Beat Saber is a rhythm game that is like an embodied puzzle game that creates a visceral connection to 10 custom music tracks. It’s similar to Soundboxing and Audio Shield, but you use extended light sabers rather than your fists, which makes you feel like a ninja. I’ve had a chance to play on the early beta version, and I played for an hour a day for the past week. It’s an extremely satisfying game that I expect will have a lot of crossover appeal for people who have never tried VR before. The LIV mixed reality streaming integration means that you’re going to be seeing a lot of Beat Saber videos in the next few weeks of people sharing their perfect runs, flow states, and expressions of personality through dancing. Beat Saber really utilizes the best aspects of embodied gameplay that is completely unique to VR, and there is a challenging puzzle aspect with the arrows dictating which direction you need to swipe. I had a chance to talk with the chief programmer Jan Ilavsky and music composer Jaroslav Beck at GDC about the development of Beat Saber, some more details about their scoring algorithm, and where they’re taking it in the future.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Beat Saber is being released in early access on Steam, and there’s a lot more content and features sure to come in the future.
Here’s a couple of runs of Beat Saber in expert mode.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Support Voices of VR
- Subscribe on iTunes
- Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So, Beat Saber is being launched today, it's Tuesday, May 1st, and I first got a chance to try out Beat Saber at GDC, and I was so stoked to play it, because I'm such a fan of the rhythm games like Audio Shield and Sound Boxing, and this was a new mechanic. With Audio Shield and Sound Boxing, you have the objects flying at you, and you also have objects flying at you here in Beat Saber but instead of punching them with your hands you have these swords and they also have arrows on these boxes that you're hitting so that you actually have to like look and be able to detect these arrows that are coming at you. Beat Saber is a type of game that you play every day because When you first start to play it, you're going to be at a certain level and your body will just slowly learn how to play the game. As you play it more and more, the game progression curve is that you can go up into these higher levels of difficulty and then keep on going and try to get the top score. At the end of the day, it's about cultivating this flow state, at least for me when I play games like this. It's like just being in my body and having a game mechanic that is so difficult that you have to play it for a number of hours just to even get through some of the runs. So it's an amazing game. I have about seven hours within the game. But at GDC, I had a chance to talk to both Jan, the creator of Beat Saber, as well as the musician, Yaroslav. And so I had a chance to play Beat Saber at GDC. I did like a 10 minute demo. I was completely out of breath and then conducted this interview. So it is a game where you get your full body into it and it's a full sensory experience. But it's something that I actually highly recommend and I've just been really loving playing it. The types of videos that are coming out in mixed reality are also really spectacular and visual, and I think it's actually the type of experience that's going to cross over into the mainstream, and people are going to see it and be like, wow, I want to feel like what that feels like because that looks amazing. And it's actually even more amazing once you're inside of the game. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Jan and Jaroslav happened on Thursday, March 22nd, 2018 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:37.544] Jan Ilavsky: Hi, I'm Jan. I'm the developer, programmer, graphic designer, and the main guy behind the Beat Saber.
[00:02:44.347] Jaroslav Beck: I'm Jaroslav, and I'm the music composer behind the songs you will hear in the game, pretty much.
[00:02:49.307] Kent Bye: Okay, great. So, yeah, would you describe this as a rhythm game, or how do you sort of characterize what you've built here?
[00:02:56.490] Jan Ilavsky: Yeah, it's definitely a rhythm game, like a combination of Guitar Hero and Fruit Ninja. Like, that's the basic concept of the game.
[00:03:03.991] Kent Bye: Okay, so mashup between Guitar Hero and Fruit Ninja, right. So you recently had a video that just went absolutely viral. So maybe you could talk a bit about, you know, this creation of a mixed reality experience with a flow artist who then, you know, last I heard has over like 150 million views across all the different platforms. So yeah, maybe talk a bit about that phenomenon that's happening right now.
[00:03:26.448] Jan Ilavsky: Yeah, it was a total accident, we didn't plan it at all. I just woke up in the morning and we should make a small video to show people we are doing something. So I just pressed record, record small video, put it on the internet and wow, things happened.
