Tactical Haptics is working on bringing realistic haptic touch feedback to virtual reality applications. William Provancher was at SVVRCon 2015, and I had a chance to catch up with him again since our first interview at SVVRCon 2014. He had a lot of updates in terms of their technology updates, but also the wide range of different funding sources to get their venture going.

William comes out of the academic world of doing fundamental research into human perception in order to understand how sheer cues could communicate direction information. Tactical Haptics is one of the more innovative companies within the consumer VR community in finding research grants to continue their haptics research. He talks about a couple of grants including one from NASA in order to provide more haptic feedback when performing physical interactions with a tele-robot as well as a grant from the National Science Foundation to research what a minimum viable haptic product for video games might be.

We discuss the implications of the uncanny valley, the tradeoffs involved, and what happens when there’s a mismatch between the mental model in your mind and the expectations of a higher-fidelity VR experience that includes hand tracking. William talks about some of their experiments with finger tracking in combination with providing some haptic feedback.

William also talks about some of their latest hand tracking technologies that they’re using including a hybrid between inertial and optical tracking, and how some of the early discussions with OSVR integration and potential for Lighthouse integration. He says that the sweetspot for Reactive Grip controller is when it’s representing physical interactions where you’re holding onto a tool. Finally, he talks about some of their future plans including continuing to search for grant and investment opportunities, getting prototypes into the hands of developers and partners, and making the controllers fully wireless.

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John Dewar of Studio Transcendent talks about their prototype VR experience called Rapid Fire: A Brief History of Flight. It’s a first-person educational experience where you’re standing on a virtual airfield where you see everything from the Wright Brother’s airplane to a F-22 raptor fly by in a historical air show.

It’s a really compelling virtual field trip where you’re able to really get a sense of the relative scale of these different aircraft, but also experience things that would be way too dangerous to experience in real life — such as having an aircraft break the sound barrier just 100 yards away from you and few hundred feet off the ground. It’s a great example of realistic sound design to see the disconnect between the visual feedback being disconnected to what it actually looks and sounds like to break the sound barrier.

They developed the Rapid Fire demo in order to demonstrate some of their technical and storytelling capabilities, and John talks about some of the innovations that they had to come up with in order to get these animations working with the Unreal Engine 4. In particular, John highlights the material editor features of UE4, and how that helps him create some really compelling unlit textures, and some of the other tricks they used to get it to work.

John also worked on a Mobile Gear VR game jam game called Tiny Cannons. It’s a multi-player artillery game where you can shoot canon balls at each other. They used the Unreal Engine 4, which in hindsight may have been a little bit too bleeding edge considering that the Gear VR support only got released shortly after the game jam began. John believes that the UE4 support will eventually be on par with Unity for mobile VR development, and is really still in an experimental phase where they’re trying to figure out the hidden monsters of interactive multiplayer experiences with UE4 and the Gear VR.

Studio Transcendent is also the sponsor of the extremely comprehensive and awesome VR Digest newsletter, which is led by a former tech reporter named Ian Hamilton. Ian has also recently started writing for Upload VR, and is one of the more rigorous and exciting VR reporters to hit the scene recently. If you’re not already signed up for the VR digest, then I can’t recommend it highly enough since Ian and the rest of the Studio Transcendent team do a great job of covering all of the essential news that’s happening in the VR industry each week.

Finally, John hopes to carve out a niche of creating more non-interactive, story-driven and narrative experiences for VR. They’re looking for work-for-hire gigs, but also see that there’s a lot of opportunity to create a number of their own original VR content experiences. You can get in touch with them via their Studio Transcendent site.

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Innerspace VR is made up of a group of people who met in art school, and have been experimenting with VR since 2011. Jason Ochoa was at SVVRCon, and shared a little bit about what types of cinematic VR experiences they’re creating.

