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.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

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.

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Greg Howes is the founder and CEO of the high-tech building company IDEAbuilder, and he’s on a mission to disrupt the $8.5 trillion annual building industry using immersive technologies to bridge design & fabrication directly with consumer demand. He uses computer-aided manufacturing and robotics to fabricate buildings, and he’s been investigating how AR, VR, and MR can help to revolutionize the process of communicating ideas around space. Greg predicts that the combination of computer-aided manufacturing with immersive technologies has the potential to more directly connect the supply and demand of manufacturing resulting in a trend towards more customization and personalization of all types of products and services.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

For a number of years now, Greg has been investigating how immersive technologies were going to change the construction business through his company IDEAbuilder. The building industry lives and breathes 3D data, and there are a lot of inefficient interoperability file issues that require designers to move back and forth between 2D and 3D data.

He’s hoping that as design and manufacturing processes increasing become more automated and digitized that there will be a more seamless way to go directly from an immersive VR experience directly to a computer-aided manufacturing process. He imagines that it’d be possible to get dynamic updates on the cost to manufacture an object based upon customizations that were made within an interactive 3D environment.

He says that the immersive technologies of AR, VR and MR all represent the most intuitive and efficient away to share design ideas about space. There are an infinite number of use cases, but building them out is going to be the real challenge. He expects that there will be a lot of demand-driven innovation from consumers once they’re able to directly participate within the design process.

In the end, he sees that these immersive technologies will enable faster, better, cheaper physical and digital products and services that are personalized and highly customized.

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Michael Aratow is a clinician and health care executive who founded VRecover, which is health care startup making physical rehabilitation exercises more engaging with VR. He says that rehab is like homework, but that sometimes up to 90% of people don’t actually do the exercises. VRecover is betting that gamifying rehab exercises within immersive VR environments will help accelerate the healing process while making it more fun to do.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Michael says that governments are looking for ways to cut costs and save money, and he sees that improving the rehab process is a simple and easy way to do that. Not only can surgery be avoided all together in some cases, but it can help accelerate the healing process with both rehabilitation and prehabilitation exercises.

VRecover is planning on developing a number of different VR experiences targeting the most popular rehab exercises starting with issues with the back, arms, and legs. For example, in order to increase the range of motion on the arms, they created a VR experiences where you close blast doors on a space ship. There’s an endless number of possibilities for creating experiences that encourage physical motion and have a therapeutic benefit, and they’ll be using a data-driven approach in deciding which rehab exercises that they’ll be initially targeting.

Michael has been involved with medicine in VR for the past 15 years, and he says that there’s over a decade’s worth of research showing how effect VR treatments are. There’s one study in particular that provided bogus range of motion feedback, and was able to show that people were able to have a wider range of motion that went beyond what they were able to do without VR.

VR rehab has the potential to start to gather more specific data on motion than was possible before. Not only could more accurate range of motion measurements be made over time, but it also could open up new metrics that weren’t possible to measure before such as velocity of movement. This could represent a trend towards personalizing rehab exercises beyond the standardized regiment that has been traditionally been given.

Recover is also going to target physical therapy offices directly rather than the general consumer market. The idea would be that the people would have to come into the office to do rehab exercises within a room-scale VR environment. Their initial prototype was using a Kinect to measure the range of motion, but they haven’t settled on a specific technology stack just yet. Perhaps they’ll eventually sell directly to the consumer market once the adoption of consumer VR grows past the point of existing game consoles, but they’re keeping their customer service demand lower by taking a B2B approach.

Finally, Michael sees that VR provides a new gateway into the mind, and that presence from immersive technologies enable a lot of new healing capabilities through enhancing cognition, controlling pain, and being able to manipulate perception for good.

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Trond Nilsen studied with Tom Furness at The University of Washington and currently works with him the RATLab LLC. He has a Ph.D. from University of Washington, which focused on building educational games that teach human anatomy. He moderated a couple of panels at the Seattle Virtual Reality Expo focusing on education in VR as well as medicine in VR. He talks about the experts featured on each panel as well as the some of the most memorable insights. There is a lot of huge potential for education and VR, as well as a lot of difficult challenges for navigating the privacy and regulatory controls that healthcare VR applications will be facing. Trond also talks about the VR Hackathons, the Virtual World Society, and his passion of world building in VR.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Damon Hernandez has been an interactive 3D developer for the past 15 years, and he’s interested in developing VR applications that solve real world problems within the construction industry. He’s interested in using the web as a distribution platform using open standards because he sees that this will be the most sustainable and robust distribution platform in the long-run. I had a chance to catch up with Damon at the Seattle VR Expo where he gave me a quick tour through the open standards landscape for VR.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Damon is interested in VR because he sees it as a really powerful communications platform. He cites the saying, “I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember; I do and I understand.” He sees that VR helps you understand problems within their full context.

