There’s been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a VR-enabled browser called Carmel. And then on October 19th and 20th, there was a historic W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality where all of the major VR players gathered in San Jose to hash out the WebVR web standards for delivering VR and AR applications over the web. Some the participating companies included Mozilla, Google, Samsung, Oculus, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Valve, Sony, Yahoo, Unity, Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, HP, Dolby, High Fidelity, JanusVR, and Sketchfab. With Oculus’ public support and the gathering momentum around delivering VR over the web, WebVR hit an inflection point of buy-in and momentum such that the future of the metaverse will more likely be based upon the principles of the open web rather than driven by a more closed, walled garden application ecosystem.

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I had a chance to catch up with Tony Parisi at Oculus Connect 3, and he’s now started his own WebVR-focused company called Form VR that collaborated with Oculus on the TripAdvisor WebVR demo that was shown during the OC3 keynote. We talk about some of the latest developments in WebVR, how Microsoft is getting involved to get support for AR WebVR apps for the HoloLens, how Form VR is developing tools for creating WebVR applications, and some of the other big developments that are showing a lot of buy-in and momentum around WebVR.

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Stephanie Hurlburt is a low-level graphics engineer who has previously worked on the Unity Game Engine, Oculus Medium, and Intel’s Project Alloy, and now she’s creating on a texture compression product called Basis at her company Binomial. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West, and we take a bit of a deep dive into the graphics pipeline and some of her VR optimization tools and processes. We also talk about how to determine whether an experience is CPU-bound or GPU-bound, an open source game engine being built by Intel, the future of real-time ray tracing in games like Tomorrow Children & Dreams, and why she sees texture compression as a bottleneck in the graphics pipeline worth persuing for the future of wireless streaming in VR.

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Here’s a recent talk that Stephanie has given on texture compression and the future of VR

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Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they’ve identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare, education, live video/events/sports, design/engineering/tools, media, military/simulation, theme parks, and social. Some of the biggest areas of adoption with the Vive have been in engineering and design companies where they’ve been able to essentially replace million-dollar CAVE systems with the Vive. And we also talk about how each of the existing video game genres have been able to be translated into VR to varying degrees of success, and whether or not he sees any new genres unique to VR emerge yet. It’s an interesting discussion about the overall VR ecosystem, and how HTC has started to break it up into these different VR business verticals.

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Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They’ve created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close your hands to mimic the feeling of grabbing a tangible object. They used a modified scene from The Gallery, Episode 1 demo to show off this new controller, and I had a chance to Cloudhead Games President & Creative Director Denny Unger about it at the VR on the Lot conference. We talked about the Valve’s new input controller prototype, the growing ecosystem of lighthouse-tracked peripherals, his thoughts on the future of non-linear narrative, and an update about The Gallery, which recently won best narrative VR experience at the Proto Awards and has surpassed $1 million in sales.

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More photos of the new Vive controllers! #SteamDevDays #Vive #VR pic.twitter.com/o99QHPZvvD

— Shawn Whiting (@shawncwhiting) October 12, 2016

Nice hands-on demo video of the capacitive touch features the new SteamVR controllers by Valve's Jeremy Selan. https://t.co/6Wd2Jc6unk

— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) October 13, 2016

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

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Oculus Medium may be the first professional 3D modeling creation tool for the Oculus Touch controllers. It was created with the goal to democratize the process of creating 3D art and prototyping 3D-printed objects. The Medium developers didn’t set out to build a high-end industrial art tool, but early beta testers have been starting to integrate Medium within their professional 3D graphics pipelines.

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There have been a TON of improvements and UI developments to Medium over the last year, and it’s in the process of final improvements before being released with the Oculus Touch Controllers on December 6th. I had a chance to talk with Oculus Medium lead Brian Sharp about some of the design intentions behind Medium as well as some of the surprising ways that it’s already being used by professional artist like Goro Fujita. We talk about the evolution of the 3DUI, and how they wanted to stick to physical metaphors that anyone could understand rather than abstract concepts that only graphics professionals can grok. Medium is a great example of a VR program that demonstrates the power of immersive computing and how it can be much more intuitive and easy learn than previous 2D methods.

