Here’s my interview about the WebXR experience called Escape Artist with James C. Kane (who at the time was Technical Director at Paradowski), Andy Wise (Vice President of Creative Technology at Paradowski), & Ayushman Johri (3D Artist at Paradowski) that was conducted via Zoom on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at AWE past and present, today's interview is with a remote interview that I did around a WebXR experience called Escape Artist that I did back in March of 2024. So this was after the Polly's Award. There was like a clean sweep of all these different awards that the Escape Artist had won. paradoski creative did a whole poster exhibition in virtual reality on mizola hubs and so we're talking around like their journey into working with social vr as a part of their creative agency practice working with a lot of brands and so they had this extra time to start to prototype and innovate and explore the potentials of immersive storytelling and experiential advertising james c kane has actually moved on and is now in another new position where he's like more of an independent contractor. He's got a new game that he was promoting at Augmented World Expo this year, 2025. And so this is one of the conversations that I recorded with James a little while ago. And I was kind of waiting to do a long series of different things in WebXR. And for one reason or another, that didn't come to pass yet. And so I still have a number of other conversations around WebXR that I want to dig into. But I wanted to go from the escape artist into James C. Cain's latest piece, Into Your World, which we'll be digging into the next episode. But In this conversation, we're just talking around the process of creating the escape artist, which is like an escape room type of game in WebXR and using the Wonderland engine. And so it's really quite high fidelity and polished and kind of above what you would expect for WebXR in terms of the capabilities. And so really pushing the edge of what's possible there. And at the time that this was recorded, it was right after the Apple Vision Pro had just come out. It was kind of a surprise to everybody of how soon the Apple Vision Pro was gonna come out. I think they were planning on having more time to develop for it. So we went ahead and did this interview ahead of them finalizing and finishing all the different kind of implementations on the Apple Vision Pro. I think they've since gone back and done some more work on fleshing that out. But when the Apple Vision Pro first came out, their piece was pushing to the edge of what was working properly. But it speaks to this vision and dream of cross-platform development to be able to write it once and have it deployed everywhere. That's not quite happening yet, but it's working towards that vision and that dream. And I think that what's happening with Vibrous, which we'll be diving into a little bit more in the next episode, we'll be kind of unpacking more of what's happening with this vision of using all the open web technologies to explore the potentials of immersive stories, entertainment, and experience. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with James, Andy, and AJ happened on Tuesday, March 12th, 2024, and it happened virtually over Zoom. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:03.800] James C. Kane: My name is James Kane. I'm technical director at Paradosky. I was also audio and sound design director on Escape Artist. But I oversee our development and 3D technical art teams and try to work with my main creative collaborator here, Andy, who's our creative director and VP at Paradosky. And maybe he can tell you a little bit about his role.
[00:03:27.818] Andy Wise: I'm Andy Wise. As James said, I'm our vice president of creative technology at Paradowsky, and I served as the director and creative lead on The Escape Artist. I've really enjoyed working with James and AJ on this project and excited to let them talk more about it. But I've worked at Veradosky for over a decade. The last 13 years have been in both the creative and technology fields for as long as I can remember. And I think this project that we're gonna talk about has been a pretty good manifestation of those things for me.
[00:04:02.216] Ayushman Johri: Yeah, and I am Aishman Johri. You can call me AJ. I'm a 3D artist at Paradowsky Creative, and I was the principal environment and look-dev artist on the Escape Artist. I've been working at Paradowsky for three years now, and yeah, I've been making art for various VR, AR, and WebXR experiences at the company.
[00:04:23.602] Kent Bye: Right, and maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:04:29.640] James C. Kane: I have a background in journalism and communications, actually. I graduated right around 2008, which was sort of a bad time in the news industry and cycled through a lot of freelance jobs around then, landing more in the communications and PR and marketing agency side. And that's where I saw that my technical skills were really the most valuable thing I was bringing to the table. And the job market was just so different, too, on the development side. So maybe like eight or nine years ago, I made the shift to a full-time developer. Very quickly got interested in 3D. I'd always been kind of a gamer and very interested in early stages of VR. This was right around when... Oculus kind of consumer version one was coming out is when I was able to really get a hold of the technology and start developing on it and experimenting and stuff and just haven't really put it down. And I think our agency is based out of St. Louis, and I think I developed like a reputation locally and was doing developer talks and such about 3D web tech and Unity and things like that. And I connected with Andy here in about 2018 or so, and he had been kind of seeing the growth of this technology and along with our president gus they had started investing more and more in research projects and had even brought on to interns who have gone on to be great full-time employees and both worked on the escape artists in fact and Yeah, so we've grown the team since then. So it's been about five years for me. And gosh, we cover the whole gamut of AR VR tech in that time, you know, we're early adopters of Mozilla hubs and did the apart poster show just a few months after that launched. We've been very involved in like eighth wall projects, certainly here and there, such as for Adidas and WNBA legend, Candice Parker. We're doing Roblox games for, you know, we're launching social filters for the likes of Sesame street and others. So really running the whole gamut, but we also have a very like soft spot in our hearts for the web and web technology overall. And so that has led us in the last few years, especially to invest in WebEx, our tech and do especially original content because we're a marketing and branding agency. So we are often day-to-day as client work and achieving brand objectives and things like that. But we are able to dedicate some time to original work and original stories and content. And so that started a couple of years ago with, it's called Above Par Adowski Mini Golf. And that was the WebEx Horror Awards Game of the Year for 2022. Started as kind of a solo project, but brought it to the team, brought it specifically to Andy and AJ here, who really built the world out and did a lot of great environmental storytelling, in addition to what we felt was like approaching native quality gameplay on the web. So... Well, and that kind of leads us right up to Escape Artist. We decided to double down and really invest in storytelling and interaction design and really strong art direction and visual style. So that's where these two definitely come into play. And that's, yeah, that's kind of my past and recent history, you know, I'll hand it off from there.
