SUPERHOT VR is one of the standout VR games to come out with the Oculus Touch launch with it’s unique blend of the mechanics of a first-person shooter but with the strategy of a puzzle game. Physics-based interactions in VR are already compelling since it helps to cultivate plausibility within our brains through the expectation loop of prediction and observation. Tying your movements to the progression of time within the game provided me with a awe-inspiring experience of the fabric of space-time that’s completely unique to VR and feels like it’s re-wired my brain.
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I had a chance to catch up with the game designer Piotr Iwanicki at Oculus Connect 3 where we talked about how they had to ditch the original teleportation mechanic and really focus on cultivating a sense of body presence using the Oculus Touch controllers. He also talks about the joys of a moving in a slow motion ballet environment while being the midst of a non-stop, intense action-movie sequence. Even though the bullet-dodging mechanic is primarily based upon your head positions and not your lower body movements, the low fidelity graphics offer a blank slate for you to project your full sense of body presence into the experience. As Piotr says, “most of the action is happening in your head.” So much so that one developers kicked over a monitor after getting so immersed and forgetting that their feet were not even being tracked.
There’s a distinct lack of abstracted gameplay within SUPERHOT VR that’s based upon your physical body movements, and so it’s able to cultivate a deep sense of embodied presence. The perceived danger of red crystal enemies running at you with guns pointed at your head also contributes to the “bat test” insight that presence can be increased when there’s an artificial threat presented. You’re also able to do a series of slow-motion actions that just make you feel like a complete badass. Overall, SUPERHOT VR is one of the more innovative gameplay mechanics that I’ve seen in VR so far. It’s compelling enough to give new VR users a taste of what type of gaming experiences are uniquely possible within VR, but also has a lot of deep lessons for VR designers for how cultivate and maintain a deep sense of presence.
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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 Oculus Touch launched last week, and there's been a number of different games that have been getting a lot of different buzz, and one of them has been Super Hot VR. And so Superhot was a first-person shooter that was part of a seven-day game jam that created the innovative game mechanic of time within the experience only moves when you move. So this gave a new twist to the first-person shooter, and a lot of people were wanting to see what this would feel like in VR. And so Oculus Studios stepped in and helped to fund the development of the VR version of Superhot. It just launched this past week, and I had a chance to play it. And it's probably one of the most innovative gameplays that I've seen so far within VR. And there's just something really super compelling about moving around in slow motion and having your movements directly tied to the other movements that are happening with the environment. So I talked to the game director of Superhot VR, Piotr Wanicki, 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 the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you and the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Piotr happened at the Oculus Connect 3 that was happening in San Jose, California on October 5th to 7th. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:58.909] Piotr Iwanicki: My name is Piotr Iwanicki, I am the designer of a game called Superhot, and here I am presenting Superhot for VR, which is a bit different thing if you played Superhot originally. Superhot started out as a first-person shooter, like on a PC platform, on a console, right? First-person shooters are a big thing and like a big twist of Superhot is time moves only when you move, right? So it's basically when you stop, it completely freezes and turns this very fast experience into something that you can experience at your own pace, which was like a big twist in the PC version of Superhot. And we heard a lot of times that, hey, I would love to see this in VR, because back then when we started in 2013-2014, Oculus was just after their Kickstarter, and every game they saw, like the first comment was, I would love to see this on Oculus, I would love to see this in VR, right? So we contacted Oculus guys and we started working together, delivering demos for the E3, so for many people like the first experience with the Oculus headset was super hot, but we wanted to turn our experiences with demos, which were like this very old-school VR style experiences, so it's like the first-person shooter, like control with a gamepad, like back then imagine that it's like a proper thing to do, like right now you think like what were they thinking? So we wanted to turn those experiments we did with Oculus during the development of a PC game into a full product and here we are. We released our PC game in March 2016, available on Steam, and now we are doing Superhot for VR, which is called Superhot VR, for touch controllers and Oculus, and adding touch controllers, this changed everything for us.
[00:03:43.497] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think being able to have your hands move around. And the basic mechanic is that any time you move, then everybody else moves. And the world essentially freezes when you are still. And so you can move slowly, or you can try to move quickly and then kind of face the consequences of things shooting at you super fast. And so I found it was a really interesting mechanic, because normally, in real life, you're not able to stop or slow down time. And I think being able to change the physics is actually really interesting and compelling.
