Edward Mason of GameFace Labs talks about his mobile virtual reality HMD, and the mobile trends of increased processing power and requests for technology that’s better suited for VR devices. He talks about building the customized GameFace prototypes to provide a proof-of-concept for what will be possible with untethered, mobile VR experiences.
He discusses using Android as an open platform, and how they’re using Bluetooth as the interface for bringing in input into VR experiences. Some of the more compelling ones are things like VR chat to be able to have cross-platform interactions with other people within VR, as well as 3D movies and VR movie theaters.
Finally, he talks about the changing VC landscape since Sony and Facebook have gotten into virtual reality and some of the future technologies that will help mobile VR experiences such as battery power improvements and foveated rendering with eye tracking to optimize the use of processing power.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro to GameFace Labs untethered VR experience.
- 0:37 – Mobile: VR needs to be untethered. Mobile tech is advancing so that it will eventually provide an immersive experience with presence and low-persistence. Intent is to put together a proof-of-concept of what’s possible with today’s technology
- 1:28 – Limited by mobile phones? Collaborating with phone manufacturers. After Sony & Facebook getting involved, then there’s more interest from phone manufacturers to develop hardware more suited for VR, such as 4K mobile phone screens.
- 2:56 – Will people use their own phone or will GameFace Labs have custom hardware? Going with custom hardware.
- 3:22 – What is differentiating GameFace Labs from other mobile phone HMDs? There’s a number of customizations
- 4:04 – Going with Android’s open platform. No one company should own the metaverse. Should be able to interconnect to the metaverse regardless of VR HMD
- 4:57 – Removing glass touch screen
- 5:22 – How do you get input into GameFace Labs? Bluetooth-enabled devices
- 6:05 – What type of experiences do you see with mobile VR HMD? Will eventually have AR with the onboard camera, but the latency isn’t low enough yet. Don’t recommend walking around yet.
- 6:53 – What should you be able to do with an untethered experience that you can’t do with a tethered one? Full 360 turning with a swivel chair.
- 7:27 – What about crawling around? Working with PrioVR. And getting data via Bluetooth.
- 8:00 – What will be different with mobile games? Usually think about simple games. Hardware is improving quickly, and will be generate immersive environments with higher graphical fidelity.
- 9:21 – Would you see any type of causal VR experiences? Could use it anywhere.
- 10:21 – What about causal VR content? Horror demos. 360-video experiences or virtual cinemas. Emulate old school games. Content will be king.
- 12:04 – Will be porting content? Have been porting some PC VR content to be able to use with GameFace, like VR Chat.
- 12:49 – Using the phone interface to be able to connect to others in a telepresence call? VR Chat experiments
- 13:18 – How to bring your body into VR? Presence if important, and you can have custom avatars. Eventually have high-res 3D scans for avatars.
- 14:31 – Are you fundraising for GameFace Labs? Not yet. Releasing a dev kit first.
- 15:03 – How have Facebook and Sony changed the funding landscape?
- 16:09 – What’s the potential of VR? So many unknowns and lots of exploration to be done. Battery power and foveated rendering with eye tracking to optimize the use of processing power.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.032] Edward Mason: My name is Edward Mason, I am the founder and CEO of Game Face Labs. We've developed the world's first completely untethered virtual reality experience. This is, as we're dubbing it, a head-mounted console, as you don't need to plug into any standalone or stationary machine. At the moment we have a 2560x1440 display panel, which is, I think, one of the highest resolution display panels in any VR headset at the moment, and we have revised our latest prototype to the Mark V that we'll be showing off for the first time at E3.
[00:00:37.162] Kent Bye: I see. I guess what I've heard the distinctions between like mobile PC and IMAX like fully tracked in a room on the spectrum and I think that makes sense to me. So would you consider yourself in the mobile space then?
[00:00:51.102] Edward Mason: Absolutely. So In our opinion, we feel virtual reality from day one needs to be conceived as an untethered experience. I think for anyone to develop a 360 degree environment and then prohibit the user from using any more than, say, 270 degrees without strangling themselves or breaking their hardware is a bit of an issue. And so we feel that, yes, we know today, while mobile technology is not quite powerful enough to give a virtual reality experience that, say, a high-end PC could do, we know that the rate in which mobile technology is advancing will give us a very immersive VR experience with presence, with low persistence, with everything that we need in the not-too-distant future. And so what we're doing today is piecing together proof of concepts, really, to show what we can do with today's technology with a view to instill confidence as to what we can do with tomorrow's technology.
[00:01:28.917] Kent Bye: I see. And so, at some level, though, using mobile phones, you're only able to do as much as the phone can do, in some ways, right?
