Voices of VR Podcast

On my way out to cover the VR at Sundance, I had a chance to try out one of the most advanced Digital Out of Home Entertainment systems today in an industrial park in the middle of Utah. The VOID goes beyond room-scale with their minimum 60′x60′ stage in order to trick you into walking into circles without even noticing. Curved physical walls feel like they’re straight even when you’re touching them while walking around a quarter circle. Every time I reached out for a wall or corner, I found one and it reinforced this primal part of myself that this virtual world was being mirrored in reality. The VOID is starting to realize the vision of exploring infinite virtual worlds at 1:1 scale, and they’re doing it with a lot of custom hardware, some visionary dreams, a lot of hard work, and a little bit of magic.

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James Jensen is the Chief Visionary Officer of The VOID, and it was his dream to mix virtual worlds with actual worlds. Ken Bretschneider and Curtis Hickman originally hired James as a contractor to create a virtualized pre-visualization of a theme park attraction. They asked James if he had any other ideas for a good virtual attraction, and he shared his long-time vision of creating a virtual world that would be juxtaposed on top of the physical world. James, Ken & Curtis would go on to found The VOID using the Oculus DK1 and DK2 systems to catalyze their prototype development.

However, they soon found a number of limitations with the consumer VR hardware, and started to build their own custom computer backpacks, integrate their own optical tracking solutions, as well as add a number of different 5D effects to increase the immersion. Even with DK2-level graphics and some spotty optical tracking, I experienced an impressive level of astonishment and awe in being able to walk around in VR for as long as I did while maintaining a sense of presence.

Perhaps even more impressive is The VOID’s content delivery infrastructure that allows a worker to change out multiple experiences within a single, physical maze template. The alpha prototype was only one quarter of the final design, but it is a structure that allows multiple choices beyond a single linear path. The combination of redirected walking and changing turning velocities tricks participants into walking in actual circles while virtually walking either in a straight lines or a 90-degree turn.

I went through the experience, and was amazed that I ended up right where I began. And I was even more amazed when I got to shadow the next participant and see how he was just as tricked as I was. With all of the magical perceptual hacks that they included, it’s very easy to get lost as far as where you’re actually physically located within their maze-like structure. Here’s an animated GIF that illustrates how physically walking in a circle is shown in the virtual world as walking in a straight line.

James gave me an extended tour of some of their latest design iterations and talked about their customized Rapture HMDs & gun peripherals. They’re preparing to put over 1000 TED participants through their experience in Vancouver, Canada from February 15-19. Prepare for a lot of VR buzz because what they have in store is going to give some of the participants a thrill of a lifetime.

The VOID is planning on opening up their initial arcade location in Salt Lake City later this year, and then start to spread out to other gateway locations around the country. They’ve also been making some content sponsorships with major film companies, and so you can expect some pretty sophisticated branded experiences coming soon.

James says that there’s a process for third party developers to go through in order to go through each of their different stages of development. There’s a special template that developers can use in order to create their own infinite virtual levels. I would imagine that it would be difficult to start designing levels within their constraints without having actually experienced it and been able to peak behind the scenes. But for those developers who have had a chance, then I would expect that their imagination is running wild with what types of experiences become possible.

I went through two VOID experiences including a single-player exploration as well as a co-op alien shooter. Of the two, I found the exploration game much more compelling and fun. There’s something to be said about being able to go at your own pace and take in all of the scenery. The exploration experience was a bit longer, and it had more 5D effect integrations which gave a more vaster, more diverse and overall richer experience that had a lot more awe-inspiring moments.

Their haptic feedback guns were novel and nice, but there’s a part of me that knew that I wasn’t really killing spiders and aliens. Whereas the sense of presence and immersion was so much greater in their exploration experience. And perhaps there was also a bit of an uncanny valley effect of seeing another player, but only being able to see a canned animation and not actual body movements. With the more complicated game play mechanics, there were just a lot more opportunities to have a break in presence and once those happen then it’s hard to go back. That said, there are some people who are going to totally love this type of co-op experience.