[00:03:41.543] Jaroslav Beck: It's pretty funny actually, because we were thinking that we should make like some proper trailer or something like this, just because I'm working mostly in trailers and cinematic music. So we said, yeah, we need to make like the best trailer ever. And Jan just like sent me this video. Yeah, I have something like this. How about, what do you think about it? And I just, yeah, that's for the video. It's okay. And then he posted on Twitter and was like, what's happening? And then we had to switch off notification from Twitter because like internet went totally crazy.
[00:04:09.230] Kent Bye: So yeah, it just went really viral. And I think part of that is that it's like mixed reality, right? So you could see the person embodied, but they're basically acting like a ninja, which I think everybody wants to be in some sense.
[00:04:22.279] Jan Ilavsky: Yeah, actually, this was the second video. The first video wasn't in the mixed reality. Oh, OK. OK. Yeah, and the second video went even more viral. Yeah. And as you said, it's because you can see the person, how he's playing in the environment, which is even more powerful.
[00:04:39.825] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe talk a bit about that. As a game designer, so I play rhythm games are my favorite genre, as you may be able to tell. I played a lot of soundboxing. The problem with soundboxing, though, is that the way that the algorithm is coded encourages people just to punch out. It's literally called soundboxing. I was like, I want to be able to be in the flow state. So I would play soundboxing where I would sort of have these little flares like this, but yet I was penalized within the game by doing that. So there's a certain degree to which the algorithms are encouraging a certain style of play. And I think that the way that Beat Saber is designed is actually the more closer to how I naturally want to play, which is like this natural sort of flow state that you can achieve by knowing where you need to be at a certain, you know, up, down, left, right, but have a lot of creative flair for how you get there if you're coming from the upper left. So anyway, that's how I was thinking about it, but yeah, maybe we could talk about that design process of how you were trying to switch that up a little bit.
[00:05:42.472] Jan Ilavsky: Yeah, actually, the basic idea was somehow make people dance, almost. Like, you are, like, best example of what can happen, like, really dancing and playing the game. Actually, the score system of the game is giving players like you a better score for all cuts, because if you are doing, like, nice arcs all the time, it's, like, the score is getting better.
[00:06:02.843] Kent Bye: Oh, that's really good to hear, because I feel like both AudioShield and Soundboxing didn't reflect the score that I thought I should be getting. But that I wasn't because I wasn't playing to their algorithm, and I think that the way that AudioShield does it, as far as I understand, is that they're taking the distance that you're going, so if you go more distance, that means you're more active, and then they give you a creativity or a performative score. It's not subjective, but it's still being added up in that way. I guess as people are playing this game, I imagine that there's going to be leaderboards and people trying to really get that high score. And so you may be keeping the secret sauce of some of the algorithm close to your chest, but I'm also curious of just how I play it. How do you translate something that is fundamentally qualitative and put a number on it such that, at the end of the day, trying to encourage a certain amount of movement but yet not penalizing the people that want to do that, but also create an open enough for people to have a lot of creativity.
[00:07:03.302] Jan Ilavsky: Actually, it's pretty hard, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure this, like, the best solution we can have. And right now, we are actually calculating the angle you are cutting in, like, you should start like this and continue through the cube. It doesn't matter if you do it like this, it's okay. But you have to do the movement there. Yeah, actually you don't have to move like this like the whole angle You just need to make it with your wrist So you can be really like conservative you can make huge arcs and it's still okay And it's still and there's a cap for each note. You can have 100 per each note So if you do like really crazy stuff in between notes, and then you just cut it doesn't matter You know, it's just about making people look good. Not so like really crazy stuff
[00:07:48.415] Kent Bye: And so let's talk about the music a little bit, because I know both in Soundboxing and AudioShield, you pull in YouTube videos. So in AudioShield, it's sort of an algorithmic way of calculating it. For Soundboxing, it's user-generated. So you can actually record your own embodiment and flip the polarity. So you can switch the left-right, or you can change the speed after you play it back. But it's created by people doing that. And so maybe you could talk a bit about both the music process, but also the actual game process of what you're actually playing.
[00:08:18.562] Jaroslav Beck: Well, for us it was really important to make the levels like really good, like programmed in terms of music that the levels will be specially made just for the music and just for the track. So this was the main thing behind it and actually we would like to continue in this that we want to be really sure that player will have the best possible experience from the track and from the particular level. and this is the reason why we started on the custom soundtrack for the game and why we are right now we have 10 tracks and we will be continue eventually but right now we have 10 tracks and 10 levels for it.
