Epic Games has had a long history of releasing new demo content at big gaming and developer conferences to showcase the latest Oculus hardware, and this year was no different. Oculus Studios provided funding to further develop the Bullet Train demo from last year into a fully-fledged FPS game called Robo Recall. This demo had one of the most polished and mature game mechanics expanding upon the Bullet Train bullet capture-and-throw mechanic into new weapons and upclose hand-to-hand combat with stylized arcade AI robots gone rouge.
I had a chance to talk with Epic Games VR lead Nick Whiting and artist Jerome Platteaux about their design process, deeper intentions, and overall art style and direction of the game. They debuted a new locomotion technique that was designed to help subtly guide players to facing the true north of the front-facing cameras, and Nick admitted that there are some design constraints to creating a game with the Oculus’ recommended front-facing camera arrangement. Jerome also said that there are new gameplay options that open up with a potential third tracking camera, but they didn’t give any more specifics as to whether Robo Recall intends on supporting the optional room-scale type of gameplay.
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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. So Epic Games has been involved with Oculus since the very beginning of creating different premiered demos to show off the hardware. In every single Oculus Connect developer conference, Epic Games has premiered some new content in order to really show off the potential of the hardware that Oculus is premiering. Back in Oculus Connect 1, there was the Crescent Bay demos and the whole series of vignettes that were created. Last year, Oculus Connect 2 was the premiere of Bullet Train, which was one of the first fully-fledged first-person shooter where you're teleporting around and you're able to catch bullets and throw them back at the enemies. And this year, Epic Games was back with Robo Recall, which was funded by Oculus Studios and an expansion of Bullet Train into a fully-fledged game, but moving from a photorealistic style to a more arcade-y, 80s style where you're destroying AI robots that have gone rogue. So I have a chance to talk to some of the Epic Games developers about Robo Recall and their design process on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Fishbowl VR. Getting candid feedback is a vital part of creating a successful VR experience, but it's not always easy. Are your testers just being nice, or are they more impressed about the novelty of VR? Fishbowl VR makes getting quality feedback from VR enthusiasts dead simple. Send them a build and within 24 hours, you'll have a number of 30-minute playtest sessions. You'll discover, is it fun? Is it replayable? And what should you focus on next? So sign up to get a user test or become a tester today at fishbowlvr.com. So this interview with Jerome Plateau and Nick Whiting happened at Oculus Connect 3 that was happening from October 5th to 7th in San Jose. So. With that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.841] Jerome Platteaux: Hi, I'm Jérôme Plateau, and I'm the Art Director of Robo Recall. And I used to work on Bullet Train before that.
[00:02:16.423] Nick Whiting: And I'm Nick Whiting, I'm Technical Director of VR and AR at Epic Games, working a little bit on the engine, working a little bit on Robo Recall.
[00:02:22.207] Kent Bye: Great. So I know that it was about this time last year where Epic Games premiered Bullet Train. And so now that's come a long way, and you've actually released it now into Robo Recall. So maybe you could talk a bit about the evolution from that demo into what's being shown today.
[00:02:37.844] Jerome Platteaux: So yeah, we had a lot of good feedback on Bullet Train. And Oculus approached us and told us, like, hey, do you want to turn that into a game? And so they funded us. And then, so thanks to them, we were able to put a team together, a bigger team, and also implement new feature for VR and then turn that into a full game.
[00:02:56.609] Kent Bye: For you, I know that there was a lot of excitement around Bullet Train. And what were the biggest challenges to take that tech demo and then kind of put it into an entire game?
[00:03:04.832] Nick Whiting: I think one of the biggest challenges is how do you stretch out that kind of bombastic experience and give people enough to keep them interested in the kind of sandbox gameplay that we started with Bullet Train. So we basically took that as a core and then started building up based on what we saw people react to at, you know, GDC and Oculus Connect 2. Everybody wanted to reach out and interact with the soldiers that were in Bullet Train. So we're like, hey, that's probably a really good place to start. And so we started with the idea of using robots so that you can reach out and grab them, manipulate them. And robots are fun because you can make them do anything, right? So a big part of the gameplay of Robo Recall is if I want that guy's gun, I can, you know, rip his arm off. Or if I grab this drone out of the air, I can shoot his laser beam. Or I can grab the crawler bots and they turn into grenades. So building upon that to really give people a sandbox that they can do this kind of emergent gameplay to keep them entertained for a longer experience.