[00:07:45.822] Andy Wise: That's a tough story to follow. My background and my way into VR really, I guess, starts with design and video games. So my experience with video games dates back to at least 3D video games, dates back to Nintendo 64. I think that was my introduction to what was possible in that space. And... around that same time a little after that playing games like quake on a pc and figuring out that you could tear it apart and modify the experience and suddenly have something that was your own creation or there felt that way so i took it for my i studied graphic design as my undergrad in college and You have to choose a field, right? But I did manage to continue studying technology along the way, which let me take a job doing creative direction and design and development all at the same time. At the time at my first job, I was doing some, I was doing things like annual report development for corporations. which were super boring at the time, and most of which were boring. But it was this little creative outlet for me, so I was pushing as hard as I could to make those as exciting as they could be. It introduced me to things like Flash and ActionScript. And there was a library at the time that I was developing with called Paper Vision 3D, which was a way to develop in 3D using Flash. and i think it was kind of the underpinnings of a lot of modern day 3d work on the web for people of a certain age anyway fast forward a little bit and we hired a couple of interns at paradowski who were studying game design and they were introducing me to things that i hadn't seen before and ways of working that i hadn't considered we started digging into right for that into things like using Google Cardboard as a really accessible way to take advantage of VR experiences and make them available to people. And that sort of built upon itself and snowballed at Paradowsky anyway into the team that we have today and the types of experiences like the escape artists that we're now doing. Nice.
[00:09:57.216] Ayushman Johri: Yeah, I can kind of speak about some of my background stuff. I would say for me, I think my exposure to digital art, I had dabbled with 2D animation like much younger, back when Adobe Flash used to be Macromedia Flash. And my first kind of experience working with 3D software was during middle school. I tried Google SketchUp for the first time, I remember. But then like a little fast forward, I kind of probably got started working with 3D software in high school and undergrad. I did my undergrad in information technology, so we didn't have a particular 3D course, but I was very interested in just the medium. So I would make a lot of self projects just like for fun. And then I realized that, you know, It was something I was deeply interested in. So my capstone project was like my first augmented reality experience that I made. And I was like, okay, this feels like really fun and I want to pursue it further. So I ended up doing my master's at entertainment technology from Carnegie Mellon. And that was a very interesting experience for me because the first semester itself was kind of like, we had a bunch of game jam like programs. So we would make games for very non-traditional platforms that I had never even tried. And it was like a great learning process. Not just in like understanding how to make 3D art for multi-platform content, but also like the game design aspects of those platforms as well. A lot of those platforms don't even exist anymore, but it was always like fun to try non-traditional platforms. So yeah. And then after graduating in 2021, I've been working at Paradosi Creative since then for three years now. That's my background.
[00:11:37.657] Kent Bye: Great, and yeah, so there's lots of different projects that you've been working on over the years. And before we start to dive into those, I wanted to get a little bit of a reflection on some of the trends that you're seeing on the web, because I know that there's WebXR that's out there. We haven't seen Safari launch it officially. There's like some flags that enable it in Apple Vision Pro, but it feels like there's been a lot of excitement and energy around libraries like 3.js and Babylon.js and also React 3 Fiber. And there's other game engines that you're using, like the Wonderland game engine to be able to do some of your immersive experiences. There's also been Mozilla Hubs that you've done some more social VR experiences and to be able to have gatherings and events in the context of the pandemic. And so I'd love to hear some reflections on how the history of web development we've started with translating a newspaper into a website. How do you start to make it so it's native to a website and not just like a newspaper? And then we have native apps, and then eventually we had responsive design to be able to respond to that. And it seems like as you introduce each of these new mediums, you need to just explore whatever those affordances of that medium are. So then there was responsive design and then there's mobile first design. And now as we move into 3D, it seems like that the first good thing to do is just kind of surrender all of our ideas about what experiences might look like before and just try to develop things that are native to that medium and then start to think about, okay, how does the entire ecosystem of websites and branding start to fit into this? So let me hear some initial high-level reflections on how this kind of fits into the overall shifts that you're seeing in the context of brands and the type of marketing work that you're doing and how some of these experimentations that you're doing are starting to fit into the type of clientele work that you're doing.
[00:13:31.034] James C. Kane: I think you mentioned all the platforms. I think that's our team's great strength is we're pretty agnostic about what platforms to use. And it's really more about providing a great user experience and a great design. And that's the through line on any of our work on any platform. You know, that said, yeah, we've just seen it change a lot over the last few years. I think there was that pandemic driven boom for like remote events that got pretty hot for a while there and drove a lot of our business and work. That's definitely slowed down. And I think, you know, you can see that in Mozilla divesting from hubs and PARF and other probably market signals out there, too. But yeah. No, you're right. There has been definitely a market increase. You see the browser as one of the most popular apps on Quest. Zuckerberg's saying that even this week. He's putting it in the top five, I think. And it's obviously a huge part of Apple Vision Pro's productivity-driven offering, being able to have the web at your fingertips. So really... So that's been great to see. And yeah, we've been talking about the cross-platform compatibility promise of WebXR for years now. And to see it kind of actually come into fruition and see the two major hardware makers in this space now competing with products on the market is extremely exciting. They're taking different approaches, obviously, and Meta's serving more of a gaming market. Apple is serving more of an Apple ecosystem and productivity market. uh you know and it's difficult i think there's room for both companies to do well for the foreseeable future and i don't think either of them are going anywhere and yeah it's interesting to try to thread that needle and do something that works well on both platforms given you know apple stuff is largely like seated experiences not moving quickly things like that so Yeah, that's, like I said, the through line through all of it is great user experience and design. So maybe, Andy, you have some thoughts on that side of things.
[00:15:29.312] Andy Wise: No, I think that's right. I mean, I see some of the longer trends that you alluded to, Kent, when you're talking about things like responsive design and the challenges that the web introduced early on. Back in the 2010s, I guess it would have been when mobile and responsive design were the topics of discussion and the biggest challenges we were facing in interactive design. Things seemed a little dicey for a while, but now I think we can comfortably say a lot of those design paradigms and patterns have matured. But we face a really similar challenge now. I think what's interesting is that the web was the dominant platform when we were solving those design problems. So there was kind of a single channel to funnel our design energy into. Now, the platforms are so diverse that the design solutions are less standardized. So it's only now, it seems, that we're seeing solutions like the React 3 Fiber UI kit that was introduced recently that standardizes and approach to UI in a 3D context for VR experiences. What a gift that is. Those are things that I know our team would have loved to have had two or three years ago when we were tackling really complicated things in VR for clients like Verizon, and we had to do it from scratch. So I'm personally very excited to see the trend toward a little bit of standardization in that form and a little bit of consensus on what are the design patterns in this space. Because selfishly for our team, it makes us more efficient. We can tackle the experience itself rather than the nuances of UI or the nuances of specific interactions. AJ, I'm going to pass to you though. I bet you've got a perspective to offer too.