[00:04:12.018] Piotr Iwanicki: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It's what virtual reality is for. You can experience the world has its similarities, you have your own body, but it reacts in a different way, but at the same time in a predictable way. So, catching something is not a matter of reflexes, it's a matter of you predicting the movement of items in the air. It's about Basically like playing around with time in VR is amazing because like even on the screen like playing something in slow motion is always like an exciting thing like watching like mundane things like on the keynote Michael Abrams showed the pupil a human pupil in in slow motion right like It's not a thing you would imagine that the pupil is so elastic when the eye makes a very fast movement, right? But like in slow motion, it's fascinating, right? So super hot VR brings this joy of slow motion into full body VR experience. I say full body because like when you have touch controllers, it's about your whole body being there. You basically extrapolate and feel the presence in a much more deeper way than just when you have a headset.
[00:05:21.074] Kent Bye: So, the Superhot, you mentioned that a lot of the physics is about prediction, so that's a big mechanic of being able to judge where you're at and where people are moving, and that when you move, they move, so you're able to kind of predict their velocity and where they're at now and where they're going to be, and so that's a core part of the mechanic, but the other part is dodging bullets so that you stay alive, so you're both trying to shoot at people as they're coming towards you, because normally in Superhot, the original version, you're actually moving around physically through a space, but with the various issues with locomotion, you've decided to keep the protagonist within this experience stationary, and people are running at you. And so it becomes a matter of you playing defense, but also offense at the same time.
[00:06:05.752] Piotr Iwanicki: Yes, it's like an interesting point when it comes to locomotion, to movement in VR. Basically, from my perspective, it's the question of having two modes of locomotion. You have these tiny movements of your body, you are dodging, you are doing those slight adjustments of your body and you feel as the time flows as you are doing this. You get very into, when you're working on this scale of movement, you get deep into the mechanics of your own body like how can I position myself it turns into like the slow motion ballet sometimes, right? Adding like a more standard locomotion to this unfortunately dispels this entirely. When we did prototypes like with locomotion with a thumbstick like there's a lot of good work being done around locomotion in VR and like we also did some of our work but we decided not to do it because it takes away the experience of the feeling of deep presence of your body. when you start moving with some kind of artificial method, like a teleport, you forget about this positioning of your own body, this ballet of your tiny body movements becomes less important. And that's why we omitted the locomotion completely.
[00:07:17.568] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that I wish that was in this game that isn't, but being able to track your full body, because I feel like my hands are stationary and I'm like moving my lower body and dodging the bullet, but yet from what the Oculus Rift can detect, they can only detect my hands my head. And so I can imagine a situation where the Wii Tennis, for example, where when people first started playing Wii Tennis, they would do these full body swings of their full body. But yet, once they realized they could just kind of flick their wrist, then they could not do the full experience of what they were originally going for. And I can imagine something similar here, where instead of moving your lower body, you're just kind of moving your hands around. What do you think about that?
[00:07:57.414] Piotr Iwanicki: You know, actually many times games happen in your head, right? It's not exactly about what is being tracked and what's not being tracked. When you have like hands and you have head, you basically often extrapolate it to legs also. Like we had like a co-worker kick a monitor because he wanted to kick a guy out of the helicopter and like he just did it. The gears just didn't click in his mind that it's not tracked, right? Many times I see people just moving their whole bodies, they often do like a leg dodge for some reason. It's not tracked, but the game is made so you can forget about it, right? So full body tracking would be an interesting thing, but like with VR I feel that the most interesting things They happen in your head anyway, right? So maybe like you acting like you have body and like that's a natural thing to do. You acting that you have like a full body tracked, right? Maybe that's enough. Like I don't feel that I miss the full body tracking here. And of course like if you would have it then probably like the game would look much different.
[00:08:58.844] Kent Bye: What's the next step for Superhot then?
[00:09:01.552] Piotr Iwanicki: First, we have to release the Superhot for VR, like finally. We are releasing hopefully with the Touch Controls launch, right? So it will be hopefully available on launch and let's see then how people react to the game and how it adjusts and I would love to do some more work on VR. We started with the idea of doing port of our first-person shooter to VR, right? But I would love to develop something completely original and play around with different things you can do in VR. It's amazing, like every booth here in this press area, everyone has something absolutely awesome to show and they just present this different approach to solving VR and I would love to play around with those ideas I've seen here and and maybe mash some of my own also more than just this.
[00:09:54.829] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what am I be able to enable?
[00:10:01.830] Piotr Iwanicki: Yeah, it's meeting people, spending time with friends in virtual worlds, playing some things together and inviting them into games, right, in some kind of like connected world of rooms, of experiences that's not just contained into one game, there's something, some connected virtual worlds, that's an interesting thing for me. If you played with Oculus Toybox demos, those were first shown with the touch controllers, And the fun thing there is that it's designed for a presenter to give this presentation to you in VR. And that was a shocking thing, really, because even though the presenter had only, like, head track and his hands, you could see the gestures, you could see the other person being there, and you interacting with this person. And this is, like, an amazing feeling, and I hope to see more of this in the very recent future.