[00:08:57.625] Jan Ilavsky: I would say like each song has five difficulties, so we have actually 50 levels and we would definitely would like to do the same thing as Sam Wong is doing later in the future because, you know, it's always nice if people can make their own levels. But this is not the priority right now, the priority is on our content because we would like to have the game which you know is the game, you know, music is part of the game, it's not like something just from the outside.
[00:09:22.957] Kent Bye: Yeah, so in that way it is very much like Guitar Hero where there is a single song and a track that goes along with that. I can just say from my own experience of playing these games is that I would record a session and soundboxing and it would literally take me one or two months for me to get a perfect score on it. there's a sense of like a game progression curve such that like I'm got so much experience in soundboxing that I'm I started on I did the difficult like expert last night and it was too hard which is great because if it was easy then I wouldn't have something to work towards but I was on hard here the second heart like the the one below the expert I think it was the hardest or the hard and that was good but as my first run through I felt like there's stuff I do it a couple times and then I can go to the expert but at some point that people are going to get bored. And it's like, I want to be able to keep, like, as soon as I stop improving, then the incentive to keep playing is not there. So you're kind of creating an onboarding for people to reach up to. But at a certain point, for the power users, they're going to want to sort of have something else to keep them engaged in that. So just curious how you handle that.
[00:10:29.894] Jan Ilavsky: Yeah, actually, you saw just the extreme or expert difficulty. But we are doing even more, which is almost impossible to play.
[00:10:38.577] Kent Bye: Just Jan can do it. We'll see, we'll see. We'll have a competition. I'll be a beta tester.
[00:10:46.760] Jan Ilavsky: Cool. No, the hardest one should be so hard that even 1% of the population can do it. And then we will have the editors. So if they are bored from our super expert heart, let them make even more complicated songs. You know, we don't want to push it so hard from our point of view. The position of the nodes should be somehow logical. You don't want to make it really crazy. You know, we can put a lot of nodes there in a really bad way, so you will have to move really crazy, but that's not what we want. We want you to feel good when playing the game.
[00:11:24.407] Jaroslav Beck: For us it's always important to make the game which could be actually like a starting point from the players who are getting into the VR but at the same time it will be good enough and actually really challenging for pro players as well and this could be the success behind Beat Saber because it actually can interest people who are brand new in VR and it can bring them like a really good gaming experience on the beginning side but on the other side there it's challenging for good players too.
[00:11:54.502] Kent Bye: Well, there's a difference between how AudioShield scores and SoundBoxing scores, which is AudioShield is more based upon overall accuracy, so if you miss one in the middle, it's not such a big deal. But SoundBoxing is on the streaks that you have, so if you have If you break the streak at the very beginning, you're never going to get a good score as somebody who has up until the very last one, instead of having the equal. So I find that the soundboxing approach penalizes people if they miss one, but it also is trying to Cultivate a flow state so you're trying to get into a flow state But yet when you break out of the flow state, then you start to try to do it again And so it's it creates different dynamics I found of like doing overall accuracy versus the flow state of the streaks And so I'm just curious how you if you have some combination of that or if you do one or the other I
[00:12:43.418] Jan Ilavsky: Yeah, we are actually in the middle. We have a streak, but there is a cap. So after like, I don't know, 30 cuts, you are in maximum. So we will break it. We are just going to the half of that. And you just do like eight more cuts perfectly and you are back to the maximum. So it's like a combination of those two games, basically.
[00:13:03.595] Kent Bye: Yeah, and tell me a bit more about the music in terms of compositionally, the different chords and keys, and what we were trying to do in terms of just the spectrum of music that's available there.
[00:13:14.310] Jaroslav Beck: Yeah, well, it was kind of a challenge, because as I mostly do cinematic music and stuff like this, so I was thinking how I should compose this, what style would be the best, and then I decided it would be great to, just from the visual, to choose the electronic music, but not in the Daft Punk way, because it will be so obvious. So I just let my creativity out and I did something, I was looking on the picture, because Jan recorded me the video of the level, without like with random notes in it but just like the visual that I just because I'm working mostly with the picture so that the feel will be there and I just compose it directly for the for the space I seen and then we actually I collaborated with other artists and singers on the different styles so there will be like really rock type of tune some dubstep type of tune drum and bass and like almost like pop type of tunes So there will be like a lot of different styles that the player actually can choose the style what they like most. But right now it's like we actually need to learn what people like most and then we can like continue evolving and actually bring more artists in and actually I already been contacted with like really really good artists who are interested with helping out. So this will be the future and it seems to be exciting.