[00:17:17.185] Ayushman Johri: Yeah, I think like I was thinking when the question from more like a technical and technical art perspective, I think as we're all discussing about the newer platforms and then the new engines that are supporting such experiences like WebXR experiences. I think what we're seeing is that WebXR in its entirety is still very much in its infancy, even though a lot of work has been done by teams such as ours. But I remember when we were working on the Apart project, there was one kind of three-month time period that we did when we were kind of doing some remastering and refreshing of that experience to make it have the best fidelity it can from an art perspective. And what we realized was that we're reaching a point where most 3D projects on the web that we were seeing were kind of like normalizing the compromisation of quality significantly for performance. And that's kind of where we started thinking about how to kind of push that barrier further. Like, you know, the stuff that we were doing in-house and the plugins and add-ons we were using, we were able to create a lot better looking quality work, which was kind of unprecedented at that time, even in 2021. And, you know, we actually ended up making a lot of the tools that we were using in-house as publicly available tools, open source tools. One of them was Zen Compress. That is something that was very significantly used in a lot of our projects to do a lot of great image compression for the web. And years later, I think, I believe it was later in 2022, that became like a part of a lot of 3D software. Like Blender started doing their own GLTF image compression like internally. So we were kind of like, we saw how that was evolving as we were making projects on WebXR. So I think there's still like a lot of ways to go in terms of exploring all the things we can and push the barrier as we get better hardware.
[00:19:17.500] Andy Wise: I think, AJ, that's right. I have to jump back in on that. When you said that there was a time when web-based virtual experiences were equated with low fidelity, I think that was a big breaking point for us as an agency. We're like, well, no, it doesn't have to be. you don't have to choose fidelity or the experience you can have both of them and i think we've been able to pay that off on a number of projects but one of the things that wonderland engine allowed us to do on the escape artist was to do just that do something that was both performant and beautiful and i think our team was really excited about that and that's part of what has led to the success of the project
[00:19:54.071] Kent Bye: Right. And maybe we could set a bit of the broadest context for the escape artist and what was leading up to it, you know, and what were some of the goals that you were trying to do internally, because obviously as a design agency and working with brands and marketing that you have a number of different clients. And so in some ways, this is your own creative R&D project to learn the technology, to be innovative, to push the cutting edge for what's even possible. And so it was rewarded the previous weekend by the Poly's WebXR Awards, where it won the Game of the Year, Entertainment Experience of the Year, and the Overall Experience of the Year. So a clean sweep of all the different categories that you were nominated in a lot of the big categories just in general, in terms of what the Polly's community is recognizing. So clearly the top best experience that was created within the last year in WebXR. So let me hear a little bit more of the context for, you know, how this project came about and what you were trying to achieve with it.
[00:20:45.738] James C. Kane: Sure. Yeah. Appreciate you calling that out. That was a, we're very proud of that. And that was a great event they're putting on year after year and good recognition of, of a great community and the WebXR world. So yeah. Like I said, we had also done well at the WebXR Awards the previous year with our mini golf game above Pardowski. And that was really created just shamelessly as a big ad for the agency. We recognize that like, okay, Meta has this browser, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are opening this browser and seeing the browser new tab page every day. they are featuring community content on that page. But the quality, especially two or three years ago, was not all that high for the audience that was there. So we felt that with just a fair amount of effort, we could get quite a bit of reach on whatever we decided to create. And mini golf, you know, it's a... it actually happened serendipitously. We're having a mini, a live mini golf event at Peridowski and we designed eight physical holes and I created one VR hole. And that was an originally a 40 hour prototype. And it was just like, okay, yeah, with very little time, let's see how far I can get with this idea. It did function, you know, it worked at function. It was kind of garbage performance wise and UX wise, but it worked. And you saw enough, uh, promise in that first pass to say like you know with just a little bit more work we could actually get this to fairly good production grade and obviously like games like golf plus and walk about set the bar high in this field but they also give you a pretty good indication of like true north for ux in that kind of game and so it's just a good game because like everyone knows how to play mini golf you don't have to do a lot of instruction there and it's just one swing teleport that's pretty much all you have to do so that worked well and yeah that was a success especially again like these guys contributed greatly to the world building and environmentally storytelling that made that like actually an enjoyable world to spend time in But, you know, it is also a little like low hanging fruit there. Like, you know, we were doing something that had been done before very well. And we wanted to for our next project, we saw the potential and we're happy with the reach we were getting from mini golf, but we wanted to do something that really let our creative team shine in terms of. interaction design and narrative design and audio design even and great visual art and art direction too so we want to adopt the bar in all those categories and i think yeah we were able to do that maybe maybe andy you can you can talk about it from well let me let me add one more thing After the Game of the Year win in 2022, we were approached by Wonderland Engine. The team there is really bright, and they've been growing their community and developing their engine for years, and we liked what we saw. And like I said, we're agnostic about framework. Mini Golf was just an A-frame game, but we wanted to try something new, and we liked what we saw there performance-wise. We love their texture atlisting software, comparing it to like Mozilla Hubs, where you add like 128 megabyte memory limit. Wonderland has this texture atlisting technology that's used in game engines. And anyway, I'm getting a little in the weeds there, but Wonderland approached us, their CEO, Jonathan, and asked if we wanted to make a game with them. And they had a few genres they were thinking of. We also had a few genres we were targeting for our next object. And Escape Room was on both lists. As soon as we, well, I'll let Andy take it from here then. But yeah, it basically resulted as us wanting to do a Wonderland project and kind of linking up with that team and deciding to go from there.
[00:24:31.872] Andy Wise: Yeah, I think that's a good background. Every year, a portion of the work that we do is just pure investment and research and development work at Peridowski. So this was, for us, kind of an obvious target for where we might invest. How do we create something that can be just a beautiful showpiece and showcase what's possible in this medium? And as a benefit to Wonderland, how do we showcase what can be done on that platform? The conversations we tend to have between creative and technology teams at Peridotsky go something like this. Can we show this amazing, beautiful, high fidelity experience in here? Can we do this? The answer is almost always no. And then we get into how we can make it happen. With a platform like Wonderland, I think when they approached us, they saw what we did with the mini golf experience. They appreciated and understood that we took what was a little bit of a clever approach in that we use a lot of polygons in the space, but we applied colors to those rather than texturing everything in the space. And as an example, they said, well, you realize we could just do millions and millions of polygons in this experience with that same approach if you use Wonderland's engine. And of course, our creative team is lighting up about that prospect. Oh, you mean we could cram even more into the experience? So it sounded like a great platform for us to try just the sheer volume of content that we could cram into the experience. We, I think, have a maybe larger than average group of people at Paradovsky who enjoy escape rooms and are just interested in that mechanic and that challenge. And of course, a virtual escape room is like a great canvas for us to play with, both in terms of interaction, but also narrative and sound design, as James called out earlier.