[00:03:49.908] Jerome Platteaux: It's basically using robots against other robots.
[00:03:52.792] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it seems like the narrative is that you're in the future, and there's these AI robots that have turned evil, and that you're basically recalling them by destroying them. So from before, it seemed like were you killing humans, and you decided to kind of change the narrative? Or maybe talk a bit about how the story kind of evolved.
[00:04:10.955] Jerome Platteaux: So yeah, the idea is we want to make sure it's an arcade-y feeling and also fun. So we were going with the robots for that particular reason. So that people don't feel too bad to come back and then really focus on the happy feeling on coming back and spending hours and finding new combos and being creative with how to destroy those robots basically.
[00:04:30.351] Nick Whiting: One of the things we really wanted to do, too, is kind of capture the 80s and 90s kind of cheesy action movie feel and bring that kind of feeling in here. So, you know, it's everything from the font, you know, Jerome picked a nice Neo Geo font for the high scores and stuff. We really try to sell kind of a nostalgic action film take on it.
[00:04:45.867] Kent Bye: Yeah, there was a trailer that was shown during the keynote during Oculus Connect 3 and it was quite entertaining, had a lot of laughs. And technically, looking at the game, one of the things that I noticed, first of all, is the locomotion system has a lot of new innovations in terms of moving around. I feel like last year with Bullet Train there was a number of set waypoints, but this time you have a lot more options to be able to teleport around and Last year it felt like a little bit of a on rails, like you had a very singular path for how you could progress through the game. But now that seems to be opened up a lot in terms of where you can go and also when you teleport dictating which direction that you're actually facing.
[00:05:22.890] Jerome Platteaux: Yeah, so the idea is actually to give the player a lot of new possibility to interact with the world. So you can now teleport on top of the awnings, you can teleport on rooftop, you can teleport all around and explore a bit more the environment. So it's a good thing for us, like we can create a more complicated and more in-depth gameplay, but it's also a lot more work because now we have to make sure everything looks good from every angle, which I don't mind.
[00:05:47.781] Nick Whiting: Yeah, I think one of the things we've been noticing is a lot of people are closing in their environments a lot more than opening them up just because you're constrained with movements. You have to have narrative concessions to being on rails and moving a player through the environment without them explicitly taking control of it. So we really wanted to experiment with, you know, what is it like to make a more open world style game? You know, it's obviously not as big as, you know, Fallout or something like that, but we really wanted these really cool environments to be places that you can use strategically to fight the robots and kind of open up gameplay and let you explore a little bit.
[00:06:15.692] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like that has a lot of replayability with that so that you can kind of choose different pathways. And I know that there's a couple of different weapon options that you have. One is that you have guns that kind of reload after a certain amount of time. So you get about 20 bullets. You also have shotguns that you can reach behind your back and pull out some shotguns. You can also have the bullet time type of effect where the time slows down. You can actually grab the bullets and throw it back. at the robots, which is really satisfying. And you can also do up-close combat and grab the robots and throw them at each other, and kind of a sneak preview of overtaking a larger mech type of robot. And so these, to me, are all sort of different types of way that you could focus on one of them or another. And I imagine you have a lot of opportunities to actually expand into other ways as well.
[00:07:03.818] Jerome Platteaux: So yeah, the big difference with Bure Train and Robo Recall is now we have implemented a score system. So we're hoping that people can actually discover new ways and actually unlock new weapons. So in the demo we don't have the full set of robots, we have actually more robots coming up. So they will be able to interact with different ways on them. And then we're also going to introduce the new type of weapons. and then also attachment so you can improve each weapon and then improve your score and create a better way to just destroy robots again.
[00:07:35.068] Nick Whiting: Yeah, I think just like bullet train we wanted to take the emphasis off of like ammo management and health management and make it about just trying to be the biggest badass that you can be, right? So we give you tons of ammo, tons of things to explode in the world and just let you put it all together and then light the fuse basically.
[00:07:49.726] Kent Bye: One of the things that was most striking for me is that I haven't been playing a lot of the shooters that require both hands and so I'm right-handed and I don't use my left hand very much and I can really tell the difference of how I'm not able to aim as well with my non-dominant hand and I feel like with VR this game is probably one of the first games that I could see like oh wow I really want to actually like improve my my skills and maybe just focus on being able to use my left hand. But I think VR in general has more emphasis of the strengths of your hands and the hand dominance. And I'm just curious what you guys have found in playing the game.
