Owlchemy Labs‘ Job Simulator was recently announced to be one of the bundled games to be included with the HTC Vive, and it’s also going to be a launch title for the Sony PlayStation VR as well as for Oculus Touch. I had a chance to catch up with Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer at the Unity VR/AR Vision Summit to talk about developing across all of the major VR platforms, the magic of hand presence, and the range of behaviors they’ve seen when given an open world physics sandbox.

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Alex has observed that people either mimic their natural behaviors from reality or they will do the most extreme things that they’d never do in real life, and that experiences like Job Simulator could be a sort of psychological personality test. Devin also discovered that people have had so much fun in Job Simulator that they experience time dilation to the point of misestimating their how long they were in VR by a factor of 4-5x.

They also talk about developing across each of the VR systems with hand tracked controllers and how they had to calibrate each system so that the virtual hands matched the position of your actual hands. One interesting discovery that they made with hand presence is that they found that it felt better to make your hands disappear when you’re holding an object. They’ve coined this phenomena as “tomato presence,” because hand presence seems to be transferred to whatever object you’re holding at any given time.

They’ve also noticed that there’s a certain performance art vibe that happens when people play Job Simulator within group gatherings, and that they expect that group experiences will inspire people to take suggestions from the audience and to do them in a way that’s as entertaining as possible.

They realize that there’s an inherent marketing problem with Job Simulator, in that people aren’t inherently motivated to simulate ordinarily mundane jobs within VR. It’s a problem that VR faces in general in that you have to try it out to really get it. But they’ve noticed that they have a lot of diehard fans who have been evangelizing and defending Job Simulator on Internet threads saying that you have to really try their experience to really understand why it’s so compelling.

It’s probably best summarized by this Tweet from Devin:

VR has two development camps. 1)Building what people think they want 2)Building what people don't yet know they want. #1 is very dangerous!

— Devin Reimer (@DevinReimer) March 3, 2016

Job Simulator is definitely a VR experience that most people don’t yet know that they want, but it illustrates the magic of hand presence in virtual worlds in a way that is both really surprising and delightful.

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Sylvio Drouin is the Executive Vice President of Unity Labs, which for the past year has been doing advanced research into VR authoring tools both for developers and consumers as well as graphic research. I caught up with Sylvio at Unity’s VR/AR Vision Summit where we talked about their some of their research projects including: VR authoring tools within VR, Project Carte Blanche to bring authoring tools to consumers, integrating motion capture and facial capture technology into Unity, and the future of smart assets that use AI and machine learning.

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A big theme that Unity Labs is working on is to make the assets smarter to eventually have more intent-based development that’s controlled with voice input. The smarter that the assets become, then the more streamlined and user-friendly the VR authoring tools can be. So the 3D assets are going to have more metadata integrated as well as eventually have more sophisticated integration of AI, deep learning and machine learning that enables intent-based content creation with a very simple and minimal UI.

Unity announced at the Vision Summit that they have 5 million registered developers, and they’re hoping to expand their content creation tools into the wider consumer market in 2017 with their Carte Blanche project. They’re planning on leveraging the Unity Asset store to allow an even larger demographic of VR users to create content without having to write any code.

Sylvio also talked about some of the new storytelling tools that they’re integrating that will allow people to create timeline sequences that are similar to film editing software. Enabling people to tell their stories with VR technology is something that has been motivating Sylvio for a long time, and so you can expect to see a lot more tools for capturing human performances in VR using webcams, Kinects, VR input devices, and other hardware input solutions yet to be announced.

It’s still an open question as to whether the metaverse will develop starting with a closed, walled garden with by apps or be more open and interconnected like the Internet. Sylvio’s suspicion is that it’ll likely eventually be an open and interconnected world that is more similar to the Internet than the fragmented game console market, but that either way Unity will have a key role to play. Based on the fact that around 90% of the consumer VR experiences that have been released so far use Unity, then they’re in a really great position to continue to expand their reach from the existing developers into the wider consumer market starting sometime in 2017.

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Michel Reilhac is a French filmmaker who wanted to explore intimacy and polyamory within an immersive 360 video called Viens! (Come!). His Sundance New Frontier piece featured 3 women and four men exploring sensual touch and sexual intimacy with each other. Michel wanted to explore representations of the naked body and the tantric philosophy of using sexual energies for spiritual transformation.

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It’s a very provocative 12-minute piece that explores the spectrum between voyeurism and shared intimacy, questions whether something sacred could be transmitted digitally, and pushes the boundaries of presence by experimenting with eye contact. I had a chance to talk with Michel about his intentions with the piece, and how he sees VR can be used to challenge cultural taboos around sharing sexual connections with more than one partner.

Viens! is unfortunately not available to view online anywhere, but I’d expect to see more first-person perspectives similar to this that have the intention to simulate a direct experience of witnessing alternative sexuality in practice.

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Adi Robertson is a senior reporter for The Verge, and she was at Sundance covering the latest developments of VR storytelling. I caught up with her to unpack some of her New Frontier highlights including narrative innovations, how empathy pieces incite anger in her, surprise orgies & insect vision, VR auteurs Felix & Paul, as well as her her top 5 Sundance experiences.

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I also talk to Adi about the epic oral history of VR that she co-wrote after the Oculus acquisition by Facebook, as well as her experiences of using mobile VR in public.