[00:26:24.813] Ayushman Johri: I just wanted to add on top of that, like, I think when we had just finished making Above Karadowski and we were kind of talking with Wonderland Engine to make our next project, I think from a technical art perspective, we were kind of thinking how to make something visually in this platform, which is kind of not seen before. I think that's kind of what we did with Above Karadowski as well. Andy hinted on the vertex color pipeline. At Paradosky, we've been making WebXR experiences for long enough time at this point. And I think we've had an optimization first mentality for anything that we've been working on. And that pipeline kind of branches differently for different platforms. We have a bunch of pure creatives who kind of think outside of the platform. So the idea is to put their vision and cram it into the platform at hand. And with Escape Artist, we actually, I think that is some of our most extensive optimization work we've ever done. We were basically hitting memory limits and bandwidth limits on all aspects, trying to fit as many textures, as many polygons as we can while making sure it was performant. And I think the goal outside just the visual design goal from the overall design, I think the goal was to make something that maybe uses techniques that have been used like you know in the past but not in this medium like we've kind of created this stack of steps that we use in our like visual art pipeline which like individual steps we have seen before andy mentioned quake early on like that's one of the first experiences with light map baking but the way we're doing it at like that high fidelity on a device which is like much weaker than traditional devices such as a desktop computer i think we were able to create pipelines and leverage off of those because we're confident in the pipeline now we can just focus on making the best thing we can with it
[00:28:19.212] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so the escape artist is a really nice blend of both world design, environmental design, but also the escape room mechanics and interactive game components, the puzzle components, but also there's a whole narrative that's happening as well that is helping to set a specific moment in time and a character that you're following. And so maybe you could talk about that iterative process of where you begin with either the world design or with the narrative and with the mechanics and how those are really playing off of each other in this experience.
[00:28:49.359] Andy Wise: I can speak to that a little bit. So we, our team always starts with just sort of a blue sky thinking creative process where you, anybody can contribute ideas, how this can come about. And early on, one of our creatives, Ryan Sondreger, came up with sort of this concept of an artist canvas being how we bring this escape room to life. and we had a lot of ideas for how that could come about interactively but where we landed was that we would set the stage for something that was transformative as you're experiencing it but in reverse a little bit so you start with something that is a little bit more fully formed as an artist's vision go to something that is more of a trough of disillusionment that all creatives experience and then emerge somehow successfully to something that's more cohesive. And we wanted that sort of artist struggle that's inherent in just about every type of creative to be brought to life visually, both in the environment and also in the tension that you feel in the voiceover from the narrator. We intentionally decided not to have a figure in the space representing the narrator or any kind of NPC that you would interact with. We tried that, and it was spooky and eerie and creepy, and so we just turned it into a pure voiceover, which I think was a really... ended up being a really great move for the experience overall. It turned it into something that was less horror genre and more intimate just as an experience. It's just you and this person that you're not talking to, but is talking to you to sort out their struggle. So it goes from broad concept Very quickly, how do we pay this off visually? Because we know we'll be wrestling with that a lot. And then trying to work out what the narrative is. As we mentioned, one of the big goals here was to draw out a really detailed narrative. And so not just superficial gameplay, but have a story that's unfolding. So one of the tricks that we employed was that the voice you hear in the experience is an AI-created voice. So it sounds very real. It sounds like a real person. But we sourced some mid-century interviews that were public domain pieces, a lot of them, actually. So it's not just one person's voice being copied, but it's representative of an era. And used that as the basis with tools like 11 Labs to generate the voice. Interestingly, if we were to do the same thing now, the process would be a lot quicker because we could influence things like the intonation and the reaction that we want. At the time, those technologies weren't available, so we had multiple takes cut together to produce what feels like a very human, very sort of sentimental at times, frustrated at times, excited moments in the narrative that otherwise we'd be able to control more finely. Yeah, that's kind of a broad overview of creative process. There are other, I mean, there are so many aspects of the game. James could speak to the time that he took developing a sound design for the experience, which I think adds an entirely other ambiance that we otherwise wouldn't have.
[00:31:57.297] James C. Kane: Yeah, I can talk about that. You know, I find that good spatial sound design is a very performance cheap way to bring a lot of real world physical energy into an XR experience that can often feel like sort of lifeless and virtual and a little dead in the absence of those elements. So yeah, I think we recorded something like 400 unique Foley sounds, like multiple takes of every type of sound of almost every object in the game that you can pick up and drop. One of our developers, Ethan Malachek, developed a physics-based spatial audio system. So if you throw the book down, it's going to make a much louder impact sound than if you just like place it or gently drop it or something like that. So we took a lot of care just to think about Yeah, environmental elements, ambient sounds, specific surface-on-surface impact sounds. Your footsteps change when you leave the interior space. Your footsteps change from hardwood floor to walking in snow and dirt and stuff like that. So just little elements to make it feel more real and bring like... human or physical energy into these worlds. That's very nice. So I always do that. And like I said, it's low-hanging fruit generally. It's not that hard to do equipment or tech-wise, and it doesn't cost a great deal performance-wise. So if you're not doing that, I think it's sort of a missed opportunity usually.
[00:33:27.093] Kent Bye: Great. And AJ, in terms of the coming in and starting to build out the world, did you already have like a rough sense of some of the characters or the other themes, or maybe talk about how the world building part of the process with the art and the look and feel was also playing into the overall context of the development of the experience?
