At GDC this year, Epic Games had a VR Lounge where they were showing off 10 different VR experiences that used the Unreal Engine. One of those experiences was Create VR’sThe Walk VR Experience, where you can walk across a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers just as Philippe Petit did in 1974. This was created as Sony Pictures’ first VR experience to promote their film The Walk, which was released last September. I had a chance to talk with Jack Black, the Head of VR at Create Advertising, about The Walk VR experience, how it triggers the primal parts of fear in our brain, and how he reacted to it considering his fear of heights.
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From a VR design perspective, this Walk experience brings up a really interesting tension between your primal brain and your rational brain. Evoking a sense of danger and fear within a virtual reality experience can be an indicator of presence, but if you’re too successful at creating this tension then the user’s rational brain may override the primal panic mechanisms and create a dissonance that breaks presence.
It’s a fine balance to successfully cultivate and preserve presence in these types of situations, and it’s interesting to hear Jake’s anecdotal results that about a quarter of the people don’t end up even trying to walk on the virtual wire in the demos that he’s seen. That means that about three quarters of the people felt safe enough to walk the walk, but it’s entirely possible that the people who didn’t walk may have had an overall more immersive VR experience. The way to measure this could by administering presence surveys to the subjects such as the Slater, Usoh & Steed (SUS) Questionaire or the Witmer & Singer (WS) Questionaire.
Here’s a promotional trailer for the experience, which interestingly enough debuted on the Sony PlayStation VR. The version at GDC was shown on the Vive:
Nick DiCarlo is the Vice President of Immersive Products & Virtual Reality at Samsung, and I caught up with him at SXSW to hear more about the VR Coaster technology syncs their VR experience to each roller coaster, how they’re managing the logistics of Gear VR headsets, and the future of using Gear VR headsets in theme park attractions.
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I was going to go try out one of the Six Flags VR roller coasters before GDC as part of a Samsung media event, but it was postponed due to bad weather in Dallas that week. I’m fairly sensitive to motion sickness caused by visual and vestibular disconnects, and so the jury is still out for me as to whether or not these VR coasters have good enough tracking and synchronization to not cause sim sickness for those who are already particularly sensitive. Leave a comment to me @kentbye on Twitter if you have a chance to try out any of these roller coasters and how sensitive you are to motion sickness from VR locomotion.
Here’s some game play footage from Theme Park Review of a roller coaster on the New Revolution Virtual Reality Coasters
Here’s a 30-second promo for the New Revolution Virtual Reality Coasters at Six Flags
And here’s a 7 and a half minute documentary about bringing these VR Roller Coasters to Six Flags
I was invited to cover the VR Intelligence Conference that debuted in San Francisco on November 9-10, 2015. It was a smaller but very focused gathering of decision-makers from a wide range of different industries, and they’re holding a European VR Intelligence Conference in London on May 12-13, 2016. I had a chance to catch up with conference organizer Pete Carkeek to hear about some of the industry analysis highlights from the panel discussions, how the VR Intelligence conference came about, and where they’re going in the future.
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I was able to interview a lot of analysts, venture capitalists, and executives that I don’t easily bump into at other conferences. Here’s my top 10 favorite interviews from the VR Intelligence conference:
Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica initially resisted and was eventually compelled enough to consider it, but she wasn’t convinced that film was the right medium.
She realized that the immersion that’s possible with virtual reality would be so much more effective in telling her story, and so she created Giant, which puts you in a basement with a family as there are bombs dropping outside. I had a chance to talk to Milica at Sundance about her personal story of growing up with war, the power of empathy in VR, how Giant went from an idea to having over 40 people collaborate on it, and finally how they blended live action 2D footage within Unreal Engine to immerse you within the scene.
One of my favorite VR games is the Kokoromi Collective’s SUPERHYPERCUBE, which is a very stylized 3D Tetris game with amazing sound design. It’s a VR experience that really gives your brain a stimulating spatial memory workout. I first had a chance to play SUPERHYPERCUBE at the XOXO Festival, and I learned more about the process of designing the game from Kokoromi Collective members Heather Kelley & Phil Fish. I had a chance to do an interview with Heather at Sony’s GDC event this year where she described to me a bit of their game design process and long history of developing this game going all the way back to 2008.
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It was surprisingly difficult to find footage online that really conveys what the gameplay looks like. Here’s an animated GIF that shows some of the basic mechanic, but a lot of the immersive feeling of the game is obviously lost in this 2D translation.
