlds whenever thinking about streaming and VR. So that's all I got for today. I wanted to just thank you for listening. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and head over to iTunes and leave a review if you'd like to share how much you've been enjoying the podcast to a larger general audience. 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