[00:08:26.260] Jerome Platteaux: So what we found is definitely seeing your hand and create as much interaction with your hand now that we have the touch controller creates sort of a bigger presence in the game. So we try to put as much interaction everywhere, like you can grab little things in the street, you can grab little mug on your desk, and then each robot is actually, you can have an interaction on each robot. So you can grab them, tear their arms apart, and then you can use the crawler and throw them against the other robots. It's all those type of interaction we were looking for, yeah.
[00:08:55.602] Nick Whiting: And I noticed a lot of people choose different play styles based on which, you know, handed you are. A lot of people, like, I do most of the stuff right-handed, so I shoot right-handed, but I do all my teleporting on my left hand. And so there's nothing that limits you one way or the other in the game. I think it's important for people that are left-handed or right-handed, right? We don't discriminate in a virtual world. We want it to make it as fun as possible.
[00:09:14.141] Jerome Platteaux: Actually, we discovered that at the end, we fight a miniboss, that's the big bot, and he has actually a right arm laser, and then we figured out, like, oh, we should have put it on the two sides, so now people can use it on the two sides instead of just the right hand.
[00:09:26.729] Kent Bye: Yeah, I found that I actually wanted to have a little bit more leeway of being able to switch to the left hand if I chose to, especially if there's a robot that's close to me that I wanted to grab, I couldn't grab it with that other arm. But being in the mech also was an interesting experience because Usually you have a little bit of a one-to-one translation of like, this is where your hands are, and you have a good sense of embodied presence. But once you start to embody the mech, you kind of are this other scale completely, which I think made it a lot more difficult to catch bullets, for example. Because by the time I was reaching for the bullet, where I would usually be reaching for it, it was already way past where I should have been grabbing it with the mech hand. there seems to be another way that that's kind of working my brain of standing in a larger mech unit and just kind of changes the way that I interact with the touch controllers.
[00:10:14.544] Nick Whiting: Yeah, I think for me the mental leap when I first tried the big bot battle that you're talking about is I kind of viewed it as a puppeteering, like you're pulling the strings on his hands and interacting with them. And that degree of separation is what made it a little more natural, but I completely agree. I think we need to make it more visually obvious that your hands are busy controlling his hands, right? But it's still early days, right? So we're getting a lot of good feedback on the floor watching people and, you know, like with bullet train, we watch their faces as they play. and try to find those moments where they're either frustrated or they're happy, because they so infrequently tell you exactly what they were feeling and give you accurate critiques, so it's much better to actually watch people play.
[00:10:49.292] Kent Bye: Yeah, with the mech boss, you have this laser that's being shot at you. Are you kind of expecting people to have to, like, get down on the ground and really kind of duck below that?
[00:10:58.447] Jerome Platteaux: Yeah, that's the idea actually. So we spent a lot of time on the tutorial at the beginning and then anytime there's a new type of combat, a new system, we also create an extra tutorial for that. So if you pay attention at that moment, he starts to fire his laser and it's like an indication like, hey, duck down, like that. So, yeah.
[00:11:16.560] Kent Bye: In terms of the score, are you aiming for precision, or how are you actually trying to track the skill level of somebody? I can imagine if you hit somebody with a single bullet, you may count that more than if you're shooting mini-bullets, but I'm just curious how you go about trying to design the dimension of the scoring within the game.
[00:11:34.765] Jerome Platteaux: So there's two ways to track. It's the accuracy of the player, and also how much combo he's doing, and also comparing that against how many bullets he took. So we want to make sure the player pays attention to not too much bullets, but at the same time find some creative ways to destroy the robots.
[00:11:52.177] Kent Bye: Nice. And during the keynote, Nick Donaldson joked saying that you guys have created an AI lab. And I assume that he meant that this was kind of in the context of the game. AI has been a pretty huge thing coming up, and I'm just curious if you guys have started to actually look at deep learning and other higher levels of artificial intelligence and how that might be applied to some VR games.
[00:12:13.335] Nick Whiting: Yeah, so everybody's really interested, and it's a hot topic. That was more of a joke, and, you know, everybody knows Nick Donaldson isn't very funny. It's a shame, but, yeah. You know, everybody's looking at it and seeing what the applications are. I don't know that it's going to be immediately applicable in something like Robo Recall, but I think there's a lot of other applications, especially in the content creation pipeline. I mean, it would be cool if, you know, in the blueprint visual scripting system, if you could leverage sort of patterns from a bunch of other users and a bunch of other blueprints to help the user pick the next node or something that they want to do and use that as an educational tool to teach people how to use scripting languages and stuff like that. So there's a lot of kind of sidebars to that. There's nothing directly in our VR games quite yet though.
