Jon Brouchoud is an architect at Arch Virtual who has been putting architectural projects within Unity since before the Oculus Rift came out. He’s been using virtual reality for architectural clients for over a year now, and says that VR has the potential to change every dimension of the architecture industry ranging from the design, pre-visualization, engineering, inspection, and even construction of new buildings.

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Two of the most important components of architecture is scale and proportion, and Jon says that immersive technologies like virtual reality can start to accurately represent scale and proportion like no other 2D medium. Any VR developer knows that there’s a world of difference between designing a VR environment on a 2D screen versus actually experiencing your virtual world within VR. Jon says that it’s no different for architecture, and that they’re constantly surprised as to what types of intuitive insights they’ll have for improvements on an architectural design even when they’ve thought that they’ve nailed it.

One of the big early VR clients that Arch Virtual had was with the Sacramento Kings basketball team who wanted to see what their stadium would look like for the owners, players, as well as fans.

Jon talks about how Arch Virtual has been using the multiplayer features within Unity in order to start to do design reviews with inspectors, engineers, construction crew, and the clients. He says that it feels like he’s living in the future by being able to have different team members spot potential construction issues before anything has even started to be build. “It’s a lot easier to move pixels than it is to move bricks” says Jon about the power of being able to spot issues before anything has started to be built.

Arch Virtual is also in the process of creating a platform and a toolset to be able to create buildings within a VR experience. When Jon was doing the Toy Box at Oculus Connect, he mind was racing with all of the possibilities that these controllers will open up for architects being able to design buildings within VR.

Jon says that he’s never shown a client or fellow architect who wasn’t completely blown away by virtual reality, and that he feels like he’s got one of the best jobs in the world to introduce VR to the architectural industry. It reminded me of this VR architectural visualization reaction anecdote that was posted on /r/oculus by an architectural intern /u/nielzz:

The architect sat down, I explained the 360 controls and what the camera did. After he put it over his head he tried to look up using the controller, and asked me if that was possible. I told him to just look up with his head, after that it was silent for a good two minutes. He carefully walked around, completely silent. Normally this man would talk a lot, constantly and really hard. My colleagues looked up with a weird expression, “I’ve never seen him quiet”.

Then a soft “unbelievable” came out of his mouth. “I didn’t expect this, not at all”. In the period of 15 minutes, he occasionally broke the silence with: “How is this already possible? I get it now. I’m so happy I didn’t put more bridges in the main hall. I can now finally see how important it is that this wall is yellow. I’ve got to change that. Amazing that I can finally see it. This opens so much to me”. And some more reactions like that.

He finally put the Rift off his head, his eyes were in a total state of blown away. He put the Rift away and just sat there, saying nothing. Some colleagues were giggling and I asked how he liked it. It looked like my question was just some noise to him, and he replied, “Sorry, it’s just so much information that I have to process.” After 5 minutes of staring he shook his head and stood up. “I would never expect this. The building isn’t finished, and I’ve already been there. As an architect, this is cheating, my god.”

Jon says that this VR technology can indeed be very intimidating to architects who may be afraid of adopting this new technology. But Jon says that applications of VR to architectural visualization are such a no-brainer that he feels pretty confident that it’s going to revolutionize every aspect of the architecture industry from design to engineering to construction.

Jon also provided one of the more profound insights that I’ve heard about the ultimate potential future of virtual reality. As VR gets more and more to the point of being indistinguishable from reality, Jon imagines a time when there are multiple people gathering within a virtual building environment in VR and then there’s a moment when they realize that they don’t need to actually build the building. The VR version may be good enough, and so the ultimate potential of VR is that it could lead to a more sustainable future.

Here’s some more projects that Arch Virtual has worked on in the past year:

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Jesse Schell has been involved in virtual reality for over 20 years, and he’s also the author of the popular The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. He was able to combine his background in VR and game design at Schell Games to create the very popular I Expect You to Die, which has been the top-ranked experience at Oculus for the last three months. It also took home three Proto Awards including the top prize for Best Overall VR Experience, Best Gameplay and Best Interactive Design. I had a chance to catch up with Jesse at Oculus Connect to talk about some of VR design principles that has helped I Expect You to Die to do so well.

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One of the key takeaways that Jesse shared is that you have to design for presence first, and that you need to avoid anything that might break presence. He also went against Oculus’ own best practices and designed the experience to work primarily with a mouse interface. He talks about the importance of this decision in terms of feeling engaged in the world, and some of the counter-intuitive insights that they made including that the brain could make sense of looking behind you and pushing the mouse in the opposite direction in order to reach out. Despite the success of I Expect You to Die, Oculus still recommends developers to not rely upon a mouse interface.