It’s still early days for The VOID, but they clearly have a lot of momentum, resources, and partnerships to actually fulfill their vision of becoming the IMAX of VR Arcades. I didn’t get a chance to experience their latest hardware or see their new RF tracking system in action. It apparently does a lot better job of not getting occluded, and it has the capability track the full body. So it’s hard to gauge exactly where they’re at based upon not seeing their latest technology, but they’ve clearly been chipping away at a number of difficult problems and integrations and what they already have is impressive even for seasoned VR veterans.

I’m looking forward to more of the educational experiences and what the third party developers do with this platform, especially when it comes to co-op experiences. I can’t wait to go through some of these worlds with my friends since I think that the social interactions within these environments is going to provide a unique shared experience that will be super compelling.

There’s still a lot of room for innovative puzzles and game design that utilizes physical props, but they’ll be constrained with wanting to maintain a fast past so that they can have a high-enough throughput to become profitable.

Once their physical template is finalized, then the sky is the limit as far as what types of genres and experiences could emerge from this type of platform. James Jensen is living out his dream of mixing virtual and real worlds, and he’s already exceeded his wildest imagination for what’s possible. I expect that 2016 will be a big year for his team, and that there will be a lot of people eager to step into The VOID.

For more information about the VOID, the be sure to check out co-founder Ken Bretschneider’s presentation:

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Eric Romo is the founder and CEO of AltspaceVR, and he shares his story of how he got interested in the potential of social VR from way before the Oculus Kickstarter and Facebook bought Oculus VR. He talks about the surprising amount of body language that can add to a social interaction, as well as some of the challenges of running a social VR company when there’s literally zero market.

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Here’s a video of Eric’s candid talk about “Lessons Learned In VR Startup Fundraising”

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David Bowman is Director of Production at Crytek, and he gave me the inside story of how VR went viral within Crytek to the point of having well over 50 developers and multiple triple AAA quality VR projects in development for the Sony PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. He’s been doing game development for over 20 years now, and he’s never seen this much excitement internally about a new technology. There were developers who were willing to work for free on VR because they were so excited to help discover the new game mechanics and emotions that were only possible within VR. I caught up with David at the VRX conference where the told me about integrating VR into the CRYENGINE as well as Robinson: The Journey and their latest Back to Dinosaur Island 2 tech demo.

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Jim Geduldick is the Professional Marketing Manager at GoPro, which includes all of the ways GoPro cameras are used within cinema, virtual reality, broadcast television & photography. Jim talks about how the history of spherical video at GoPro goes back to 2011, and how virtual reality provided a platform to actually watch these immersive videos. He also talks about GoPro’s Odyssey camera, which is created in collaboration with Google’s Jump camera platform. He alludes that Google is doing some highly advanced post-processing with the information from the 16 cameras, but wasn’t able to provide many more official details yet.

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Jamie Kelly is a co-founder and president of VR Studios & VRCade. They’re creating a series of out-of-home VR gaming experiences that can be played in spaces as small as 15′x15′ and as large as 150′x75′. They were at the Seattle VR Expo showing off their latest, custom untethered VR HMD with Time Zombies, which is currently deployed in Dave & Buster’s flagship location in San Jose, CA. Jamie has a lot of passion for full-motion immersive gaming, and he talks to me about his dream of creating the technology that enables eSports franchises and athletic leagues within VR.

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Chandana Ekanayake is a game director & art director at Uber Entertainment where he’s working on a VR adventure game for the PlayStation VR titled Wayward Sky. I caught up with Chandana at the Seattle VR Expo where he shared with me some of the highlights from his presentation about “Unlearning Game Design for VR.” He talks about his lessons learned from creating a third-person, single player adventure game focusing on atmosphere and storytelling and why they decided to focus on the PlayStation VR as their initial platform.

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Linda Lobato is the CEO and co-founder of OBE Immersive, which is a wearable tech start-up that is part of the current Rothenberg River Program. She previously raised $77,000 to kickstart a MIDI Controller Jacket, and after seeing an early Oculus prototype in Korea she decided that VR was the next frontier for wearable technology. I caught up with Linda at a Rothenberg demo day where she talks their progress for creating a jacket that turns your body into an immersive input controller within a first-person shooter. It’s still within the early stages of development, but they hope to launch a Kickstarter later this year.