This gameplay footage of SUPERHYPERCUBE correlates what it’s like moving your head around to be able to see how to rotate the cube, but the footage is hard to really make more out of the gameplay.
And here’s some of the original gameplay of SUPERHYPERCUBE from 2008 that shows the same mechanic, but the art and sound design has been drastically improved.
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer Jeremy Selan and tracking engineer Ben Jackson about the evolution of room-scale tracking technologies, as well as some of the oral history stories that include some of their favorite memories and types of experiences within VR. They didn’t talk about any specific future plans for things that they’re not ready to talk about yet, but Jeremy did allude to the fact that there’s a lot of latent hardware functionality that’s shipping with the Vive that can be turned on with a software update. We also speculate a bit about the potentials of using the front-facing camera to track static objects with fiducial markers, the desire to go beyond room-scale in VR, and using controllers to prototype tracking other body parts until Valve presents a solution that makes it easier and more aesthetically pleasing.
My interview with Rob last year was one of my top 10 favorite podcasts that I’ve done because he has so many interesting insights about what’s unique and different about VR as a storytelling medium. He was the first person to point out to me the importance of body language cues in NPCs to maintain a sense of immersion within a story, and that the lack of believable social interactions with artificial characters can break presence and disrupt your suspension of disbelief.
Part of the magic of storytelling is that we allow ourselves to believe in the overall context of a story as well as the individual motivations of each of the characters. But the problem within an immersive story where the user is playing the protagonist is that you actually know very little about who the identity that user and what’s really motivating them. So instead of creating a well-defined set of motivations for the main character within the context of the story, Rob suggests using the mechanism of ambiguity to allow enough spaciousness within the story for the viewer to project their own identity into what they’re doing and why.
In my interview with Devon Dolan about the four different types of stories in VR, he makes the distinction of whether the character is a spectator and ghost within the experience or whether the character is a part of the story and has some agency within it. If you are a character in the story, then Rob says that some of the essential questions that the user will be asking are “Who am I?,” “What is my relationship to what is happening around me?,” and “How much can I affect it?” In that way, becoming the main protagonist within an interactive story becomes an interface to the experience.
One useful mechanism that Rob has discovered to help immerse you deeper within a story in VR is to have other characters implicate you in some way. You may have a secret or be accused of a murder, or they may just tell you, “Just act normal.” As soon the other characters make an assumption or assertion about your motivations as to why your doing something, then it allows you to clarify your own internal sense of what you’re doing and why. Then if you start to internalize or express that sense of agency within the story, then it allows the user to take their roleplaying to the next level and to get really emotionally hooked within the story.
Virtual and augmented reality also opens up new types of genres and stories that were previously impossible before. Conflict and growth is the heart of drama, and a lot of films and video games use the trope of external combat to express this. But Rob sees the potential to explore stories in VR and AR that are much more about internalized emotional conflicts within the main protagonist / player of the experience.
There’s a number of moral dilemmas within The Assembly including a specific moment where the player has to decide whether or not to press a metaphoric “evil” button. His goal is to not have the player use their rational mind to calculate the costs or benefits of the action, but to get to the point where the user makes more of gut decision as to whether or not it feels good or bad. It’s a much more visceral experience and memorable experience if it’s felt in their emotional body rather than a result of an abstracted mental process.
Rob believes that the canvas for all storytelling is within the space between the user’s ears, and that VR has the capability to evoke a level of immersion within a story that goes beyond what was possible before. He says, “We are ALWAYS dealing with mixed reality, whether it’s AR or VR, because the reality at the center of the experience is always the player.” And by using the mechanism of ambiguity and implication, then you’re able to both have more of an impact on allowing players to express their identity within the story but also exert some sort of direction or control in how the story unfolds. Leaving the story open-ended enough will allow the user to fill in the blanks with their own story, and in the end create an experience that will be more personal and leave a deeper impression.
Rob is a freelance writer for immersive technologies, and you can read more of his thoughts at @AboutThisLater or on his blog.
Katie Goode is the Creative Director of Triangular Pixels, which has developed Smash Hit Plunder for the Gear VR and Unseen Diplomacy for the Vive. Unseen Diplomacy is a room-scale experience that has people crawling through tunnels as a spy, but Katie wanted to ensure that she wasn’t excluding people with disabilities in being able to enjoy and participate in their experience. I had a chance to talk with Katie at GDC for how they’re taking into account accessibility for VR by designing experiences that still work for users who are deaf, colorblind, or have a disability that restricts their movement.