One of the important aspects of designing a stand-up VR experience is to avoid proprioceptive disconnects that might prevent the user from believing the scene. Jesse said that a huge inspiration for him was Daniël Ernst’s Blocked In because sitting at a desk was such a familiar situation for so many people. That inspired him to create the setting for I Expect You to Die to be sitting in a car because it’s something that is so familiar to so many people.

When designing I Expect You to Die, there was some internal debate as to whether or not a good VR experience could be designed that didn’t have any motion. They wanted to feel like a superhero, and then realized that there are a lot of tropes about superheroes escaping from impossible situations, and they used these familiar situations to create an engaging and fun escape room type of scenario. Jesse also says that his team got a lot of inspiration from different real-life escape room games, and that Schell Games is actually in the process of creating an escape room that blends collaborative physical puzzles with a virtual world.

Jesse says that social VR is going to be the aspect of VR that is going to be the most compelling. His dream is to build a VR MMO, and he talks about some of his early work in VR in building out some of the technology to make that happen. He says that he’s made a detailed plan, but that it’d take about $10 million dollars worth of investment in order to make it happen so he’s not expecting it to happen unless he’s able to find someone to back it.

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Arthur van Hoff is the CTO of Jaunt, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect 2 to go over some of the most important specifications for their Jaunt ONE 360-degree camera,formerly known as “Neo.”

Arthur talks about how they’re using cloud-computing to interpolate between 24 different cameras using digital lightfield technology in order to eventually render out 8K worth of pixels for each eye at 60 frames per second. In this interview he explains exactly how they’re using lightfield technology, and how they eventually want to explore lightfield rendering.

Each of the cameras also have an accelerometer that could eventually be used for more advanced image stabilization, but right now they have their own set of algorithms to do image stabilization.

Arthur also talks about their ambisonic sound solution to render out sound fields in combination with HRTFs, as well as how they’re also using Dolby Atmos Audio Technology, which is more object-oriented.

He also talks about how the ultimate end-product for Jaunt is the content in collaboration with their partners, and he talks about what types of doors their latest round of $65 million dollars is going to open when it comes to securing talent and content producers to create immersive, 360-degree video content.

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Nicole Lazzaro is the founder and president of XEODesign, Inc., has twenty years expertise in Player Experience Design for mass-market entertainment products. She’s recently started developing and consulting on a number of different virtual reality projects, and has a lot of insights in terms of how to go beyond an interesting VR tech demo and the elements required to translate that into a full game.

She’s come up with a model called Four Keys to Fun, which she describes as the following:

1. Easy Fun (Novelty): Curiosity from exploration, role play, and creativity
2. Hard Fun (Challenge): Fiero, the epic win, from achieving a difficult goal
3. People Fun (Friendship): Amusement from competition and cooperation
4. Serious Fun (Meaning): Excitement from changing the player and their world

She talks about some of the VR experiences that she thinks have started to bridge that gap between a novel tech demo and experiences that start to incorporate those challenging and hard fun elements.

Nicole also recently gave a presentation about 5 Must Have VR Strategies for Better Games that provides more details. For more information, then be sure to check out her website for XEODesign, Inc.

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Nicolas Férey was presenting a number of papers at the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science at the IEEE VR. Nicolas was presenting different navigational paradigms for molecular biology tasks that were designed with the involvement of experts in structural biology.

Here’s the abstract of his presentation:

Visualization and exploration of molecular experimental results play a crucial role in structural biology. By visualizing and analyzing the 3 dimensional structure of a molecule possibly over time thanks to simulation tools scientists try to understand its functional role in the cell. Stereoscopic rendering features are historically used in structural biology and experts are thus quite familiar with virtual environment and 3D interaction. Since the dawn of virtual reality, immersive environments have been used to bring scientists into the heart of complex molecular scenes while adding an interactive dimension.

However, in immersive environments as well as in desktop contexts, many issues concerning navigation need to be addressed when exploring molecular content. Among these issues, lack of spatial awareness and the cybersickness phenomena encountered in navigation tasks are major obstacles to overcome to avoid any degradation of the experience and efficiency. It is interesting to highlight the fact that even if navigation is very frequently studied in virtual environments, most of the studies produce generic paradigms that are only applicable to realistic virtual scenes. These approaches do not explicitly take into account the content of the 3D scene and the task of the end user.

In this study, we present some new implementation of navigation paradigms based on tasks and contents, dedicated to molecular biology and designed with the involvement of experts in structural biology. These paradigms are independent of the interaction context and can be indifferently used in a daily desktop context or in immersive environments ranging from CAVEs to HMDs.