[00:12:52.379] Kent Bye: And so do you imagine the scoring with something like this is going to be that people go through three fixed levels? Or do you kind of imagine kind of an infinite runner type of thing where it could just keep on going and going until you eventually die because it gets so crazy?
[00:13:04.962] Jerome Platteaux: So yeah, the idea is like having maybe two to three hours gameplay on the first pass on the game and then hoping that people come back and improve their score and then try to brag about it on the internet. We're going to try to integrate a spectator view so that people can twitch that or actually do some sort of like party game at home and somebody plays, look at the score, look at how many combo he did and then another guy comes over and say, OK, it's my turn. I'm going to beat that score.
[00:13:31.130] Kent Bye: In terms of designing the gameplay, this is for the Oculus Touch, but I'm curious if this is kind of a lowest common denominator, that you feel like this is a type of system that could be translatable to other systems as well.
[00:13:42.154] Nick Whiting: Yeah, I think the basic concepts of it are, you know, kind of universally applicable. We've had to make some concessions in order to do forward-facing tracking and whatnot. We need to aid the user to make sure that they're facing towards the tracking devices and stuff like that. And that's stuff we're still constantly improving. I mean, we're getting a lot of good, you know, user feedback by watching people here, seeing what encourages them to rotate away from where they should be looking and how we might be able to correct that sort of behavior. But I think the scale's up to room scale. You basically don't have to worry about the tracking problem and you can kind of teleport wherever you want and maybe have a little bit more running around your local area. I think it would be even more fun running around.
[00:14:15.673] Kent Bye: Do you have any more details as to when this is actually coming out?
[00:14:18.455] Nick Whiting: Q1 2017, and it's going to be free for the game.
[00:14:21.297] Kent Bye: Okay, great. So it's going to be a free game, that's what was announced. And so, what's the big next steps for you then, from now until launch?
[00:14:27.462] Jerome Platteaux: It's going to be finish the game and then take a big break and a good vacation.
[00:14:32.205] Nick Whiting: Yeah, ending up face down in my bed in a pillow sounds pretty good right now. I think it's a lot of content. It's a core team of about 15 people, so it's not very big, and we don't have a lot of time to do it. So we try to do things as efficiently as possible, but there's still, it's going to be a long few months.
[00:14:47.444] Kent Bye: Awesome and finally what do you see is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what am I be able to enable?
[00:14:54.215] Jerome Platteaux: Like the sense of presence is for me the most important form like I'm making sure we are making sure that the player feels inside the experience as much as possible so seeing all those new improvements that Oculus announced today like maybe one day we're gonna have no more cable and then they just announced that we're gonna have like the three point camera so all that stuff it's gonna be great and maybe we're gonna be able to create new type of gameplay I mean not maybe it's sure we're gonna create a new type of gameplay thanks to that
[00:15:21.065] Nick Whiting: Yeah, I think we're still in the phase, I think we're starting to get to the point where we can do a lot of meaningful experimentation of what interactions are possible, what are the best practices for it. Now we're kind of generating a bunch of content that's high quality now and we can kind of see what works and I think that's a good first step in getting to kind of the social VR stuff that Mark Zuckerberg was talking about on stage. I think that's really one of the ultimate goals of virtual reality is to make a more social experience and that's really cool. I think you have to have baby steps before you can go full bore into a sprint. And if you can perfect one person's interaction with that world, then it makes it easier to add more and more people into that same world. Everybody knows what to expect. Everybody speaks the same language. It's not necessarily a verbal language, but a language of interaction with the world. And I think we need to get that consistent, and then we can take the next step and realize the full potential of social VR.