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There’s a menu option at the beginning of Unseen Diplomacy if your movement is restricted, which then alters the experience to make it more accessible to people who can’t crawl around on the floor whether due to age, an injury, or a disability. There are some sections that are completely removed, but there are other adaptations to the game that move the buttons and objects around so that they’re accessible to people in a wheelchair.
In the end, designing with people with a range of disabilities in mind usually ends up with stronger game design for everyone. For example, the visual cues in Unseen Diplomacy were more explicit and didn’t solely upon color or audio to give the user feedback in their game. This not only makes is so that deaf and colorblind people can still fully enjoy the experience, but it also in the end provided a more clear design for everyone.
Here’s a gameplay video of Unseen Diplomacy, which is available on Steam for $2.99. The game does require a minimum of 4m x 3m space, and so I wasn’t able to fully play it in my 2.9m x 2.3m room.
VR Unicorns is a Copenhagen-based development collective that developed #SelfieTennis. They were working on Julie Heyde’s RagnarökVR until they stated experimenting with room-scale sports experiences.
Playing tennis against yourself in VR was the first mechanic that found was really compelling and fun, and so they started doing rapid iterations on maximizing the sense of fun and play in the game. Rather than trying to create an accurate tennis simulation, they started adding in the ability to kill the audience members by hitting with balls, putting in selfie sticks, and adding other mini-games that were more about exploration of an interactive environment than making an accurate tennis simulation.
I had a chance to catch up with VR Unicorn developers Horatiu Roman & Milan Grajetzki at the Unity VR/AR Vision Summit to learn more about their game jam-inspired design process and intention behind the game.
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#SelfieTennis is an oddly compelling game that I found myself coming back to play again and again. The teleportation mechanic is fun, but it’s also fun to explore physics interactions within an interactive environment. ResearchVR Podcast‘s Azad Balabanian wrote an essay on how Cause & Effect is VR’s Basic Interaction where he argues that physics is how humans can predict the future. This is supports Valve’s Jeep Barnett’s theory that physics in VR is compelling because it’s how humans are able to see into the future.
I’m a tennis player, and so I actually found that my tennis skills could be a detriment while playing #SelfieTennis. If I used proper form, then I would just hit the ball in the net, and so I found that I had to alter my swing just to keep a rally going. The design goal of #SelfieTennis wasn’t to create an accurate simulation to make me a better tennis player, and in fact I imagine that if I played too much #SelfieTennis then it would make me a worse tennis player in real life.
But real tennis is hard, and an accurate simulation would not be fun for a lot of people. #SelfieTennis can be still quite challenging for a lot of people, but the learning curve is a lot faster than playing real tennis. And the teleportation mechanic is something that is so unique to VR that it can be really compelling for a lot of people. For example, here’s a video of Twitch streamer OMGitsfirefoxx in a typical evolution of how people play and explore in the game:
One warning is that it’s easy to get so immersed within the #SelfieTennis experience that you either swing and hit the ceiling or wall, or accidentally throw a controller across the room. So be sure to have players wear the wrist guards while playing.
Also, the initial #SelfieTennis game does feel a bit light to justify the current $19.99 price, but hopefully there will continue to add more features and do a lot of rapid iterations and improvements over time. But it’s also a lot of fun, and a great experience to include for people playing VR for the first time because there are a lot of cute animations and interactions to be discovered within the environment.
VR has the capability to take us into completely new realms, and experimental artist Isaac “Cabbibo” Cohen has been creating some of the most surreal and transportive experiences that I’ve seen. I had a chance to try out a number of Cabbibo’s Vive art experiments and then talk to him about his design intentions and process at the VR Mixer party, which ended up being one of my favorite conversations at GDC. Continue reading →
At GDC this year, Epic Games had a VR Lounge where they were showing off 10 different VR experiences that used the Unreal Engine. One of those experiences was Create VR’s The Walk VR Experience, where you can walk across a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers just as Philippe Petit did in 1974. This was created as Sony Pictures’ first VR experience to promote their film The Walk, which was released last September. I had a chance to talk with Jack Black, the Head of VR at Create Advertising, about The Walk VR experience, how it triggers the primal parts of fear in our brain, and how he reacted to it considering his fear of heights.
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One of my favorite VR games is the Kokoromi Collective’s 
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer 
VR has the capability to take us into completely new realms, and experimental artist Isaac “