When asked about some of his favorite VR experiences, Nicolas talked about a really interesting CAVE experience of a fully-immersive molecular biology docking simulation that including haptic-feedback and sonification. Nicolas also had a really interesting answer to the ultimate potential of where this technology could go in talking about some of the implications for medical breakthroughs and scientific investigations for being able to do real-time simulations within an immersive environment.

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Florian Frieß is from the Visualization Research Center at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His presentation on using sonification to highlight events extracted from a molecular dynamics simulation. This talk on sonification was mentioned by a number of other participants in the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science at the IEEE VR conference.

Here’s the abstract from his presentation on sonification:

Scientific visualization is an application area for virtual reality environments like stereoscopic displays or CAVEs. Especially interactive molecular visualizations that show the complex three-dimensional structures found in structural biology are often investigated using such environments. In contrast to VR applications like simulators, molecular visualization typically lacks auditory output. Nevertheless, sonification can be used to convey information about the data. In our work, we use sound to highlight events extracted from a molecular dynamics simulation. This not only offloads information from the visual channel, but can also guide the attention of the analyst towards important phenomena even if they are occluded in the visualization. Sound also creates a higher level of immersion, which can be beneficial for educational purposes. In this paper, we detail our application that adds sonification to the visualization of molecular simulations.

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At the IEEE VR conference this year, there was the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science (VARMS). Molecular science is one branch of science where virtual reality has a lot of applications, and Logan Herche from the University of the Pacific talks about his presentation about “Visual Similarity Analysis of Atmospheric Nucleation Data using Virtual Reality.”

Here’s the abstract from his presentation:

Nucleation processes are fundamental in many technological fields. However, the lack of effective, collaborative tools has slowed discovery in these fields. This paper outlines our work to visualize nucleation data in two ways to assist researchers seeking to learn more about nucleation processes. We created a similarity network to allow researchers to study similarities between nucleation structures easily. In addition, we developed tools to allow researchers to visualize aggregate molecular structures. To facilitate collaborative work over distance with low cost, these visualizations are web based, interactive, and can run on commodity machines. Though this paper focuses on similarity of molecular structures, this research can be applied to any network or graph visualization.

Logan mentions some of the other presentations that were interesting to him, including using sonification in order to help better visualize occluded information.

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Himanshu Chaturvedi wanted to investigate the impact of the uncanny valley within training simulations that include interactions with virtual humans. The specific training scenario was a simulation for nurses to help them identify the signs of rapid deterioration. They investigated different avatar styles that ranged from realistic to stylized to black and white sketches. They did find that the stylized and sketches were more effective in demonstrating the signs of rapid deterioration.

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Johanna Latt was at IEEE VR talking about the impact of avatar anthropomorphism on the Virtual Body Ownership Illusion effect. She found that there was some uncanny effects when the avatar looked more like a human than a more stylized robot or block humanoid.

She talks about some of the bottom-up and top-down variables for the Virtual Body Ownership Illusion effect, and some of the techniques that are used in order to help induce the effect. The research literature indicates that the biggest factor for inducing the virtual body ownership illusion is to one-to-one limb tracking. One way to test whether or not the subject is identifying with the virtual avatar is to introduce a threat within the virtual environment. If the subject reacts to a threat, then it’s a good indicator that they’ve identified the virtual avatar as their own body.

She talks about some of her conclusions from her research, and some of the future research questions about how virtual embodiment can have long-term effects on identity and behavior.

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Indira Thouvenin teaches Virtual Reality at the University of Technology Compiegne. Her research focuses on informed interaction in virtual environments, and how knowledge representation and sensory motor knowledge are linked within these environments and can be used for training, designing, and collaboration within virtual worlds.

Here’s a bit more context about informed interaction:

Informed interaction is a concept connecting 3D interaction in virtual environment and knowledge representation. An ‘enactive’ approach to cognition or ‘enaction’ inspires our work with the concept of ‘action guided by perception’. This notion originates from the reflections of Francisco Varela, a neurobiologist who, following his work with Maturana in Chile, sought an alternative to computationalism and connectionism as approaches to understanding cognition. Varela’s attempts to introduce concepts from the biological cognitive sciences and his research in neuroscience lead to the concept of ‘embodied cognition’.

Our objective is to understand how human experience can be at once reinforced,capitalized and re-exploited in a virtual environment. We are particularly interested in activities centered on training, design and collaboration for which on one hand knowledge engineering provides a pertinent level of abstraction and on the other hand virtual reality offers modes of interaction with sensory feedback which are beneficial for the users involved (trainers, students, designers, remote workers, etc.). In this vast region of investigation, we have chosen to focus on a single area: the relationship between interaction and knowledge within informed interaction.

In this interview, Indira talks about a specific application of VR training by talking about how VR is used to train pilots of barges. VR provides a safe learning environment as well as the opportunity to learn through failure.

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