Voices of VR Podcast

Pollen is a first-person exploration game set in space by Helsinki-based Mindfield Games. I had a chance to catch up with Project Lead Olli Sinerma at PAX Prime to talk about the story behind the game as well as some of the lessons learned from working on Pollen for the past two years.

The graphics in Pollen look amazing, and there is a very detailed blog post on Unity’s site talking about how they’ve been able to achieve high-end visuals within Unity 5. Road to VR also did a pretty comprehensive hands-up write up on the experience that you can find here.

Olli talks about some of the considerations that Mindfield Games took into account for VR locomotion, and how they’ve been approaching locomotion within a room-scale Vive environment. They considered using the type of Blink locomotion system that Cloudhead Games is using, but for now are opting to use a combination of using the thumbstick controller as well as walking around in a room scale environment. Time will tell to see if this is a viable approach in the long-run as I suspect that this will not be 100% nausea-free as the Blink approach promises to be. VR locomotion is still largely an open problem within the VR exploration genre, and so I expect that this will be an area in VR that will continue to have different approaches and potential solutions.

Olli also talks about designing the first-person control mechanisms for both the gamepad, mouse and keyboard, as well as the Vive and the Half Moon Oculus Touch controllers. They’re considering experimenting with some of gesture capabilities within that are made available with the Touch, but likely not going to be a vital part of the gameplay considering that it wouldn’t be possible if people were playing with a gamepad or Vive controllers. Olli describes how they’re trying to make the interactions as natural as possible whether using a gamepad, mouse or 6DOF hand controllers.

They’re also designing a 2D version of the game, and he mentioned that there will be things that you can do in VR that you can’t do in the 2D version like look underneath a bed. There are definitely design restrictions and considerations like this when trying to develop a game for multiple platforms, and so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it’s worth for VR game developers to make 2D versions available and how much that 2D version would limit the VR experience.

Olli is excited to see more medical applications of VR, and he’s really grateful for the amount of community and information that’s available on /r/oculus. You can get more information on Pollen on their website here.

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John Nagle is the CTO at Phaser Lock Interactive, who is developing a Vive game called Final Approach. The gameplay of Final Approach involves selecting miniature planes flying through the air and then drawing landing paths in 3D space with a 6DOF controller. It’s sort of an arcade style air traffic controller game where you’re an invisible giant helping planes and helicopters land and take off. But then you can shrink down to normal scale and help to put out fires and clear the sea gulls from the runway.

I had a chance to play Final Approach at PAX Prime, and it was a fun and entertaining experience to draw the flight paths and to switch between miniaturized and more 1:1 scale. I only got to step through the initial demo scenes, but I could imagine how having to juggle between all of the tasks and switching scales could make for longer gaming sessions. They were also really inspired by the painting mechanics of Tilt Brush, and wanted to turn that path-drawing motion into a full game.

John talks about the process of developing for the Vive, how they’ve converted a room-scale experience into also working as a sit-down experience, some of the lessons learned, his first experience within Job Simulator, as well as what some of the reactions to the game have been so far. John says that developing for the Vive has been one of the most rewarding development experiences he’s ever had, and they’re both really excited to be working on a Vive launch title and to be in early in this latest wave of VR development.

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One of the challenges with a first-person VR adventure game is that locomotion causes some people motion sickness. People have a wide range of tolerances for how much they can move around a VR space with a controller, and room-scale VR helps to eliminate nausea because your real movements match your virtual movements 1:1 and there’s no disconnect within your vestibular system. However, there’s still the problem of how to move within a virtual space that’s larger than your limited room-scale VR physical space. Cloudhead Games has come up with a really elegant solution in their The Gallery experience for projecting your room-scale volume within your virtual space in a system they call “Blink,” and it does really lives up to the promise of 100% nausea-free VR locomotion.

Cloudhead Games has been working on their first-person VR adventure game The Gallery for over two years now, and they’ve been one of the leading innovators in solving this VR locomotion motion sickness issue. They came up with the VR comfort mode approach of incrementing in 10-15 degree increments when doing raw rotation with the joystick.

Cloudhead Games was showing off their latest Blink VR locomotion system at PAX this past weekend, and I had an opportunity to try it out. I’m someone who is very sensitive to motion sickness to the point where I can’t really even move around with a controller within a VR environment for more than 5-10 minutes without starting to feel some motion sickness. I was able to do a 15-20 minute demo of the first episode of The Gallery called “The Call of the Starseed,” and I wasn’t feeling any type of motion sickness symptoms.

I talked with Cloudhead Games producer Joel Green about their Blink new system, and some of his insights after using it for a couple of months. Joel says that there’s going to be a new skill that people need to develop within room-scale VR, which is to be able to have a dual awareness of where they’re located within their physical space as well as where they’re located within VR. He says that it takes some practice to learn this skill, but that after people can have this dual spatial awareness that they’re able to move much more quickly and confidently within a VR space.

I feel like I’m still relatively new at this skill, and so I found myself moving very slowly within the experience and was bumping up against the chaperone boundary system within the experience more often than I should have had I been more aware of where I was located within the physical space. Joel said that they decided to place a visual representation of the boundaries of your physical space within the experience to help people make this connection because they did find that people would blink teleport to a new spot and not really feel comfortable to walk around their room-scale volume if they didn’t have that spatial awareness and confidence.

There’s a system of volumetric blinking where you visualize and rotate your room-scale volume and place it more precisely around objects within an area that you’d like to explore. I found this to be really helpful because it did start to give me a better idea as to whether or not I’d be able to interact with those objects without worrying about if they were outside of the volume or not.