[00:14:37.025] Kent Bye: So I'm curious, as you're playing this game, were you able to achieve different, what I would call, flow states, or getting into the flow? And as you're designing a game, if you're able to, as a developer, continually make it so that you can create and do something that you feel like is still enriching and engaging, but you can achieve a flow state. And if you have, what that flow state feels like when you play the game?
[00:14:59.257] Jan Ilavsky: It feels amazing. Yeah, it happens to me all the time. Actually, when you are developing a game for a long period of time, We had a very early prototype a year ago, which was playable, almost the same thing like we have now. And you know, you are playing it all the year and you still want to have a challenge and you still want to have fun. And this is a simple concept. So you have to figure out how to do that. And I think all the levels we have right now are really fun even after the year. So I'm quite happy about it.
[00:15:27.286] Kent Bye: What about you, as you're playing it, what it feels like to get into those flow states?
[00:15:30.769] Jaroslav Beck: Well for me it feels impossible to play because I'm really bad at it. But it's actually, like when I seen it for the first time, I seen the teaser of what they put out like a year ago and I was like so excited about it that I texted them immediately and tell guys we need to make a soundtrack and then I played it for the first time. and it was amazing. It actually looks really good on screen and somehow it's satisfying just to watch the gameplay, but when you actually play it, it's even more powerful and it's a whole new level. So for me, I definitely won't play the highest difficulty levels, but I'm actually enjoying it. quite a lot, and I think it's reflecting the music because I was actually really enjoying doing this music for this game, and yeah, a lot of ideas came in, so this is the reason why it's so, like, pumpy and rhythmic and stuff, because I was, like, jumping on the chair when I was doing it, so.
[00:16:25.584] Kent Bye: Awesome, great. And finally, what do you each think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:16:34.809] Jan Ilavsky: That's a super hard question. I think like when we get to the point when the virtual reality is really like low cost or really affordable for a lot of people and it's very comfortable, we can like don't use any screens at all. You know, it will replace everything in our lives. So we will have just like small glasses or something and that's the future, right? I think.
[00:17:00.843] Jaroslav Beck: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think in the first place that and the reason why I actually did this soundtrack for this game as well was that I actually think that this game could help to the future because it can bring on the board new players who actually never tried VR before because it's something what is actually fun to play and it's not the game which looks like super awesome. You will play it once and then like yeah it's cool but like where's the point to play the same thing again but this actually is challenging it's actually easy like easy for your brain or something that you are like relaxing when you are playing it so you actually want to get back so I think that this game which is like not that common in VR and we actually got a lot of lot of comments which sounds kind of incredible that this is the first most viral VR game in the VR history so we actually think that and we will work very hard on it that this game could bring VR industry in general to next level and this is our goal actually.
[00:18:01.860] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think it's very embodied, so it's really using the affordances of using your body as a controller, but with the mixed reality, you're actually putting your full embodiment in the virtual world, and you have this sort of ready-made for like, hey, let's go to the location-based entertainment, let's play the game, let's take a video, post it to social media. You have this phenomena where people wanna, they wanna show what they can do in this, show their own personality and their own flair. So I think that the mixed reality component here, it's really designed to do that as well.
[00:18:32.558] Jaroslav Beck: And this is actually the reason why we have big plans right now with the game and with different fields where we want to push this game, just like in the music in general. And there is a lot of things. So right now we are in super hype and we are trying to solve everything. But there is actually quite a few companies who are looking to get on board with us. And so we are sorting everything in the moment just to make this game the best possible game we could. And yeah.
[00:19:02.588] Kent Bye: And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you guys would like to say?
[00:19:06.227] Jaroslav Beck: Have fun.
[00:19:07.728] Jan Ilavsky: Start practicing like physical stuff because it's really hard to play more than one level.
