Ivan Blaustein is a co-founder of the Orange Country VR meetup, which happens to be in the same location as the headquarters for Oculus VR. Their first meet up had 180 people, and they had five meetings within their first month including a couple of game jams hackathons.
Ivan talks about fostering community through the process of getting together to create VR experiences, rather than just talking about it or demonstrating existing VR experiences. Leading up to the Immersive Education Initiative’s Immersion 2014 gathering, OCVR held a couple of educational game jams and were demonstrating the winners of those hackathons.
He talks about how the VR Classroom, VR Typing Trainer and PVRamid demos were demos that were much more compelling in VR than in 2D, topics that haven’t been well-explored in the past, and were a really polished experience for having been created within 48 hours. You can check out these and the other demos on the OCVR site here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro – co-founder of the Orange County Virtual Reality. Meetup group for VR developers near Oculus VR headquarters. Had 180 people show up to try 12 demos including a DK2 demo from Oculus. Had 5 events in the first month teaching how to create VR experiences and to foster community
- 0:56 – Dove in head first. Other events that they’ve held. Had hackathons for the past couple of weekends. Developers split into teams to develop educational experiences to have demos to show at the Immersive Education Initiative’s Immersion 2014 gathering.
- 1:35 – In partnership with UC Irvine and collaborated with them on a hackathon. VR Classroom won that VR competition. Had another group the following weekend and a couple of guest judges. Showing two top prizes from Hackathon. VR Typing Trainer and the Pyramids.
- 2:45 – VR Classroom developed by someone who never VR. Take traditional classroom and twist it on it’s head. Each classroom has a VR twist to it. History room that has a small-scale model of the Roman coliseum. Approach it, and the room walls fall down and you’re in the middle of the Roman Coliseum.
- 4:07 – VR Typing Trainer like Mavis Beacon. Can’t see your fingers and forces you to learn the keys. Has a TRON style. Fun and exciting and difficult to cheat
- 5:03 – PVRamids done in UE4. On-rails experience exploring the pyramids
- 5:55 – Design principles of educational demos – Can only be in VR and wouldn’t be as compelling in 2D. Look for things that haven’t been well-explored in the past. And to create a polished experience within 48 hours. Other Wii mote and Google Maps integrated experience didn’t have as much polish
- 7:19 – Forming community through hackathon projects. Future plans? Really amazed by the support by the community. Not the first VR meetup group, but actually getting together to make things. Talked to Smithsonian to possibly work with 3D scanned objects to see what they can do with with. Talked with Eric Greenbaum about doing a fitness game jam.
- 8:50 – First development experience at the Portland Game Jam. Having time boxed constraints to make something real in 48 hours. First time in getting hands dirty with Unity. What can get done in 48 hours. Get to see what’s possible. Any time you get together and bouncing ideas off each other is an exciting creative environment
- 10:14 – Where VR could go? Everywhere. Scared of Facebook metaverse. The positive potentials is making the world a better place and do great things, live healthier lives and learn new things.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.018] Ivan Blaustein: I'm Ivan Blaustein. I'm one of the co-founders and organizers of Orange County Virtual Reality. We're a meetup group for virtual reality developers in Orange County based in Irvine, very close to Oculus' actual headquarters. And we had our first meetup earlier this month with over 180 people show up to try out 12 different VR demos. Oculus actually showed up to show off a DK2. And we really rode that success and saw a lot of people in the community and a lot of game developers were interested in virtual reality and were passionate about it. So we've actually had five other events in the last month specifically for creating virtual reality experiences and trying to teach people how to build virtual reality experiences and kind of foster the community.
[00:00:56.934] Kent Bye: Wow, so you guys have really dove into the whole virtual reality space. And what were some of those specific events that you were having over the last month?
[00:01:05.122] Ivan Blaustein: Yeah, absolutely. So leading up to this event, the Immersive Education Initiative's Immersion Summit, the last two weekends we had hackathons, which were both weekend days, Saturday and Sunday, for the past two weekends, got together a large group of developers and split into teams to build educational VR experiences in 48 hours. And some really amazing experiences came out of that. You know, people worked really hard over those 48 hours. A lot of people didn't sleep much. And we're excited to have a bunch of demos to show off today.