[00:16:07.154] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So that was Jerome Plateau and Nick Whiting of Epic Games. And they were talking about the new game that was premiering at Oculus Connect 3, which was Robo Recall. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, this was a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun playing this game. And I think that it was a very smart choice to go away from the super photorealistic style that I think the bullet train was And I think this still looked really, really good. But instead of having humans that are in these kind of helmets and shooting at you, they were robots. And so you just kind of believe them a little bit more. And it's also just a lot more fun to go up into them and just start ripping their arms and head off. I think if this was humans, this game would be way different. But I think it's also just important to note that when they say it's an arcadey feel, I think that they're meaning that they're kind of moving more towards a stylistic decision to go further down the uncanny valley. If you look at the previous bullet train demo, it was very photorealistic. And when I was in that demo, it was kind of like, yeah, this doesn't really actually feel like I'm in a subway. And so I think by having all these kind of subtle cues that it's over-the-top cheesy in different ways, it just helps you be transported into this other world and this other realm. And even though it is still Epic Games, they're still having like this amazing looking experience. So it was just a lot of fun. Now I do have to expand a little bit about what Nick Whiting was saying about some of the concessions that they had to make in terms of forward-facing camera. And this is something that I had given them some direct feedback right after playing that. But essentially what they have to do is that they have this system when you're teleporting first of all you're able to teleport anywhere now like either anywhere on the screen or up on an awning that just really opens up so much different gameplay but the challenge for them is that when you're teleporting around they have to subtly guide you back to facing forward because My understanding from talking to many different developers over the course of the week is that I think oculus is really pushing this forward-facing Camera arrangement for a couple of reasons I think that's just the way that the controllers work better and the whole room scale approach with adding a third camera I think is gonna be at this point. It's a officially unsupported and not really what most of you are going to have. And so you just have this hardware fragmentation issue where everybody that buys touch controllers are going to have at least two cameras. And so I think Oculus has said, you know, we have to design for this and there's concessions that have to be made. So if that wasn't the case, if this was a fully room scale, there would be no issue with trying to figure out ways to get the person to look forward. They did add this mechanic so that when you teleport, you're able to dictate which direction that you're facing. However, they have two cues. The first cue on the ground is kind of like this Google Maps arrow, and that arrow is trying to point you to where the true north is in terms of where the front-facing cameras are. And then on top of that, they have the face with their controllers as to which direction you're going to be facing. The first like two or three minutes that I was in this demo area, I was really trying to like figure out, wait, this is not working the way that I'm expecting it to work because was expecting it to whichever way that arrow was pointing is which way you'd be facing but I think what they found was that they had to like use that main arrow to help you guide you to keep facing forward for the frontward facing cameras which feels like a little bit of a hack and makes it less of a good experience where you're fully present because then you have to start to manage in the back of your mind oh am I gonna start to lose tracking and then I just remember when I was at GDC and I was playing bullet train and I just went crazy and wild and was just like turning all around. I was losing tracking all over the place because of that. And so I think people are going to have to be trained to like only face forward and then like basically not like move their feet around too much and just kind of keep their orientation a little bit and maybe like rotate their body around, which I think it just kind of breaks the sense of embodied presence. That said, I think the game was amazing. It's just frustrating when you see things where there's hardware limitations that they have to design around. And so I think that's what Nick was saying, is that there's a number of concessions that they have to make. And that Jerome was saying, yeah, if we had that through camera, then we're going to open up a lot of new gameplay possibilities, because then they don't have to start to manage all the different frontward-facing constraints that they have. I think there's entirely possible that people are going to be able to start to cultivate that sort of awareness of where the cameras is. And it may not be as much of an issue. And I think people who are used to kind of spinning all around within a vibe experience, or we'll just have to kind of like start to just kind of lock their feet down a little bit more and just try to keep in the back of their mind where the front is, just like you have to kind of manage the cords. And there's all these other little ways that you kind of have to stay present to reality. So it's also interesting to hear that they've really taken the emphasis off of health management as well as ammo management and is a little bit more about like how can you go through these levels and be the most efficient or precise and it'll be interesting to see how the different scoring systems come out because there's many different ways to play and enjoy a game and If the scoring system doesn't match how people are going to intuitively already want to play the game, then it's going to be a situation where people are going to just play it and not pay attention to the scores. Ideally, you'd be able to find that perfect balance where you just kind of go in there and do whatever you want, and maybe there'll be a way for it to be tracked so you have different leaderboards or maybe you just don't care about the leaderboards and just a fun experience to go in there and just shoot up and rip apart different robots that are running around. Right now it's just like you've