[00:19:13.570] Jaroslav Beck: We actually released two tracks from the soundtrack already. It's on YouTube and people are actually practicing in front of the screen, which seems for me absolutely incredible and super fun. Just to know it and just to imagine those people how we are like pretending to play. They're getting ready. Yeah, so get ready guys.
[00:19:32.618] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you.
[00:19:35.320] Jaroslav Beck: Thank you very much.
[00:19:36.561] Kent Bye: So that was Jan and Jaroslav, the creator and coder and co-founder of Beat Saber, as well as the music composer. And Beat Saber is out. It's released on May 1st, and it's an absolutely amazing game. I really love it. I've been playing a lot of soundboxing as well as AudioShield, but this is a different mechanic with Beat Saber. And the mechanic is like you have these lightsabers, and it actually feels like an extension of your arm. they have the haptics whenever you start to hit the blocks and it actually just helps you play the game you have the option to turn off the energy so if you want to just like get into a flow state and not really care at all whether or not you're improving or not then you can do that the way that the game is set up is that there's different difficulty levels and that you can play the game and as soon as you miss enough of the blocks then it's game over, you stop. And it's a little frustrating at first because you just suck, usually. I mean, most people beginning the game. you play it and you the round will end and you just have to kind of churn through and it's also very intensive once you start to play the game enough like most people probably be able to play for 45 minutes to an hour maybe 90 minutes but you'll get tired after you play through all the different songs and trying to just get through them that's the sort of challenges just to get through the song and then once you get through all the songs at one level then you move up and I started on hard and then hard was fairly easy for me at the beginning I was able to get through all the runs fairly quickly but then going up to the expert level like the gap between the hard and the expert is a huge like game progression curve like I couldn't get through any of the expert levels for a few days and after many hours of just churning through. And the thing about this type of game is that you may feel like you're not making progress, but if you just keep at it and you have the run just end and you just keep doing it, then the combination of the haptics as well as you'll develop a sense of vision and seeing of the different blocks as they're coming at you. there's some mechanics that you'll have to learn in order to actually get through and so there's different lengths of your saber and you actually have to figure out like sometimes it's better to hit things at the tip sometimes it's better to hit things in the middle especially in different combinations and then sometimes you have to wait to hit things with your fist and as you play the game more and more you start to see the blocks further out and you start to discern the patterns in a way that is much easier to see and so in some respects I think this is like we're teaching ourselves to cultivate our perception to be able to take in a massive amount of information and be able to react to that with our bodies and it's such an embodied game more or less I mean I think there's actually a lot of mental puzzles that are happening here that you have to identify the different patterns of the arrows and then with your body being able to like actually move into the right spot but I think that After you play it enough you sort of like get this sixth sense in some ways where you just stop thinking about it and you get into like these total flow states and so I've been having a lot of fun with the game and Also, you can play it trying to get the top score or you could just dance It's an amazing job they've done, especially at the higher expert levels where they've tied together the music and the nuances of the music and the rhythm to the actual beats and the movements. And so you start to really have this embodied experience to the music, which if you think about this music being released, it's actually kind of like people who are now going to hear these songs are going to have this association. That actually happened to me where I was playing a lot of the song Happy within Soundboxing and when it came on out and about, I hadn't heard it outside of that context of playing it in the VR experience, my body just wanted to start dancing. And I think that there's going to be a certain amount of like conditioned response that gets cultivated by playing games like this, especially with all the haptic responses, because it feels good. And it's actually like this huge dopamine hit when you're exercising and you're like, it's actually really challenging so it's like a puzzle and you're trying to solve the puzzle and once you solve the puzzle with your body you just have this huge rush and then once you get done playing it you just feel like you've had both an accomplishment but your body just is like thank you please let's exercise more so I've been playing a lot like pretty much every day for about an hour and I see continual improvements and I can see that I can keep going and I also created a couple of mixed reality videos for this episode and that was a whole other journey and adventure. I mean it's not easy to get your mixed reality setup going. I fortunately had the help of Matt Henderson and Steph Mendoza who live here in Portland and they're doing different VR labs here and at the Open Signal I was able to go to their studio and they had been trying to get this working for a while now, for at least a couple of weeks. We finally broke through and got some videos, but it was not without some pain and struggle. It's very temperamental. When you start to bring this up, there'll be different failure conditions. There won't always be good debug messages. You'll get it working once and then something will break and then it'll crash. It just