One other innovation that was interesting is that they were using a backpack as their inventory system. You have to reach over your shoulder and pull the trigger in order to take off your backpack and place it in front of you. It was something that felt natural and intuitive, and felt like another elegant solution to a tricky problem. It felt like a really good tradeoff for how to present a 3D representation of an adventure game inventory that preserves the realistic nature of VR, but yet also has an intuitive user interface that is efficient to use.

One challenge in an adventure game like this is figuring out which objects are valuable to solving puzzles, and which ones are just simply fun to play with but won’t ultimately help you advance through the game. Part of the logic that was implemented within The Gallery was a backpack inventory system where if an object was important enough to be used later, then you can put it in your backpack and it’ll automatically be stored there again if you drop it. If it’s not important, then it’ll just drop to the ground. This would allow you to pick up objects from one room, and then use them in another room.

Joel helped guide me through the many different puzzles within the experience, and I think that there’s going to be a lot of really exciting exploration, puzzles, and fun gameplay within The Gallery experience. They have a solid foundation with a VR locomotion system that is indeed 100% nausea-free, and so now they can focus on finishing up the content with engaging puzzles in time for the consumer Vive launch.

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Sarah Northway & Colin Northway talk about the process of converting an open world building game of Fantastic Contraption to a room-scale VR experience with the HTC Vive.

The gameplay is very straightforward and intuitive in that you have a limited set of objects to build things with, but you can use as many of them to build a contraption within a zero-gravity environment. Then you press go, gravity kicks in, and you hope that your contraption is structurally sound enough to get from point A to point B.

It’s a simple premise, but excellently executed in how natural it feels to be in an environment where you can build whatever you can think of with these pipes and wheels. Colin talks about how it’s somewhat disappointing how seamless the two-handed interactions are within the game since he spent over a month writing all of the code to make it happen. Yet his efforts are almost completely invisible due to how intuitive the interactions are within the environment.

Colin and Sarah talk about their approach to minimalist game design, and how they foresee expanding the number of objects and items as well as potentially adding in more social components to the experience.

I had a chance to try out the Fantastic Contraption at PAX, and I have to say that it’s been one of the more fun and compelling experiences I’ve had within VR. I didn’t want to stop playing it, and could have been in there for hours. The fact that you can just let your imagination run wild within this frictionless construction environment meant that I could build a very complex object within a couple of minutes. It had no chance of actually accomplishing the goal, but it was extremely fun and satisfying anyway and I look forward to being able to play some more — as well as watch how other people try to solve the puzzles.

Colin said that the original Fantastic Contraption has had over 12 million contraptions saved, and they plan on allowing people to save and share their solutions so that you can see how others have solved the various puzzles that are in the game.

Colin & Sarah are both looking forward to see what VR and AR has to bring to society, and they think that it’s just a matter of time until VR or AR headsets start to replace 2D computer screens. They’re going to be continuing to solidify and develop this open world building experience with the Fantastic Contraption, and they’re looking forward to other experiences that unleash the potential of their creativity like Tilt Brush and Fantastic Contraption.

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Daniel O’Brien is the Vice President of Business Planning and Management for Virtual Reality at HTC. I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX Prime in the HTV Vive private demo area. Dan talks about the first time that he tried Valve’s room-scale VR, and some of the story for how the collaboration between Valve and HTC began.

Daniel talks about how creating the Vive has been a true collaboration between Valve and HTC, and that they don’t like to get too much into the details of who did what because they’ve both had a part in creating the hardware and software for both the developer kits and final consumer version.

Daniel said that there will be some upcoming announcements with more information on the final consumer product as well as the timing of the release. He said that there would be a limited quantity at the end of this year, but didn’t specify whether that limited quantity would be available to the general public or released to specific developers. More details on the target release dates and some more details on the final specifications, as well as some of the extended capabilities, should be coming soon.

I asked Daniel if he thought that the initial HTC Vive experiences would primarily be games, and he did say that he expected that a lot of the initial experiences and innovations would be coming from the gaming market. But he expects that there will also be a healthy ecosystem of non-gaming applications that will be emerging within the next couple of years. He didn’t specify how many dev kits have already been distributed or what percentage were sent to non-gaming applications, but it does sound like there will be some non-gaming applications released for the Vive as well.

Finally, Daniel talks about the some of the marketing initiatives for the HTC Vive, and that it’s not something that you can read about in a magazine to understand it. They’re dedicated to providing opportunities for people to experience room-scale VR first-hand with their World Tour, as well as going to various tech events.

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Evan Suma is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Institute of Creative Technologies. He was at IEEE VR presenting a poster on “Towards Context-Sensitive Reorientation for Real Walking in Virtual Reality” led by his USC ICT students Timofey Grechkin & Mahdi Azmandian.

Evan talks about some of the redirected techniques and different visual tricks for getting the most use out of your constrained physical space. For example, here’s a 2012 paper from Evan titled: “Impossible Spaces: Maximizing Natural Walking in Virtual Environments with Self-Overlapping Architecture.” You can read some of his other papers here in his list of publications.

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Niels Christian Nilsson is a graduate student at the Aalborg University Copenhagen, and he was at the IEEE VR presenting a poster on Factors that Effect Perceived Naturalness of Virtual Walking Speeds.

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Kasim Özacar is a Ph.D. Student at Tohoku University working with Virtual Reality. He was presenting a poster at IEEE VR 2015 about Physical-Virtual 3D Collaborative Interaction Environment with Coupled Clay.

This is a really interesting mixed reality poster that puts magnetic sensors in clay connect VR to reality.

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Ayana Burkins is a student at the Duke immersive Virtual Environment program at Duke University. She was at IEEE VR presenting a poster on “Wayfinding by Auditory Cues in Virtual Environments.”

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Alec Moore on The Effects of Olfaction on VR Training of Assembly Tasks

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