[00:01:37.102] Edward Mason: To some degree, yes. And this is why, up until recently, we have been dismembering various high-end devices to get the components that we needed. Now that we have grown a little bit, we're now dealing directly with the component manufacturers themselves, and as such, we're getting components that are not actually seen in any mobile phone to date. Now, this is something that, while, yes, the mobile phone industry and virtual reality industry have a lot in common, we feel that with the gained interest with people such as Facebook and Oculus and Sony now getting involved, we should start to see companies developing hardware and components specifically for virtual reality devices. So yes, up until today, simply because there was no need to have anything more powerful than a mobile phone chip, there isn't anything. But with a view that VR is now here and here to stay, we should start seeing individual components being developed for, and solely for, virtual reality devices. One example I like to give is There's no real reason to have over a 4K resolution in a mobile phone screen, because obviously you're holding it at arm's reach and you're not going to tell that pixel density difference. However, with virtual reality, with a magnification glass, you obviously can see the difference in pixel density. So the view is, while there's no reason for phone manufacturers to get their hands on screens of maybe, let's say, over 2.5 to 4K, there is a great need for VR users to have that high resolution. And as such, now that we have more people getting involved, we feel that display manufacturers have to now take heed and listen to the demand for higher resolution display panels for mobile devices. So we may not see a mobile phone with a 4K or an 8K display panel, but we will still see VR devices with that sort of resolution. I see.
[00:02:57.225] Kent Bye: With Game Face Labs, are you having people take their existing phone and putting it into the device, or are you shipping it with a custom hardware?
[00:03:04.292] Edward Mason: Exactly. So we have built the device ourselves. So this isn't a phone case, if you will. This actually has an Android embedded device built into the actual virtual reality headset. So this is something that... you can ultimately connect to your mobile phone, let's say, and stream content from your mobile phone to GameFace. But GameFace itself is the computer. You don't need anything other than GameFace.
[00:03:21.451] Kent Bye: I see. And so what's to prevent someone from just taking the exact same phone and putting an HMD around it? What's the differentiating factor for GameFace Labs?
[00:03:28.958] Edward Mason: Well, as I said, this isn't a mobile phone in a case, so if you were to try and find the greatest mobile phone in the world and put it in the greatest case in the world, you will still have an inferior experience as to what we can provide, solely because we have built this device solely for virtual reality, and as such we can do things, we have overclocked hardware, we have components and trackers that are not in mobile phones, and this is something that, yes, you get a great experience, and I am fully behind people such as AlterGates who are making these mobile phone holders, and I think it's a great segue for guys to get interested in VR and to start them developing before they have to spend any serious money. But at the same time, I would strongly recommend whenever you get the chance to try Game Face out and try one of the phone and case holders. And you should see a vast difference between the two. I see.
[00:04:04.746] Kent Bye: And so it sounds like you are settling in on Android technology with an open platform. Maybe you could talk a bit about that decision-making process.
[00:04:11.469] Edward Mason: So we genuinely believe that VR needs to be a completely open experience. We don't feel that any one company should own the metaverse. And as such, we really believe that people will ultimately have their own user interface which will be effectively your home screen that you may have on your mobile phone or your desktop that will have all of the applications installed within. And this is something that we've got a representation as a user interface. Now our view with the metaverse is something that You should, ideally, be able to connect your user interface with your game face to my user interface with my game face. And you, as an avatar, should be able to come and sit in my user interface and enjoy the content I have installed on my device from your device. And so this is our view of the metaverse. It needs to be a completely open platform that's not owned by any one person. And of course, Android, being the largest open platform there is out there, with over 50 billion apps downloaded already, really shows that this is the platform that we need to consider.
[00:04:57.530] Kent Bye: I see. And so mobile phones were designed with a glass touchscreen interface. And so you're essentially taking that same design and putting it into a virtual reality HMD, but yet you don't necessarily need that touchscreen capability. Is that something that you're removing and kind of optimizing in some way?
[00:05:14.221] Edward Mason: Absolutely. We don't use touchscreen at all. I mean, there's no access to the screen to touch. So it's something that we can keep the price down overall without having to need that capacitive touchscreen element. I see.
[00:05:22.967] Kent Bye: And so how do you interact? How do you get input into this Game Face Labs?