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Epic Games has had a long history of releasing new demo content at big gaming and developer conferences to showcase the latest Oculus hardware, and this year was no different. Oculus Studios provided funding to further develop the Bullet Train demo from last year into a fully-fledged FPS game called Robo Recall. This demo had one of the most polished and mature game mechanics expanding upon the Bullet Train bullet capture-and-throw mechanic into new weapons and upclose hand-to-hand combat with stylized arcade AI robots gone rouge.

I had a chance to talk with Epic Games VR lead Nick Whiting and artist Jerome Platteaux about their design process, deeper intentions, and overall art style and direction of the game. They debuted a new locomotion technique that was designed to help subtly guide players to facing the true north of the front-facing cameras, and Nick admitted that there are some design constraints to creating a game with the Oculus’ recommended front-facing camera arrangement. Jerome also said that there are new gameplay options that open up with a potential third tracking camera, but they didn’t give any more specifics as to whether Robo Recall intends on supporting the optional room-scale type of gameplay.

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In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the lowering of the minimum specification for an Oculus-ready machine, as well as some new announcements from Oculus about their support for room-scale VR.

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These topics are difficult to really cover since a lot of information is protected by non-disclosure agreements, but I was able to talk to a number of different developers off-the-record and synthesize these conversations into this op-ed podcast. There are still a lot of open questions, unknowns, and concerns that I try to dig into a bit more, as well as the overall vibe and other private hallway discussions that were happening at the San Jose Convention Center.

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VR is a new communications medium, and as such it’ll likely be applied to anywhere other existing communications mediums are already used — such as in courtrooms for presenting evidence. Kineticorp VR has already been presenting 3D forensic evidence in courtrooms, and I had a chance to talk with Tomas Owens about some of the unique challenges that VR faces in getting into the courtroom. They’ve created some prototype demos, and done some early prototypes that have yeilded some promising and surprising results. So I talk to Tomas about their work on that path to using immersive technologies within a legal context.

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Reverend Kyle and I recorded a recap of the first day of Oculus Connect 3 as a part of the Oculus Livestream sponsored by Intel. We went around Oculus Connect 3 trying out a number of multiplayer VR experiences with the Oculus Touch and the gamepad including Dead & Buried, Gang Beasts, Ripcoil, Kingspray, and Blazerush. I also had a chance to try out the latest version of Oculus Medium, which has come a long way over the past year in creating a fully functional and professional application within VR.

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You can watch the recording of the livestream down below to see some of the footage and reaction shots of playing different multi-player games

Watch live video from on www.twitch.tv

On October 4th, Google revealed Daydream View, which is their reference design for their mobile VR headset. Google CEO Sandar Pichai also announced the first Daydream-ready phone designed called Pixel, which also has native hardware support for their artificial intelligent Google Assistant technology. Pichai emphasized that Google and the wider tech industry are moving from mobile-first to AI-first, and so they showed off more demos of their AI conversational interface with Google Home.

I had a chance to go hands-on with the Google Home, Google Pixel, and Google’s Daydream View devices, and then had an opportunity to sit down with Google Vice President Clay Bavor, who is heading up Google’s VR initiatives. We talked about Daydream View & the 3DOF controller, the special optimizations they made to be able to seamlessly stream 360 videos on YouTube, their Streetview implementation and future of Earth VR, and how AI and conversational interfaces will start to be integrated into Daydream. We also talked about how Google Jump was their first initiative after Cardboard to improve upon the stereo 360 video quality, the future of digital lightfields, and Google’s push for open ecosystems and their support for WebVR.

I also have a chance to give some more of my hands-on impressions of Daydream View, and add some of my thoughts and analysis for how Google’s VR immersive computing platform is starting to converge with their AI initiatives.

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