got the handguns and the shotgun and the mech you're able to catch bullets and throw them back at the enemies and to be able to do the close hand combat to rip the robots apart and it sounds like they have a lot more other options and guns and power-ups and different things like that so I It could be a combination of teleporting and moving around, whether or not you go different strategies that develop. But this feels like this is going to be a pretty robust game and a lot of fun for a lot of people. And I really like how what Nick was saying in terms of some of the ultimate potential of VR is that right now Epic and a lot of their initiatives in this game in particular, they're really trying to figure out how one person is interacting within the world. And that eventually, they want to be able to kind of create this nonverbal language of interaction that happens. And, you know, that's kind of what he was implying is that eventually we're going to start to be moving into these different social experiences where you're going to be able to share social experiences with other people that is not based upon language, but based upon your interaction for how you're interacting in the world. But they first have to really nail down what interactions are fun to do within that world. And I think that what Epic Games is doing with Robo Recall is really perfecting all those little things and game mechanics that just end up being fun to do. And they have attention to detail in terms of the visual fidelity. And I think that also just really helps transport you into this other world. And I think they've created this really fun and delightful world with these AI robots gone rogue. Yeah, it's just fun to explore around and play and kind of hear the little jokes that they've added in there as well. And finally, it sounds like that they have really done a lot of the basis of the development of Robo Recall based upon some of the reactions that they've seen both at GDC as well as Oculus Connect. And so because of that, they've been watching what people are reacting to and what their face is doing and just seeing kind of like their emotional reaction while they're doing different things. And also, what people try to do and I think generally user testing is just hugely important in the development of games because I think that Nick's right that a lot of times people when they're in the midst of being present in the experience they can't always kind of fully articulate different things afterwards because they're just immersed and they're just having fun and you know like When I was at Oculus Connect 3, I had all this video footage of cameras falling around playing some different experiences for this live stream that was sponsored by Intel. And I was just sticking my tongue out. And I had no idea I did all this crazy stuff just because I get so immersed into it. So I guess that's what I mean, is that you never know what you fully look at or you're doing when you're immersed in a VR experience. And I think just being able to actually watch people is probably one of the best feedback. And it sounds like that's been a huge part of what Epic Games' process has been in order to creating this highly dynamic and interactive type of game. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to take a moment and just thank everybody that's been reaching out and providing Patreon support for this podcast. I think that I am an independent entity just going around and trying to make my way. And the Patreon support really does help me sustain in the long run where I want to take the podcast and to eventually also expand into the voices of AI. and if you enjoyed this podcast then you know spread the word tell your friends but also just donate a few dollars even if it's just a dollar a month it's just like send me a tip like you would be tipping any other service that you get because i do see this as a service that i'm trying to provide to the community. And in terms of the op-ed that I posted yesterday, I know that there's likely things that I didn't get correct and misspoke, and I think the format of op-ed is not really all that easy. I think one thing that I'll say is that there's a lot of things that are off the record and I can't talk about officially on the record just because of different contracts that people have signed. I still haven't tried personally the asynchronous space warp. It may be great. It may be awesome. It may be a perfect algorithmic solution. I haven't seen it. So I'm just withholding judgment. I'm just kind of cautious about that. And, you know, I also, I don't think I am the voice of the community. I'm just trying to represent the voice of the community. And I think it's just frustrating sometimes when the work that I've been doing here just isn't like fully seen or recognized by these different companies. And so they also have stocks that are out there. They can't, you know, go off script too much. And so I think there's like real implications sometimes for these big, huge companies that it's difficult for them to actually be authentic and tell the truth, just because there could be some like consequence in the stock market. I mean, If I got an interview with Mark Zuckerberg and he said something wrong, that could send billions of dollars away. I understand the pressures of big companies like that. It's just frustrating when everything seems to be so locked down and they want to be telling these singular big stories. issues that are creeping up from the community and the sense of journalists, they're not always asking these super in-the-weeds detailed questions, whether it's privacy or whether it's about some of the claims about room scale, and the reality of a lot of the fragmented ecosystem. You know, I just see that there's a lot of concerns and yeah, just thank you for being patient as I explore some of those. And I wish there was a way to go back and update any errors or incorrections. But I think in the future, I'm just trying to stick to what I can get on the record. And if I get a zeitgeist of a lot of the facts, just to be a little bit more rigorous and being able to connect what I'm saying to something that's able to be demonstrated in some way. So yeah, I just wanted to kind of add that little addendum from yesterday's episode for anybody who was also listening in and is just joining me here on the Voices of VR podcast. So again, thanks for listening. And if you'd like to support the podcast, then please do go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR and send me a few bucks. It really does mean a lot. So thanks again.