[00:10:55.236] Kent Bye: Awesome, well thank you so much. Yeah, thank you a lot. So that was Piotr Feninski. He's the game director of Superhot VR, which was a launch title for the Oculus Touch. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Superhot VR is probably one of the most fun experiences that I've had in VR so far in terms of just pure gameplay mechanics. It's just unlike anything else you've ever experienced before. There's something really compelling to having your movements tied to the physical environment. And I've seen different slow motion experiences like Showdown that showed with the Crescent Bay demos at Oculus Connect One. And you're kind of moving through this environment in slow motion and things are kind of flying around you. Just messing with the time and the physics in general and VR is super compelling. And when you tie it directly to your movements, then it becomes even more compelling. So it's feels like part first person shooter part, you know, somewhat of a puzzle game because you have time to really think about things, make a strategy and really plan out your sequence of movements. And it's okay to fail and you just restart at different milestones. You know, I think they kind of go in clusters of three or four different levels. And then if you fail on one of them, you go back to a couple of experiences and have to go through it again. So it ends up training you to get better and better so that by the end you just kind of are really testing your limits of ability of being able to handle a super intense situation. There is something really super intense with these crystal red characters. They're running at you pointing a gun right at your face and you know ordinarily you would never try to just grab a gun out of somebody's hand but you know with the physics of the game you're able to feasibly do that and even dodge bullets if they start to shoot at you at very close quarters. So it's very interesting that they originally had a locomotion mechanic so that you're actually moving around, but that did not work with being able to actually maintain that sense of body presence. And I've talked a little bit about abstractions and comparing the Vive and the Oculus Touch controllers. Superhot does not use any of the top buttons within the touch controller. In fact, they actually kind of use the grip controller in combination with the trigger button to great effect. You know, you pick up a gun and you're using your middle finger and then you're using your trigger finger to actually shoot. And the Oculus Touch controller, I think, is particularly well suited to be able to handle that mechanic. And they're not necessarily even using any of the top buttons at all. So, no abstracted gameplay, and it's actually really encouraging you to have a much, much deeper sense of body presence, because you're actually physically moving around primarily with your head. And, like Pierre just said, is that most of these games are happening within your mind. You're kind of projecting into it. Because it's such a low-fidelity graphics, it allows you to have a deeper sense of presence because it just seems more plausible and you're able to kind of project yourself into the experience a lot more. So I do agree that most of the action is indeed happening in your head and it makes you just feel like you're in the middle of a matrix, you know, with Neo dodging bullets. So in episode 326, I did an interview with Jeep Barnett, and he was talking about physics and why he thought physics was so compelling. And he was saying that he thinks that it's because we like to make predictions about the future. And if you think about plausibility and your expectations, that's all about making predictions about what you expect to happen. And whenever your expectations are matching what is actually happening, then you start to have more and more plausibility within the experience. And I think that is a big part of why physics are so compelling within VR is because we've had a lot of experience of watching a natural physics of the world. And so when we go into VR and we see that replicated, it just subtly starts to communicate to our brain that this is a plausible experience and it's real. When you start to slow down physics, but it still is reacting in a way that you would expect, such that the faster you move, the faster objects move. You have a direct correlation of being able to tie your movements into that world and have this really tight loop of expectations and predictions and what you know of physics and how things are moving around. So because of that, it just creates this even deeper sense of plausibility. And it really feels quite magical, I'd say. It's a unique experience that you cannot have in any other domain aside from being in VR. And so I think I see a lot of people talking about this game as a game to introduce to other gamers. just because it has that element of shooters you have to both be able to aim and shoot but also have that level of prediction because you have to know whether or not is that person moving are they standing still where are they going to be in a few feet given their velocity you're trying to make predictions about where even characters are going to be and how you're going to aim and shoot so there's just a lot of layers of strategy and your ability to make predictions about the future that make this game particularly compelling So I actually expect to see a lot more other types of games play with time in this way. It's something that is just completely unique and it just feels like it rewires your brain in a, in a weird way, just because it allows you to have these experiences that you're not able to have in any other capacity. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for joining me on the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do tell your friends, spread the word. A big way of how I continue to grow the podcast is you just telling people about it. And people who are wanting to get into VR and learn more about it, I think the Voices of VR is a great way to get started. And also, consider becoming a donor to the podcast. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