[00:33:46.457] Ayushman Johri: Yeah, I think for just the overall visuals, we had a good enough time in pre-production when we were discussing different kinds of concepts. And as we were kind of shaping the story, once we had decided it's going to be an escape room type of experience. And then when we were shaping the actual narrative, there were a lot of old concepts where there were different environments being discussed and how those could shape out and stuff like that. then the more we started kind of forming what it was actually going to be, we were discussing about, okay, we have to make the players feel as if they're kind of stuck in a painting. And that was kind of our first step. That was kind of like the first level in the game. And the whole point was like, okay, this is going to be the way to kind of make people experience as if they're stuck in someone's imagination and the person's imagination you're stuck in is a visual artist they paint and basically kind of create this environment and try to justify a lot of those visual decisions with the narrative at the focus and uh yeah that's kind of how the process about it went We had many discussions about how much of the game we actually want to make. There was at one point, the story used to be a lot more extensive. There were some other parts of the story that we were trying to tell and we were like, okay, we need to compress it because of, you know, time constraints and stuff like that. So with the time that we had, we decided to kind of shift it into three different layers almost, but all of them having like different times where like people spending time there would be different. Like level one would be, I would say 30%. The next one would be like the biggest one, which is going to be at least 50 to 60%. And then the last environment would be basically like we show the conclusion of the game. And all those three environments had very distinct art styles. That was very interesting because as the narrative flows, you kind of understand the thought process of the voice in your head almost. I don't want to give away a lot of the games to the listeners, but basically, as you experience the game, you will see how the environment is reflecting how the narrator is feeling. There are certain environment places, such as a cave, which kind of is the creative block of a person. It's the analogy for creative block of a person if the whole environment is the inspirational imagination, right? And that part was really interesting because we have a great team of artists in our team. It was me, Colin Freeman, Noah Ilberry, and Cameron Saimimi. We were kind of able to take parts of the experience and kind of focus on our strengths so me for example i am very much focused on doing physically based rendering texturing so i'm very much into substance painter substance designer and when we were making those three environments we realized that the first level say for example should look like a painting and instead of us trying to over engineer a way of creating scripts or shaders of making something look like a painting, we just ended up painting it. Like we did a lot of hand painting by ourselves because that is how you make a painting. And that kind of stuff really helped us make the art style we had in mind in pre-production. And by the time we were on the conclusion level, which had to look a little more realistic, I took that one on and then basically made it with a lot of high quality textures, full PBR pipeline, and then compressed the whole thing onto just the color texture. I was checking some of my files before this talk, and the last level was only 20 megabytes. That is like a minute of watching a 720p YouTube video, which I found really interesting. It's like that was our strength on realizing our vision visually and basically letting the creatives focus on making the best experience and not worry about how we will do this visually at the end.
[00:37:45.520] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to share some of my experience of actually playing through the game because I didn't really quite enjoy playing through it and enjoying the different worlds and all the different aspects of the control mechanisms, the UI. I played through the first time with controllers. The second time I started to do the hand gestures, although I didn't play all the way through with hand gestures because I then went back and played it again in Apple Vision Pro to see like how far I could get. And then at some point the browser had crashed. And so then I was like, ah, I don't know how stable this is going to be. I don't want to like keep trying to get to the end and then have it crash again and again. After having gone through the whole arc of the experience, I was satisfied with the narrative components and it was more of a trying to see the technical differences between like how the Quest and Apple Vision Pro are implementing some of these. So just in terms of the control mechanism, I will say that I'm very used to having the trigger button be take action. And in your experience, it's teleport, which I don't know how many times I teleported when I didn't want to, but typically a teleport is with the thumbsticks rather than the trigger button. And so that was like a little frustrating because I was wanting to interact with stuff and it was like expecting to push this, but then to interact with it was I was having to click with the grip button. But other than that, there was not very many other technical glitches that I ran into. I think I used the hint one time in the first like three. And then at the very end, I used it just to kind of finish it out. Because I was like, I'm not able to decode what's happening in this last puzzle. I was like, it was lost on me. So I just wanted to finish it and see the ending of it. But the hint system was also nice to be there because... It's not like totally introductory. I think it's probably intermediate to advanced in that you can use the hint system to help give you those clues. But I was surprised to see how rigorous it was. I could tell there were some Escape Room fans there designing this because it felt like a little bit more that... intermediate to advanced level but for people who love escape rooms then when you actually do figure it out it is quite satisfying so i did have that experience of once i did figure out whatever the puzzle was then i was able to move on and have that kind of rush that double mean rush that you get But I'd love to hear some of your process of developing this across the different platforms, the Quest and Apple Vision Pro, some of the specific considerations and challenges. I know that you were wanting to get the Apple Vision Pro out sooner, but ran into a lot of moving target issues on the backend. And it still doesn't seem like it's completely stable for, it's still under a feature flag. The Safari WebXR features are still underneath the feature flag, meaning that they're still experimental, which I guess means that they can do whatever they want and developers like yourself will suffer. Love to hear some of your reflections on developing all the technical bits of the user interface and the controllers, the hand-controlled version on the Quest, as well as Apple Vision Pro.
[00:40:37.813] James C. Kane: Yeah, I can start there. I have a lot to get into. But like I said, we developed in Wonderland Engine, which is like a very Unity-like development experience for the WebXR world. You're dealing with a hierarchy and adding components to objects, and it's using the same physics system as Unity is, in fact. they have a slightly different math library than like a 3js but it's about the same so it's again super fast and it can handle way more textures than we've ever been able to throw into a project before so that was great to the development process you know they are it's a they're still a startup so there were weeks when something we needed was broken and we had to wait a week for you know uh an update to the engine or something but Kind of comes with the territory. And overall, I've seen tremendous growth from that team and that engine and really impressed by what we're able to do with it. The hints you mentioned, I'm glad you mentioned the hint system because I know our lead developer, Kevin Olsen, is responsible for architecting that as well as most of the underlying game systems. And he put a lot of time and thought into that. It's actually a progressive hint system. So the first clue you get, it'll detect what puzzle you're supposed to be on. It'll kind of give you a generic, general, maybe even like an artsy hint, like with a little like disguise to it. And the second time you press it, it'll be a little more clear. The third time you press it, the thing you're supposed to go to will start flashing yellow and it'll be a pretty abrupt hint and it'll tell you nearly exactly what you're supposed to do. So I thought that was really smart of them. And yeah, it's interesting to see like the data, like users that use that or users that do the tutorial, users that make it past certain checkpoints in the game and certain puzzles and stuff. So that has been pretty gratifying to hear, but yeah, no, I agree. Like actually I, because we're an agency team, folks are kind of coming and going off this project throughout development, myself included. So I actually came back to the second level, not really understanding any, I got to try it like a fairly complete version of it, not understanding really having previewed any of the design and that dopamine hit you're talking about when you do get something and it's kind of exposed through a few different clues and they all line up. But yeah, I think that's something that the design team was definitely