[00:01:36.470] Kent Bye: What were some of the demos that came out, and which ones you decided were the best to be able to win the competition?
[00:01:42.573] Ivan Blaustein: The first one was in partnership with UC Irvine, and they had their HackUCI, which we were actually a special category of the event, was the OCVR Education Hackathon, and we were the judges of that one. We ended up going with VR Classroom with Aaron Gutierrez, made a really cool demo. So he's here showing that. And then the second one was a much more intimate group of just us and just our community of about 60 people that showed up. And we had actually two great special guest judges. It was Morris May from Spectral Theory, who is a VR developer professionally, and actually a community organizer from Oculus actually attended, gave away a couple of dev kits as prizes, and judged the event. We're excited. We're showing the two top prizes for that one is the VR typing simulator, or teacher, which is really cool, and VR pyramids, which puts you in a kind of on-rails exploration of ancient Egyptian pyramids.
[00:02:45.757] Kent Bye: And so yeah, maybe we could talk about each of those three demos, starting with the VR classroom. What happens in the VR classroom?
[00:02:52.843] Ivan Blaustein: So yeah, the VR classroom, really interesting. So Aaron is a student at Long Beach and had never developed for virtual reality before. And we just gave him a dev kit and said, go and see what you can do. And his first kind of thought was to take a traditional classroom environment with four walls, basically, that he put together real quick in Unity. and completely twist it on its head. So in four or five different rooms of subjects for education, he has a traditional classroom and then has an interesting kind of twist on it that only the limitless potential of VR would allow you to do. So my favorite room, for example, is the history room. When you launch into the history room, it's a boring four-walled room with a small-scale model of a Roman Colosseum. And as you go up to it, there's a narrator, an overview, that is giving some brief little information about the Roman Colosseum. But it's not very interesting. It's not very compelling. And then as you get close to it, the room starts to erupt, starts to vibrate, and actually falls apart around you. And rising all around you in true immersive virtual reality is the Roman Colosseum, true with fire and an audience and cheering. And it's a really compelling, interesting experience, and gives you something that no classroom could ever give you of feeling like you're really there. So it's a really cool demo.
[00:04:08.316] Kent Bye: And what about the VR typing trainer?
[00:04:10.395] Ivan Blaustein: Yes, the VR typing trainer is interesting because, you know, think of like the Mavis beacon and, you know, that's a topic that's been heavily explored that makes sense to gamify and make it fun of trying to teach typing. You know, a big problem that I always had when learning it is I would cheat. I would look down and I would end up, you know, for a long time I typed with two fingers and having the virtual reality goggles on and actually not being able to see the keyboard makes it a really interesting experience of forcing you to really learn the keys. And they created a really compelling, a fun game where words are flying at you in virtually 3D environment. And it's kind of like a Tron art style. And you have to look around, find the words flying at you, and type them before they hit you. So it's fun. It gets you going. You're excited about it. It's real quick. And you get to learn where the keys are without getting to cheat and actually look down. So you really get the feel of the keyboard. And it's a great simulator.
[00:05:05.173] Kent Bye: And what did the VR Pyramids do in their demo?
[00:05:07.534] Ivan Blaustein: So the VR Pyramids was the first and only that I know of in our group to use the Unreal game development environment, which apparently was actually really easy to do. And if you've seen demos there, it is a different level of quality. Even in the low-resolution DK1s, you get all of the textures, all of the models, the terrain. It is a higher quality in the Unreal game development environment. And he did a great job. It's super simple. He didn't want to do complex controls. There's no even input at all. Just Unreal's experience where you're looking around and you're exploring different pyramids and different basic information appears as you're flying through. You enter a tomb and get to see a sarcophagus, but it's a quick two, three minute demo, but a very peaceful, interesting, explorative experience.
[00:05:55.280] Kent Bye: And so what were some of the qualities of these demos that set them apart from other things? What were some design principles that they were using?