Innerspace VR was showing a trailer for the first episode of The Fifth Sleep, which is an interactive story within a story where man who is in a coma shows you his fantastical imaginal world. Jason says that it’s like a cross between Inception and Fantastic Voyage.

They’re planning on creating a series of episodes that have branching narratives, and they’re going to be gathering feedback as the story progresses in order to get more iterative feedback for their development process. They’re planning a total runtime of around 90 minutes, but with all of the branching narratives then it could be as much as three times that length.

Innerspace VR originally started developing with the Crytek CryEngine, but have since migrated over to using Unreal Engine 4. They were also originally fairly skeptical about developing for mobile due to their graphics requirements for doing interactive cinematic VR, but they’re planning on creating some pre-rendered sequences that are output as video files, but still perhaps have some interactive elements to them.

Innerspace VR has also been busy in creating a variety of different VR experiences. Beyond The Fifth Sleep, they’ve created a couple of Gear VR experiences including DMZ: Demilitarized Zone VR documentary & the Playhead game. They’re also creating a room-scale HTC Vive experience called Firebird where you perform as a ballerina in front of an audience. A couple of other VR experiences they’ve created include The Cave and The Forbidden City virtual tour.

Finally, Jason is looking forward to more immersive experiences that allow you to make decisions, but also has a high replay-ability factor that makes you want to experience everything that’s possible. He also sees a lot of potential of adding in a social component in going on different quests and accomplishing tasks with his friends.

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I had the chance to catch up with Nicole Relyea, the community manager & VR evangelist at Jaunt VR at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference. Jaunt has produced a number of 360-degree video experiences that they were showing on the Google Cardboard, Gear VR and Oculus Rift at SVVRCon, and Nicole talks about some of those experiences and which ones have been the most popular.

One interesting thing that Nicole mentioned is that the release of Google Cardboard actually changed their product timeline planning. They were not expecting a consumer release of VR until the end of 2015 or early 2016, but the proliferation of Google Cardboard as a minimum viable VR headset meant that there is actually a demand for video content that’s available to be served now.

Nicole also talks about the opening of Jaunt Studios and what that will mean for learning more about the language of VR and how to best tell stories within it. She also talks about some of the lessons they’ve learned about the language of VR storytelling, and some of the open problems and challenges that 360-degree video producers will be facing.

One big announcement that Janut had after SVVRCon and after this interview was their Neo digital lightfield camera. This is a radical technological leap from their previous approach of stitching together video spheres from an array of cameras. There isn’t a commercial digital lightfield camera designed specifically for VR that’s on the market yet, and Jaunt VR hopes that Neo will be the first one.

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Aaron Lemke of Unello Design talks about his VR development strategy where he’s prototyping and quickly iterating and refining a VR experience first for Google Cardboard, then updating it for Gear VR, and then increasing the graphical fidelity to create a release for the Oculus Rift.

The tagline for Unello Design is “Transcendence through Virtual Reality”, and so a lot of Aaron’s experiences are very relaxing and meditative. He’s probably most well known for Eden River, where you simply float down a river within VR and lean side to side in order to stear. He adds his own musical compositions, and then uses VR as a sort of music video and immersive experience to give people a feeling that goes beyond what a 2D medium can accomplish.

Some of his other experiences include Zen Zone, which uses the concept of mirror neurons to be able to watch a digital avatar in front of you and then focus on the highlighted areas of your body. Other experiences include Opera Nova, Nebuland, and Lunadroid 237. Aaron has also been exploring the possibility of using some of his experiences within a medical context for pain management.

Aaron also recently participated in the Austin Vive Jam, where he created a snake game that is kind of like operation for a room-scale maze where you’re trying to avoid touching virtual walls. Given that a Lighthouse tracked room is only 12 feet by 9 feet, then their design intention was to create an experience that turned people around and disoriented them so much that they forget where they’re located in the real physical room. By all accounts, they were able to achieve that.

Aaron also talks about some of the other highlights from the the Vive jam as well as from the SVVRCon.

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