chasing. as far as the platform differences yeah i mean we targeted quest that was our target from the start and controllers was our target from the start as well i think a few months into development avp was announced apple vision pro was announced and you know they revealed it's hands only no controllers so we took a look at our game and said you know what actually it does line up pretty well it's It's not a game that requires a lot of fast motion. It's more thoughtful. And almost every design we've got for controllers, well, yeah, you could do a grab. You could do a teleport. This all sort of works pretty well for... Happily and luckily, it works pretty well for the game we were already fairly committed to making. So that was a bit of serendipity on our part, but like... We had been making a big bet for years that Apple was going to support this on their eventual headset, even when that was, you know, a fairly distant rumor in 2018. There were business reasons and and hiring reasons and practical reasons. We thought that was likely. So it was pretty awesome to see that come out and get confirmation it was going to happen and have a great title in the works that we really could put out and get a really high quality WebXR example. in front of the Apple Vision Pro community at launch or near launch. As you said, yeah, we wanted to be ready to go live day one. I'm incredibly impressed with how close Kevin and the team got. I started the initial hand tracking development in like December. I think that was roughly... We launched the game on Quest with controllers in October 23 at Augmented World Expo in Vienna, Austria. And I think our first move was an optimization to cut the download in half, because I do think we are kind of approaching a size of a WebXR game and a scale and a scope. It starts to become less reasonable for someone to just download it and start playing it immediately. I have a gigabit connection up and down. I think we all do, actually, on this call. So we're in an ideal network world where our 160 megabyte game downloads like that, no big deal. If you're on a 50 megabit connection or less, 160 megabytes before you can even start playing is kind of a lot. So one of the first things we did was an optimization to cut that in half. So you're starting this game in about 80 megabytes of download over the network. versus, just to compare, above Parodowski was 14 megabytes for the entire game. This one's, again, a bigger scope and scale. To start, you're at 80 megabytes. And I think total, it's about 160. So we were kind of approaching a practical limit for how big a game might or could be given current networking conditions around the world. So our first move was, yeah, that optimization. But very quickly after that, we learned the Apple Vision Pro launch date, and it was sooner than we expected. So we were kind of like, OK, can we do it? Made very quick progress. Again, our hand tracking aligned well with the kind of game we were making. made some promising progress quickly and got what we hoped would be a working version on day one. But yeah, as you said, there's some instability in the platform, especially around like high memory apps. So this is a classic iOS behavior too. So on your iPhone in Safari, if a tab is using too much memory, it'll just kind of loop restart and crash and loop restart and crash. So Vision Pro does that as well. But it's never clear exactly what limit you're exceeding. And once your tab crashes, you lose all console logging. You lose all debugging. So there's no way to backtrace it or anything really either. So the instability and crashing around high memory apps has been an issue. We do have it through the Assistant Feedback. We have it into the Safari team. And we're hopeful they'll be able to take a look at that. You would think something that runs comfortably on Quest 2 hardware, something like Apple Vision Pro would be able to turn through that with no problem. It has four to six times the memory and CPU or something. But yes, the inconsistency of crashing has been a struggle. It's weird because I'm not experiencing it at all anymore, but users in the wild certainly have been reporting that. Oh, yeah, there have been other minor differences, too. They want everything to be, you know, the eye tracking on the headset is this transient pointer stuff where it's using your gaze and then a pinch and then a subtle modification of that as you move your fingers around. That wasn't even available at launch. So we couldn't have implemented that and used it anymore. It's now in VisionOS 1.1. Transient pointers are available, so you can use that. But they only expose the gaze data at the moment of pinch, and it's just a one-time vector. So the targeting reticule will be a little different. Anyway, we hope to look at that and improve some of the gesture recognition tech we had to rely on instead, where you're holding out two fingers is teleport, making a fist is grab, pinch is also grab, things like that. So yeah, it's definitely been interesting and I'm super happy it's out. It's an incredible device in so many ways, but it also is a dev kit in many ways as well. And in a way it's good for us because the absence of content is an opportunity for us to come in and shine with a title like this. But yeah, we're trying to work with the browser team there to investigate issues and get it to be a little more stable and maybe adopt some of their specific Apple APIs. So yeah.
[00:48:46.989] Andy Wise: that's kind of long-winded but yeah andy what do you think in terms of like designing for hand tracking and stuff like that yeah i well first i would go back just a second and kent i don't know if you saw our faces as you were describing your experience but we immediately were all smiling i think one of our most enjoyable parts of of creating this is just watching people play it and also hearing hearing stories of their experience is playing good and bad. I think we're fascinated students of what it means to create experiences on this platform. And anytime somebody else experiences what we built, it's just more, more data and more information to make the next one better. So grip versus trigger, hotly debated topic internally. I'm not sure if we landed on the right decision, but I think it works. I've played it so much I can't even remember the debate very much.
[00:49:39.355] Kent Bye: more. Well, just to jump in, I think it's a broader thing. If people have played a lot of other VR games, there's certain established mechanisms that your approach deviates from, which means that if you're only playing your game, that's one thing. But if you're playing the whole ecosystem of the games, then it kind of uses a user interaction paradigm that's kind of unorthodox. And because of that, I kept on making those errors. So anyway, I want to put that out there just in terms of how there's an ecosystem of other experiences that are kind of using these user interaction paradigms.
[00:50:11.060] Andy Wise: Yeah. Yeah, I think more than anything, what we debated was the degree of complexity and the mechanics and progression of the puzzles in the game. So I think ultimately, we wanted to balance making it something that was approachable and acceptable for a broad audience, not so niche that if you got into it, you just said, this isn't for me. This is too strange or too specific. but also genuinely challenging and rewarding for the people that were willing to spend time with it. So any great escape room has a level two reveal moment, or sometimes more than one of those. And I think there's a lot that we learned from in the specifics of the interactions, but one of the things we got right was having some really great whoa, wow moments throughout the game that were reveals that you didn't expect. We have kind of a reverse Wizard of Oz moment when you step outside again. I don't want to give too much away, but when you step outside of your immediate confines and then the cave, as AJ described, and then the final moment and the final stage that you get to with that beautifully designed studio that AJ created. So I think we did really well in that regard. I think if we were to repeat the project, we would take more care in those specifics and probably aligning with convention like you're describing, Kent. As far as hand tracking, that is a real new adventure that I think everybody is going to have to wrestle with in the VR space for the Apple Vision Pro. It was clear when we started using it that this really isn't meant to be a VR device. And we're forcing it to do things that it wasn't designed to do or wasn't intended to do. Even though it's a head-mounted unit, even though you do have the range of movement, all you have to do is take more than three or four steps forward to see the world revealed to you, around you, to know, oh, yeah, Apple does not want me to experience VR in the way that I experience it on a Quest headset. So there are limitations there. There are interesting challenges, but the hand tracking itself and finding, back to what we were talking about earlier, finding a standard way of handling. It's the age-old cross-platform struggle brought to life with our hands now instead of the way we're clicking or the way we're resizing browser windows. Boy, we don't have the right software yet. We have a really crude functional version of it. I think Apple is way, way ahead in terms of the gaze-based transient pointer technique that they've got. But retrofitting that to something like a Quest device is a challenge. Or taking the alternate approach and getting what is really great hand-trapping working on the Quest and making it consistent with Apple Vision Pros. Something we'll have to spend more than the few weeks we spent post-launch figuring out.