[00:06:03.365] Ivan Blaustein: So some of the things they were going for in judging and some of the things we looked for is something that can only be done in VR, which all of these were. If you took any of these demos and put them in a normal, basic 2D screen environment, they would not be nearly as compelling. They wouldn't even be good experiences. So that was a big aspect. Another one, we wanted to look for ways that haven't been done, haven't been well explored in the past. And some of these have been touched on, but I think all of these did a great job of taking a simple concept and running with it. That was a big aspect. And the last one was polish, that it's really hard in 48 hours to make a polished experience. And there were a lot of really, really cool demos and ambitious projects. Some using a Wiimote, using the motion sensing of that tied to a skateboard, where you're standing on that and balancing, which was super cool, but it was a really rough project by the end of it, because that's hard to do in 48 hours. And another one using Google Maps, where they actually wanted to be able to explore a real environment in virtual reality through Google Maps and Google Street View. But it's hard to get those polished in 48 hours. So all of these took a simple concept, ran with it really far, and made a polished experience in that very short amount of time. So it was really impressive. That's why they're here.
[00:07:20.593] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it sounds like you are quickly forming community through actual projects, which I think is interesting, having hackathons and bringing the community together. And so, you know, what do you see going forward, the cadence for getting these people interested in VR development to continue to collaborate?
[00:07:36.482] Ivan Blaustein: So I have to say, we are really, really amazed by the support from the community and everyone we talk to about these hackathons, that we're not the first virtual reality meetup group. Silicon Valley Virtual Reality, LAVR, there are a bunch of them out there, but we're the only one I know of that are actually getting together to make things, not just showing them off, not just gaining publicity about them. And everyone we've spoken to and everyone that's participated, everyone that's seen what's come out of it, they seem like a great idea. And we've talked to, even here, a bunch of people, you know, we talked to the Smithsonian, that they're interested in maybe giving us a bunch of their 3D assets from their scanned exhibitions and seeing what we can do with it. And we talked to a guy from the New York virtual reality meetup group who I was exploring some fitness potentials and that he's got a specially rigged dev kit that is like sweat proof, but doesn't have a lot of people, a lot of developers exploring ways to use it and creating experiences with it. So I reached out to him and said, we'd love to, you know, explore that. We'd love to see what we can do with it. So I'm going to have a conversation with him this week and we might in the next couple of months set up a hackathon, set up another event like this to get developers on board, to bring a bunch of people together. Cause when you get people collaborating, some great things happen.
[00:08:51.408] Kent Bye: Yeah, actually my first actual development experience with the Oculus Rift was going to the Global Game Jam and in Portland there were 80 people there and I had brought my Oculus Rift and said hey you know I want to create a virtual reality experience and had two people come up that had between them like eight years of Unity experience but the thing that I took away from that is that having those time box constraints. It really focuses you to hone in into what can you get done within 48 hours and it's amazing what you can get done.
[00:09:25.769] Ivan Blaustein: Well, it's not only that, so that's amazing. And it's true, I participated in Global Game Jam 2, and that was one of the first times I actually really got my hands dirty with Unity, that I was teaching myself, you know, basic tutorials. But opportunities like that, where you get to see what can get done in 48 hours, it was really amazing. If you do come up with something, even if it's not polished, even if it's not fantastic, you get to see, here's what's possible. You know, if I could do this in 48 hours, what can I do in 48... weeks, in less than a year, you can do some really amazing things. And it's a great opportunity, I'm sure, you had at the Global Game Show. Anytime you get together and you're in that time-sensitive, bouncing ideas off each other, it's a really exciting, creative process. So I think that's a great atmosphere to create stuff, and we're going to keep pursuing that.
[00:10:14.432] Kent Bye: Cool. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality and where this could go?
[00:10:21.212] Ivan Blaustein: The ultimate potential. I mean it's everywhere. There's some scary potentials I'm scared of Facebook's metaverse and all of us living in a interconnected world that you know, maybe we don't want to but uh, you know, I think the positives which is really what I'm trying to explore and what I think us at OCVR are looking at you know and Educational in fitness is making the world a better place and using these immersive technologies because that's truly what this is to do great things and to motivate people to live healthier lives, to learn new things and I think there's fantastic potential there and I'm excited to be a part of it. Great, well thanks. Yeah, thank you.