Damon has been working at a construction firm named IDEAbuilder for the past 8 years where he’s been able to explore the latest open standards and technologies in delivering 3D content. Rather than looking to the coolest game engine platform, he’s more interested in going with a non-proprietary and completely royalty-free that’s going to both be robust and stand the test of time.

The game engines were also not designed to account for ISO standards. He says, “When you start to get involved with the reality part of virtual reality, you bring in all of the legal aspects of the real world into that.” If your video game goes down, then it may inconvenience someone. However, if you give someone the wrong diagnosis, then it could have fatal consequences where you become liable to pay damages.

Damon believes that the web will continue to serve as a robust distribution platform and that open standards will provide the stability and consistency in the long-run. Some of the open standards for VR and 3D content over the web include VRML, X3D, COLLADA interchange format for geometry. There’s also x3dom for integrated 3D content into web pages, as well as the glTF specification from the Khronos Group that provides compression and efficient transmission of 3D content.

Damon is continuing to develop his content pipeline and delivery over the web as the ecosystem evolves. Even though the web hasn’t fully matured as a distribution mechanism yet, he’s betting that the open web and open standards will eventually provide a robust and solid foundation for VR to be able to solve many real-world problems.

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Matt Henderson is a visual artist from Portland, OR who has been creating art installations of abstracted Christmas nativity scenes for the past six years. Matt has been inspired to use virtual reality in order to document and preserve his “NTVTY” installations, and he talks about some of the unique hardware he’s used. He’s also started the weekly Portland Immersive Media Group gatherings, and subsequently received a grant to buy additional VR hardware. Matt shares his journey into virtual reality starting with being an avid listener to the Voices of VR podcast, and eventually into creating a collective of artists interested in pushing the limits of VR experiences that are possible.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

In my interview with Pete Moss of Unity, he told me that he’s the most interested in what pure artists do with virtual reality because they are the best-placed people who have been looking at new perspectives on existence. Pete says that VR provides new pathways into the brain and just as renaissance scientists were also artists, he see’s VR as a that new medium that is similar to how perspective painting helped to cultivate new modes of thinking.

Hearing this from Pete, I immediately thought of Matt who started integrating VR into his “NTVTY” scenes after getting into VR through listening to the Voices of VR podcast. Matt would listen to episodes while at work, and got inspired to buy a couple of DK2s for his alien baptism experience that is facilitated by a gravity-inversion table. This year, he’s recreated the previous 5 years worth of installations within a room-scale Vive experience.

After attending the monthly Portland Virtual Reality meetups, Matt decided to hold more frequent VR hacking sessions at his ex-church home in Portland that’s decorated to look like the Holodeck. He was able to win a grant in order to buy motion capture suits, 3D scanners, VR headsets, and a gaming PC in order to create a series of holistic healing experiences through pop-up installations under the umbrella of VR Spa. One idea that they’ll be working on includes “cute overload therapy” where you would be interacting with a number of different cute creatures in VR while receiving haptic feedback by an attendant who’s wearing furry gloves.

VR art installations provide the opportunity to push the limits beyond what a more scalable consumer VR experience might be able to provide. But since there’s not a lot of pressure to produce a replicable consumer experience, then there’s more opportunities to do one-off and non-sustainable experiments. I’d expect that we’ll see marketing companies and ad agencies start to adopt these types of high-end art installation and nomadic experiences that would not be feasible within someone’s home.

Matt is looking forward to experimenting with the latest VR technology from an artist’s perspective, and sharing a variety of different experiments as part of the Portland Immersive Media Group’s VR Spa project. For more larger concepts and predictions for what Matt wants to explore, then be sure to check out his audio essay titled “Checking in with my social network: Observations and predictions of virtualization.”