[00:53:00.029] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when I was playing through the first time, I used the controller, and then the second time I used the hand gestures, and there's something around like having an experience when every time I try to do an input, it works like 100% consistently, aside from like the controller mapping unorthodox ways that I was getting confused and kind of constantly pushing the wrong button. But aside from that, user error and design convention, more or less each time I was trying to interact with stuff, it was, I think, well, there were some things where I was trying to open and close stuff where it wasn't always like 100%, but it was closer in terms of like having my input be translated into the experience. And I think with the hand tracking, there's a little bit less percentage of like not as consistent as the controller because you have to have the hand tracking detect like, you know, your two fingers pointing out and then pulling a trigger with two fingers, I guess, is a way of describing how to point at a place to teleport with your index and middle finger and then pull them back towards you to be able to teleport, which is a nice conceit, but sometimes it was difficult to actually detect both of my fingers and I would have to position my hand in a certain way so my middle finger wouldn't be occluded and then still get it so that I could point at the area and have it. So there was a number of extra like cognitive load dimensions to actually get it to work. So like it felt a little bit more frustrating, which as I had already played through the controller after a certain point, I was like, okay, I'm not sure if I want to tolerate all these friction elements of the hand tracking. And then when I did it with the Apple Vision Pro, it was kind of a similar type of frictions. And it's hard for me to know. I'd have to play a lot more to say whether one was better or not. But yeah, those are just some of my experiences as I was playing through the different interactions.
[00:54:37.912] James C. Kane: Yeah, the gesture recognition tech is a library we made custom for this game. And I think it is kind of a first draft effort in a way because it is just based on static recordings of these gestures that we made in development. And, you know, the size of my hand and the way I make a fist is never going to generalize to everyone in the population, you know, so... I think we are sort of limited. We have debated like a step in the tutorial where you make we ask you to make the gesture and then record that and then use that during gameplay to trigger the things. It's a little more friction on startup. It's a little more steps to actually get to gameplay. It probably would be a higher percentage of recognition. but yeah i agree i think that the hand tracking is a less precise thing and it's just more necessary to tutorialize that side of the game where the controls are all kind of labeled and you can kind of just glance at them and figure out what to do the hand tracking is almost by definition a little more custom and needs to be the user needs to be walked through it so Yeah, I think we've got a little bit more work to do figuring that out. Or maybe there's some kind of industry standard way that comes out. Because the only gesture officially supported in the WebXR spec is the pinch. And that's quite easy to detect because you're just doing a distance check between two joints at the end of your thumb and index finger. But there's no other gesture detection built in that's going to be default across your devices or platforms or anything. So yeah, it becomes a challenge for developers to address it game by game or platform by platform.
[00:56:23.542] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I think you did a good job also having the hint button there. And I'm sure as we move on, we'll have more solutions to these problems. So this, it feels like a first draft and I haven't actually seen a lot of teleportation, even in other Apple Vision Pro fully immersive experiences with the VR component to be able to move around a space. So what you're doing here is a little bit, even cutting edge of the Apple Vision Pro app ecosystem in general. So yeah, as time goes on, I'm sure we'll find new ways of new solutions and approaches to all this stuff. But yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear from each of you what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:57:03.950] James C. Kane: You know, ultimate potential... is a tough one. I can tell you why I am interested in working in this industry and with this team specifically. And it's every discipline. In the same way that filmmaking brings together so many different kinds of artists and professionals and experts, so too does XR, almost to an even greater extent, because now you absolutely need these developers and animation experts and great technical and optimization thinkers like AJ here. So yeah, getting to bring something together that's the creative side and the technical side, getting to bring in audio design and music. So I guess I'm not speaking so much to the total potential, but that's why I think we love working on it. It's a way to, through our agency, just being able to bring this stuff more and more to our clients has been the most rewarding thing. And getting to grow our team and grow our business and add on clients that if we hadn't invested in this team ahead of time, we may never have gotten in the same room with these kinds of clients. So that's sort of been our journey and one reason why I love doing it. So maybe someone else wants to take a stab at the long-term potential.
[00:58:16.693] Ayushman Johri: I can kind of piggyback off of the stuff that you talked about, James. I think this idea that I think right now, even though we have enough companies making VR hardware, that it is becoming slowly more mainstream. It is still in the niche category overall compared to something, like you said, films or other forms of more traditional media. I do think that VR, the way it is kind of set up right now and is being interpreted by different... bigger corporations such as Apple and Facebook and like trying to target different type of hardware to tackle a different type of medium. I think it just opens a lot of potential in that aspect in the sense that I have seen more creative people be interested in VR, even though they're not very much into playing video games or, you know, watch like not as much big cinephiles. But I think VR just is, I think, much broader as a platform where if you own a VR headset, that doesn't necessarily mean that, oh, you purchase that for playing video games or you purchase that for, you know, productivity apps or watching movies, stuff like that. So I think it just brings in more people to create more interesting and non-traditional content. And I think as it's going to build, I think the potential at the end, well, this is the kind of hope that It creates a more like mainstream ecosystem of people creating things that we have not seen before and kind of learn towards it. And I just think the potential there is like really, really huge. We are still learning about certain things that we can do, which we didn't even know, like just two months ago. And I think like looking at it from like a much broader view, like years in the future, It'll be very interesting, the kind of things people are recreating, which is not going to be even close to remotely traditional stuff.
[01:00:09.616] Andy Wise: I can't say it any better than these two have. I feel like my interest in VR is that it still represents sort of an infinite canvas for creation, whether in just pure storytelling or in the silly games that we like to create or more serious things like forcing empathy where it might be important i think it's just an amazing canvas for that kind of storytelling i i think it can be a really good tool ultimately to sort of explain complicated things complicated systems you know during covid the big groundbreaking thing that we experienced when we created the apart show online was it was a way to actually connect with people when we couldn't thank God we can connect with everybody in ways that we could pre-pandemic again. But it was a real lifeline for us. And I think I don't know that any of us that experienced VR as a way to connect during that time will ever forget that. And Hopefully we don't have to return to that, but it did open our eyes to ways to connect that we couldn't before. We, I think at Peridowski, we look at technology as like a really important tool to communicate, but also a really giant toy to play with. We spend so much time every time a new Apple Vision Pro headset comes out or a Quest headset comes out. It's a new toy for us to play with and figure out and wrestle with as creators and storytellers. And to me, that's always going to be exciting. So looking forward to whatever is next.