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Michael Lenzi is the CEO & co-founder of Atomic VR, and they’ve spent the last couple of years experimenting with untethered VR experiences. They’ve created a backpack with custom hardware that can run a desktop GPU for up to an hour, and they’ve also created a Star Wars-inspired Lightsword Experience that can be played in a space up to 20 feet by 20 feet with a Vive. They’re currently not interested in mass producing their hardware solution, but are interested in enabling and developing eSports VR experiences that give you a more active workout.

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Michael says that the VR hardware manufacturers have been knocking it out of the park with providing high framerate and low persistence HMDs, but that being tethered is something that decreases the immersion. They’ve been prototyping and developing their own custom hardware in order to create an untethered & mobile Vive system. The Vive’s Lighthouse tracking solution is particularly well-suited for an untethered tracking solution because each unit does not need to be directly connected to a computer.

Atomic VR has been creating automotive visualizations that are full-scale and have natural interactions, and they’re also interested in other B2B applications as well as getting into eSports applications. They’re interested in creating experiences where you could have a workout while playing with your friends. In the process of developing and playing their 20×20 Lightsword Experience, Ben Teitler lost 30 pounds from all of the movement and activity that he got from playing their game:

They’ve also developed a Fruit Ninja inspired experience for the Vive called Ninja Trainer where you have to actively swing your hands as if you were slicing fruit. They originally accurately modeled a sword but found that this was too difficult and had to make it a bit easier to play. Michael says that this is an experience that he expects to have a lot of reply value because people can improve the more that they play it, but it also provides quite an invigorating workout.

He says that the Wii and Kinect started the trend towards more active gaming experiences, but that they were too easy to hack. Once people realized that you could just flick your wrist instead of fully swinging your arm, then a lot of the exercise was lost because it was less efficient in playing the game. With VR’s submillimeter accuracy, then he expects that VR eSports will more accurately mimic 1:1 movement and natural interactions.

Michael says that they have some more ideas for some peripherals that would make eSports VR experiences within a room-scale environment more safe, and that this will be also something that the VR HMD manufacturers will also be in the process of continually improving with passthrough cameras as well as mapping out your physical environment.

Finally, Michael says that he was inspired by Vivid Vision’s gamification of physical therapy, and that he expects that the combination of eSports and social gaming with introduce a lot of new ways to have fun with your friends. Overall, he sees that VR will enable a lot of new stories to be told where you feel like you’re actually there, and VR has the possibility to show us how we’re all interconnected and allow us to empathize with experiences that we were previously blind to.

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Mike Alger just finished up his master’s degree focusing on VR interaction design methods, and he’s released a couple of popular videos summarizing his insights into immersive usr interfaces. I caught up with Mike at the Seattle VR expo talking about how he’s been using his film background and motion graphics skills in order to transition into VR experience design.

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Mike says that interaction design is all about looking at the properties of a given technology as well as the properties of humans. The different types of motion tracked controllers versus hand-tracking will dictate the best user interface. For example, if you look the mouse and keyboard model of interaction for a desktop computer then you have two different types of input, and perhaps immersive professional applications will eventually take a similar approach of having one hand-on a 6 degree of freedom controller, and the other hand being tracked with a camera. But having a combination of technologies would dictate the range of interaction design possibilities. Mike had an example of this in one of this videos:

Mike uses his background in filmmaking and motion graphics in order to put together some prototypes and user interface ideas in a couple of popular videos called “VR Interface Design Manifesto” and “VR Interface Design Pre-Visualization Methods”

Mike is able to have some fast iterations by using After Effects and Cinema 4D, but he also advocates translating other ideas from web design such as the design grid. You can still do a lot of paper prototyping of interface ideas, but VR is a medium that has spatial, depth, and lighting considerations and so it’s helpful to see what it actually might look like in VR as well. Mike refers to Alex Chu’s presentation where he suggests using a “greybox prototyping method” by putting in textureless primitives in Unity to quickly test out lighting and spacing layouts.