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

The Virtual Reality Company is a 360-degree video production studio in Hollywood that has Steven Spielberg as an advisor. I had a chance to catch up with Joshua Watson, Emily Cooper, & Chris Edwards at Oculus Connect 2 to get a sneak peak of some of their premiere storytelling experiences that they’re working on. They haven’t announced any specific projects yet, but they’re working on a pilot for a VR show as well as an immersive documentary. Some of the VRC founders come from a pre-visualization studio called Third Floor, Inc, and they created a immersive traveling attraction for The Marvel Experience which the VRC says these types of theme park attractions have a lot of similarities to creating a VR experience. The VRC seems to be really well positioned to provide a bridge between video game and film franchises and it’s worth keeping an eye on them as they’ve got a lot of connections within the industry.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

The Virtual Reality Girls group was started as a Instagram and Twitter accounts by Paisley Smith, Ashley Pinnick, & Julie Young. I had a chance to catch up with Paisley and Ashley at Oculus Connect 2 about their efforts to celebrate and promote women working in the field of Virtual Reality. They each talk about their projects in VR, and how they see VRG is helping to grow community of women who are embracing the medium of virtual reality.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Mike Gallagher is the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, which is the political arm of the interactive industry. The ESA established the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in 1994 in response to criticism of violent content found in video games. They also won a supreme court case that established video games as a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. Mike suspects that VR will face a lot of political pressures similar to what video games have faced in the past.

The ESA is preparing to defend VR content creators as a part of their mission to protect the frontiers of the interactive industry. He sees VR as just a part of a larger trajectory of media ranging from cave paintings to books to movies to video games that has been moving towards more immersion and realism. Now that the ESA has established video games as a protected First Amendment right, then the burden of proof is going to be on the counter argument as to why VR should be treated any differently than any other media.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.

Tim Sweeney is the founder of Epic Games, which has been collaborating with Oculus over the last two years creating a number of different tech demos with their Unreal Engine 4. I had a chance to catch up with Tim at the VRX conference, and ask him about the evolution of VR at Epic, cinematic VR, whether Epic is working on a full VR game, and where he sees the biggest potential of VR is going to be.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Tim says that after John Carmack and Palmer Luckey were showing some of the early demos of the Oculus Rift, that people at Epic Games started to investigate VR. He had a conversation with Michael Abrash, and then ran some numbers to see that there was a confluence of both the hardware being ready in combination with some design inspiration that pointed towards the time being now for VR to really take off.

Whenever Oculus has revealed either a new iteration of their head-mounted display or touch controllers, Epic has been there with a new tech demo that pushes the limits of what’s possible within VR. The most recent tech demo for the Oculus Touch controllers was the Bullet Train demo, which explores using motion controllers to have gun fights with some teleportation locomotion techniques.

When asked whether Epic was working on a release title for the Oculus Rift, Tim said that he is not able to reveal any secret projects. However, he said that if you look at the history of Epic when it comes to new technologies that they have a history of doing a number of different experimental tech demos that usually lead to a full game of some sorts. So it seems very likely that Epic is indeed working towards a full game based upon some of the Bullet Train game play dynamics.

Tim said that Epic has been experimenting with different gameplay modes, and that they’ve broken it down into three major categories.

• first-person and full immersion that feels as if you’re there, but it’s also the most constraining due to motion sickness issues.
• Tabletop experiences like Couch Knights where they’ve only scratched the surface with input control and what’s may be possible with finger tracking with force feedback
• an experience where you’re surrounded by a “badass 270-degree monitor” that can deal with rapid motion.

The last gameplay mode is the one that’s the most vague and on where there hasn’t been a lot of public demos of it yet. Tim said that it’s feels more immersive than a screen, but perhaps is more tolerant to motion than the full first-person perspective type of immersion. Tim believes that VR will have a much larger dynamic range of experiences than the traditional video game market and screen-based media has so far supported.

The sequencer within Unreal Engine has also picked up a lot of traction within the cinematic VR community as Oculus Story Studio has adopted it as their primary toolset and have started to extend that toolset. One of the more incredible cinematic tech demos was when WETA Digital did the Smaug demo at GDC.

Finally, Tim sees that any chicken-and-egg dilemma that VR has faced so far has been due to a lack of clear business opportunity, and that we’re well past that point now. He’s looking forward to how the multi-user games will blend aspects of social media and move towards the visions of the metaverse. He cautions that a lot of sci-fi visions of the metaverse were created before either the world wide web or the gaming industry had fully taken off. He foresees that the metaverse will look a lot more like the current Balkanized gaming platform ecosystem than any unified Internet. VR will eventually be indistinguishable from reality, and that now is a great time to be a part of the industry.

Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.