took a longer than it should for most consumers to be able to do Mixed reality and I'm hoping that all of this workflow and the software is gonna get figured out so that it's just sort of like easy to just plug and play and get it going but I the end result is once people do actually get the mixed reality video is that you're able to see yourself dancing within the context of the Beat Saber and the fascinating thing is that I had no conceptualization of what I actually look like when I play the game and so As I watch myself playing the game, it's like really fascinating because it's like my experience of the game is so much different than how I look playing the game. I mean, it's similar in some ways, but it just feels so much more immersive and satisfying. And I think the thing about seeing the mixed reality videos though, is that I think it's going to inspire a lot of people to, you know, be like, how, wow, I want to have that experience. That looks amazing. because you feel like a ninja. You just feel like, you know, you're into this total flow state. And I think that's the thing that is probably the most appealing to people is that they see people sort of in this ecstatic flow state. And I've been giving a number of different talks and lectures and talking about the difference of Kronos time and Kairos time, but it's a very like Kairos time type of experience where you're in the quality of the moment at the time. And in fact, you're like so in tuned into the structure and the rhythm of the music with the way that they've developed it. So I just think that it's got a lot of potential to continue to just make a huge splash within the VR industry, especially with kind of bringing people outside of the VR industry into VR. It's one of those games that people will inherently want to try out and play. I know at GDC, there was huge lines that were at the VR mixer for people to try to play it. There were people trying to get in and see it at the Valve booth. People saw the videos and they're like, yes, I want to experience this. So I think it's going to be a big hit at location-based entertainment places around the country and if people get set up of like mixed reality videos it can kind of be like the equivalent of people like going on a roller coaster and like you know going down the huge hill and getting a photo of their face like freaking out. Well, I think people may want to be like, yeah, I want to capture a video of myself playing this game to be able to share it with my friends. And I think that if there's people that get that set up, I think that that will potentially be a thing that people want to come and do, especially because the mixed reality is not insignificant thing to get set up and to get going. So there are also a number of different types of levels on Beat Saber. You can play it with the arrows, you can turn off the arrows, and actually turning the arrows off actually gives another extra layer of embodiment. I think that the main game, especially up to the hard level, is a very mental presence. And so you're doing, it's almost like a puzzle game, but you're solving the puzzle with your body. so it has a level of embodiment and as you go higher and higher and higher then it becomes much more embodied where you actually have to like really be physically fit and to be able to like have the agility to be able to do these different runs and I found myself actually like my left hand is not as strong as my right hand and there's other different modes where you actually have the ability to just use one hand you can play those modes just to kind of strengthen the agility of your hands and those modes actually are actually really difficult to even get through because it's like just one hand but you just have to be have like super agile response time similarly they have a run that is just like no arrows and so it has colors and so you still have to hit the right color but again it's much more of an embodied sort of movement and you have much more freedom and flexibility to how you hit the blocks you don't aren't constrained to be able to hit it from one specific direction and so you can do a lot more creative sort of arcs and dances and I think the the no arrow is one that I Enjoyed to play through and that those were actually really difficult to get through especially at the the expert level because at that point it starts to really become into this really like embodied response that you have to cultivate and and you actually have to just put the time in to be able to train your body to be able to do it. But I think that we're moving into the experiential age and there's gonna be different dimensions of virtual reality that are super compelling. I think that the sense of embodied presence and immersion that comes from music and the emotional engagement that comes from just the inherent dimensions of music of how that is evoking the emotions, So you have the embodiment, you have the emotions, and you have the puzzle solving, and you're expressing your agency. So I think that this is a type of like sweet spot type of experience that has really just got a great balance of different dimensions of presence. And I think it's just something that is going to really resonate and have people respond to it in a way. And I expect to see a lot of people doing mixed reality videos and just trying to share what they look like when they play this game. So I expect that there's gonna be a certain viral element of that. Starting tomorrow, I'm sure we'll see lots of different videos that people have been working on. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. The Voices of VR podcast is a listener-supported podcast, and I rely on donations from my listeners like yourself. And if you feel inspired to support this type of journalism, then please do become a member to the Patreon. just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference and you know at the five dollar level that's a great level to give at as well just to help really support and sustain this podcast so donate today at patreon.com slash voices of vr thanks for listening