Mike’s second video had a call to action that he was looking for a job as a VR experience designer, and he’s since taken a job within Google’s VR design department. Based upon the feedback he got on the video, he sees that there’s a huge demand for more designers to get into VR to help experiment, iterate, and figure out the rules for creating the most comfortable interactions.

I asked Mike about projecting the UI onto a sphere, and he said that this feels more comfortable because the UI elements are all equidistant from your eyes and that this helps to avoid the vergence accommodation conflict that can happen with objects being at different distances. Another tip that Mike gave was to look at how we are currently mimicking depth within 2D interactions with drop shadows, and to convert those visual cues into actual depth within VR. He’s also really interested in how to create non-fatiguing interfaces that prevent forcing users from doing too many repetitive motions that could strain muscles.

Mike says that being a filmmaker is like being an experience designer in a 2D medium, and that there’s still a lot to be learned about the language of VR. For example, Oculus Story Studio discovered that the distance of characters from the camera can affect the emotional impact of a scene. And just like any other communications medium, VR is going to have a lot of strengths and weaknesses and these specifics will be more clear as more VR creators experiment with different combination of factors.

Finally, Mike hopes that he can help make VR a socially acceptable way to experience immersive entertainment and education as well as do useful work in the enterprise. Since the recording of this interview, Mike has since taken a job as a VR designer at Google and I hope to see a lot more insights and lessons learned as he continues to iterate and explore his ideas about interaction design with VR.

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Kayla Kinnunen is a game director at Roadhouse Interactive, which is an independent game development studio based out of Vancouver, BC. She talks about her process of evangelizing VR at her studio and slowly ramping up a VR team. She made a goal to put every one of Roadhouse’s 150 employees through a Vive demo loop, and she talks about what discovered in doing this as process well as how a indie game studio is thinking about VR.

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Seeing the Valve demo room at the Steam Dev Days gathering in early 2014 convinced Kayla Kinnunen that VR has a transformational potential, and now nearly two years later we’re approaching the consumer launch of the first VR HMDs. There’s still a lot of risk to dive all into to VR game development, and so Kayla talks about her process over the past couple of years to do some internal evangelizing of VR.

She decided that the best way to establish a baseline of conversation about VR was to first give all 150 employees of Roadhouse Interactive a wide range of Vive demos over the course of about 30 minutes. She wanted to build a consensus around what VR is, what works in VR, as well as what doesn’t work.

She slowly tweaked a demo loop that has a logical progression of showing specific mechanics. She starts with the constraint-free 3D graffiti painting application of Tiltbrush before putting on headsets so that people could get used to what it feels like to have frictionless creation within VR. She then puts on headphones and puts them through the TheBlu: The Encounter in order to demonstrate what a linear storytelling cinematic VR experience looks like. Then she shows Valve’s Apature Robot Repair for what high-fidelity animation can do, but with limited interactivity. She shows Job Simulator for a highly interactive experience, and then finally ends with Fantastic Contraption for a full-on, world-building experience.

After going through demos, she’s been seeing a lot of excitement as well as lot of ideas being brainstormed. She created a Unity test project that developers can download and start to experiment with VR on their own time. She’s been slowly recruiting internal developers in order to do rapid prototypes in order to quickly interate and continue to experiment with what types of game mechanics seem to work really well.

Kayla reflects a lot of the sentiment at the VRX conference in that 2016 will likely be a year where VR will continue to have a lot of experiments and early explorations as the install base starts to be established within the consumer VR market. It’s obviously too risky of a move to completely shift over all of their development resources, and will instead slowly build out some experiences over the next year.

She’s really excited about how VR can be used as a positive force in the world, and how it could amplify our humanity. She expects that social multiplayer games will help us feel a connection to other people, and that VR can appeal to a broader range of people beyond just gamers because the interface is a lot more intuitive and natural. She sees that VR allow anyone to experience anything, anywhere, and at any time and that ultimately it can help society enjoy the spirit of play as well as help make the world a better place.

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