Adi is VR gamer at heart, and talks about some of her favorite VR demos like Bullet Train as an example of feeling exhilarated with pure emotion, and hopes to see more interactive worlds on par with Job Simulator.

Adi sees storytelling in interactive games is still of an open problem, and believes that VR has the potential to be an interesting interactive media that allows us to make art that is impossible without it. But that this may limit our imaginations to reaching the full potential of creating Matrix-like worlds that could change the way that we see reality. She’s looking forward to exploring virtual worlds, immersing herself in SOMA-like VR worlds, and making all of our wildest sci-fi dreams about VR come true.

You can follow Adi’s stories on the Verge, and be sure to check out her beginner guide to the HTC Vive Pre:

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Karl Krantz made a strategic move to California in order to start the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup in May of 2013. One year later, he organized the first consumer VR conference with SVVRCon that had 400 people and 35 companies. SVVRCon 2015 had 1400 people and 100 companies, and Karl is expecting it to double once again for SVVRCon 2016 on April 27-29 with a projected attendance of 3000 people and 200 companies.

I caught up with Karl to talk about VR startups, fostering the VR community, plans for virtual components for SVVRCon, content creation & imagination, and the phenomena of “time dilation.” Karl had an experience of playing a VR game for 12 straight hours without a break, but he only thought he was in VR for around 3 hours. He’s concerned about the addictive potential of VR, and that it’s a technology that’s going to force us to face our demons otherwise VR could be really disruptive to our lives.

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Palmer Luckey said in an interview at E3 2015 that his longest play session was between 12 to 16 hours. He wanted to beat a game in one sitting, and so it’s possible that he experienced some time dilation.

I’ll be exploring more experiences of time dilation in some more interviews that I did at Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit.

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Budget Cuts is a first-person stealth game that’s one of the more fun and engaging room-scale Vive experiences that I’ve played. You’re an aspiring spy trying to infiltrate a robot-protected building in order to approve your job application. Part of the intention behind this game was to push the limits of physical action that was incorporated into the game play with sneaking around, looking around corners, and peaking over obstacles. There’s also a very unique teleportation method where you can look through the lens of a Portal-like window that you can sweep around an area in order to preview your next teleportation destination. I had a chance to catch up with Neat Corporation’s Jenny Nordenborg and Joachim Holmér at Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit to talk about their design goals with Budget Cuts, some of their favorite stories and reactions to the game, and some of their future plans. Budget Cuts is expected to be finished sometime later this year.

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Here’s a trailer for Budget Cuts

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One of the most inspiring keynotes at Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit was by Alex McDowell on world building and storytelling. Alex was production designer for Minority Report, Fight Club, & Lawnmower Man, and so he’s been creating imaginal worlds for many years. Alex argues that the process of building worlds can inform and inspire stories, and that storytelling is coming from tribal oral traditions to singular viewpoints and now back to multiple perspectives with immersive experiences. The more multi-disciplinary VR and VR gets over time, then the more rich and profound the experiences are going to become. I had a chance to catch up with Alex after his keynote to unpack some of his innovative world building narrative work that he’s been doing at 5D GlobalStudio and with students at USC’s film school.

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Here’s a video of Alex’s keynote at the Unity AR/VR Vision Summit:

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XEODesign‘s Nicole Lazarro has been researching emotional reactions of gamers in VR to discover the unique properties of the medium. You can’t just port a 2D game into VR and expect it to work, and so she’s calling for design leadership in the field in order to create experiences that use the strengths of the medium. She’s come up with 36 different VR design benchmarks across 12 different categories, and she presented some of these at Unite Boston and the VR Intelligence Conference. In this interview, she tells me about some of her findings in audio design in VR, experiments with low-frequency haptics with a Subpac, VR controls, emotion in VR, as well as revisiting her theory on the four keys to fun.

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Here’s an extended version of Nicole’s talk from Unite Boston:

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Nancy Bennett is the chief content officer at Two-Bit Circus, which is a start-up specializing in creating immersive digital out of home entertainment experiences for the Indianapolis 500, NFL, NBA, and the Olympics. Nancy talks about some of the innovations they’ve engineered including technology to synchronize up to 200 people watching a VR experience at the same time on the Gear VR, which was used at Sundance as well as the World Economic Forum. She has some keen insights about the future of shared VR experiences as well as emerging narrative techniques. In the end, Nancy’s goal is to create vivid memories similar to the joy this girl felt in returning an NFL punt for a touchdown.

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Jesse Schell wrote the book “The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses,” and his company Schell Games produced I Expect You to Die. It’s one of the top-ranked VR games on Oculus Share, and it also won the Vision Inspire Award at Unity’s Vision Summit. Jesse says designing VR games in the 90s really informed a lot of what’s already in his game design book, and so the only additional design lens that he might add is the Lens of Presence. I caught up with Jesse at the Unity AR/VR Summit to hear more about the specific game design lenses that Schell Games used in the design of their three VR games including the escape room puzzler I Expect You to Die, room-scale 3D water pipes puzzler Water bears, and the comedy, choose-your-own-space adventure Orion Trail. I also talk to Jesse about storytelling in VR, maintaining presence, and predicting the future of VR.

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Here’s Jesse’s 40 predictions from VR Intelligence about VR and AR in 2016, 2020 and 2025

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