[01:01:46.869] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things that I'm really looking forward to as we move forward is as we get more of a solid WebXR implementation from Safari to see how that will start to bring in more folks from the web development communities who have backgrounds in these front-end projects like 3GS, Babylon GS, React 3 Fiber, and You know, it's great that there's more Unity type of web engines like Wonderland Engine to create these fully immersive experiences. But I'm also interested in seeing like D3 visualizations and more spatial representations that we've seen from like Flow Immersive and other folks from the web development community bringing in these other frameworks from like Node.js and React Native types of opportunities that are happening with Apple Vision Pro. And so how can we start to use the open web stack to start to push forward what's even possible for bringing the best of the web into these special experiences? So I'm also really excited to see where that goes as well.
[01:02:43.288] James C. Kane: You know, and that's where everything goes in the long run in technology. You look at the apps you use day to day, your email, your calendar, your video, your TV apps, mostly all migrated to web apps these days, even if they manifest as native apps. And I think in pasts, tech epochs or generations, the rise of the PC and consumer internet in the 90s, or the rise of the smartphone and mobile internet in 2010s. In those days, the web lagged behind the native platform, often by years. With this generation of tech, it's really interesting because meta, at least, is allowing their browser platform to stay almost neck and neck with native Quest API capabilities. So their browser team is doing a fantastic job, not only like implementing features as they come out, but also communicating with the community and being really responsive to bug reports and feature requests and things like that. So they've been incredible to work with and I think are driving hard in the direction you're talking about. And I yeah, Apple's communication strategy is different. They're not out in the discords talking to everybody about every issue. My hope is they get pushed in that direction and eventually just decide to decide to do it on their own. But it's a great sign that they are exposing WebEx are behind a flag even at this point, like at launch. So I'm also I'll share your excitement there.
[01:04:13.885] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was at the MetaConnect at the WebXR meetup and some of the feedback that was given to the web browser team was that it'd be really great if they would consider open sourcing some of their developments and so that the broader Chromium teams from other platforms could also benefit from some of the innovations and development they've been doing and Yeah, I feel like as we move forward, just having a real robust and vibrant ecosystem for web developers to be able to create content and see how like React Native types of approaches too can be a stop gap to tap into native APIs, but still use the open web technologies. And when the browsers stabilize enough, then start to deploy out these cross-platform experiences that you're already doing here through Wonderland. Yeah, lots of exciting things. And I'm super excited to see where it goes in the future. And I've been digging into thinking about my own website and how to start to add different elements in there. And just did an interview with Agog yesterday that I published that they have spatial dimensions on their agog.org and just starting to brainstorm on my own ways of thinking about how to start to tie in more of these spatial components into the voices of VR. website and experiences and information architecture. So this conversation I'm having with you is on the heels of me also doing deep dives and research and seeing what the state of the art is at the moment. So checking in in these little checkpoints to see how things have progressed. Is there anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader Emerson community?
[01:05:40.067] James C. Kane: Well, I guess I'll take a chance to thank you for having us. I've been listening to your show since I got into the industry in 2016. And I appreciate your journalistic perspective on the industry versus, well, I won't even say versus what other kinds of content creators out there, but I appreciate your perspective. And I've learned a lot from your podcast over the years. So definitely thanks for having us. Yeah, like I said, we're an agency team and we do this kind of work for brands and companies around the globe and brands like Verizon and partnerships with Mozilla, Adidas and Sesame Street and things like that. So if you're a brand or company interested in learning how you can get some work in this field or just learning more, feel free to reach out to our team at paradowsky.com.
[01:06:27.944] Andy Wise: I would echo that. Thanks for having us, Kent. I have been a huge fan of your show. It's a pleasure joining you here. Appreciate you having us on. We are three of many that have worked on projects like The Escape Artist. So there's a long list of people that contributed, didn't join, but would have great things to share and contribute and are so brilliant. Feel lucky to work with them every single day. So I want to acknowledge them too. And as far as the industry generally, I just hope for anybody that is creating in this space that we can continue to evolve what it means to create on the platform and break apart some of the expected tropes creatively that we see. That's sort of what we tried to do with the Escape Artist and with other projects. Introduce new aesthetics, new ways of telling stories, things that we haven't seen on the platform. So just encourage everybody else to do the same. Continue to define what's possible there.
[01:07:25.721] Kent Bye: AJ, anything else you'd like to say?
[01:07:27.915] Ayushman Johri: Well, I think James and Andy kind of read that up really well. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. It was great talking about our kind of creative process and the project. It was, it was a lot of fun. It was also reminiscing like all the things that we had gone through in the process. So it was nice thinking about that. And yeah, we were just, I think as just individuals and creatives, we are very excited to see the kinds of projects that the community creates, because I think at the heart of it all, I think It's creativity. Right now there's like just in WebExile, there's like not a lot of monetization ways. So the whole idea is about increasing the community and just making things that we want to make. And it's always fun to see other people kind of making great content and like that pops up on the MetaQuest browser. And it's like, oh, that's amazing. Like the community keeps growing. So it's just fun to see that. And yeah, that's the hope. People keep creating cool and fun things for us to experience.
[01:08:22.844] Kent Bye: Awesome. And James, at the Polly's Awards, you alluded that Paradosky Creative might be going through for a three-peat next year with another experience. So you got more stuff that you're working on to be aiming for another game of the year or experience of the year?
[01:08:37.256] James C. Kane: You know, I'm not sure how close to the vest I should be playing this right now, but I will say the Game of the Year award for 2024, the field is wide open right now. We certainly don't have a lock on it. So I encourage everyone to dive in and see what you can make and explore the platform for yourself. Yeah, it really is amazing the reach and kind of global distribution you can achieve instantly with this platform. compared to some of the more walled garden app store approaches. So yeah, we will definitely be fielding a game. We're in that process now. It's like, okay, the big thing is out there. It's ready. What's our next big thing? So yeah, we're in that process now. It's an exciting part of the creative cycle.
[01:09:23.723] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, certainly Paradosky Korea has been on the bleeding edge of pushing forward what's even possible with these web-based technologies with your early work with Mozilla Hubs and the Apple Store Apart was a great experience that I actually had a chance to experience and do a little like a web video kind of tour, guided tour that we did at the time. And yeah, just continue to innovate and push forward all these technologies. And yeah, the Escape Artist is a real great fusion of a lot of different components of narrative design, the escape room mechanics, and WebXR, and yeah, just interaction mechanics as well, and hand tracking. I mean, just really pushing the edge for what's possible on the web. So great to get a chance to hear a little bit more about the context and the development of this experience and to just hear about where you're going to be taking it all in the future. So James, Andy, and AJ, thanks again for joining me here to help break it all down.
[01:10:11.840] James C. Kane: Thanks so much, Ken. That was great. Great talking to you. Thank you.
[01:10:15.401] Kent Bye: Thanks so much, Ken. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage so you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