[00:05:26.793] Edward Mason: So this is the beauty of Android. We support any Bluetooth peripheral that already works with Android. And we're now working with chaps such as Omni and the Stomps gentlemen who are making new input controls to work with virtual reality solely for virtual reality. And we will support anything that comes to market. I mean, this is really the beauty of an open platform. You are open to support and develop for everything. And this is really something that we're looking forward to. As it stands today, if you have any Bluetooth gamepad, you can pair it up and use that. I mean, we're not trying to sell our own gamepad. This is something that the hardware will always be sold at cost because we have a platform to take into account. So that being said, we really want to embrace the freedom that is Android. We want people to use whatever peripheral they already have lying around, or if they want to then go out and buy a specific peripheral for what they want to do, they're welcome to do that.
[00:06:05.655] Kent Bye: And so what type of experiences do you foresee happening in, say, a closed room with an untethered mobile HMD?
[00:06:13.640] Edward Mason: So we've been working with Augmented Reality for the past year or so, and we've now started working alongside Qualcomm's Vuforia team with their SDK, and this is something that we have a prototype with a stereo camera built in, that we're now working on getting stereo 3D Augmented Reality. Up until the stage that we have very low latency, high resolution camera feeds coming through to the headset, then I think we probably won't really dabble that much, but it's coming very soon. I wouldn't recommend anyone walk around with a game face on in virtual reality as they probably can't see where they're going unless we incorporate some pretty cool tech which isn't there yet. But with augmented reality you're free to roam around and of course if you have a room you will be able to see where you're going and if you're going to break a leg or not. So that's something that we are looking into with a lot of seriousness.
[00:06:53.168] Kent Bye: Well, even with the untethered virtual reality experience, what do you imagine you should be able to do that you can't do with the tethered experience?
[00:07:00.389] Edward Mason: We always give demos on a swivel chair, which, in my opinion, at the moment, is one of the more efficient ways of demonstrating virtual reality. Now, as I mentioned, you have a 360 degree environment. You should be able to turn in 360 degrees or more, 720, 1080, if you so choose. Now, we can offer that, as opposed to the Rift, where if you turn any more than 270, 280 degrees, you're going to start getting tangled up in cables. and exactly the same with Morpheus, we can do the full 360 experience without having any risk of death, which I think is always a good thing.
[00:07:27.923] Kent Bye: And what about crawling around or just having that type of mobility? Any type of user interactions that you have for that?
[00:07:33.909] Edward Mason: So we've only just started talking to the chaps at Prior VR. These are the guys who have made the awesome tracking suit that you wear, and you can position or track everything that you're doing. So this is something that we look forward to working. We don't have any demos at the moment, but we are looking into it.
[00:07:46.200] Kent Bye: I see. So how would you get the data from the Prior VR suit into Game Face?
[00:07:50.284] Edward Mason: It's wireless, so we can just Bluetooth it straight into Game Face.
[00:07:52.568] Kent Bye: Oh, I see. So from prior VR, they can broadcast Bluetooth then.
[00:07:55.589] Edward Mason: I don't know if it's a demo they're showing off yet, but I know it's in the works. And so by the time we're ready, they will also have that ready. I see.
[00:08:00.951] Kent Bye: OK. Cool. And so obviously, mobile gaming is a different sort of genre of gaming. And I'm just curious if you've kind of thought about or seen what the differentiating factors are going to be, and maybe kind of use the analogy of how mobile games are different from the PC games now.
[00:08:18.877] Edward Mason: So, up until recently, when you say mobile games to people, they think Farmville, they think Flappy Birds, they think Angry Birds, they think very simplistic games. And that is the case up until today because of the power of these mobile chipsets. That being said, the rate in which mobile chipsets are advancing is far outpacing the advancements of PC hardware, and the gap that exists between mobile technology and PC technology is gradually closing. And what we will see over the next few years is SoCs, System on Chips, mobile chipsets, getting more and more powerful and catching up to their desktop counterparts. While we know they will never be as powerful as the current day desktop, we feel that the rate in which they are advancing, we will be able to generate a very immersive and low-cost VR experience based on the technology that we will have available to us very soon. So, as far as the games themselves go, this is something that we will see more and more higher graphical fidelity coming into these games. And the chipset we've just received from NVIDIA, the Tegra K1, is benchmarked at about 1.6 times the power of a PlayStation 3. So it really gives a good indication as to what sort of graphics level we could experience in virtual reality in the next year. So yeah, mobile is certainly... it has a bright future, and we're going to see some very, very high-class games coming out in the next couple of years.
[00:09:21.699] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious in terms of the user behavior in terms of like, you know, I just observe like casual gaming as being like on the bus or standing in line and you're bored and you have like a minute or two and I'm just curious if you've thought about what type of VR experience would be very well suited to kind of diving in and out very quickly.
[00:09:38.660] Edward Mason: So it really depends what you're doing and what you want to experience. So we found that Game Face is used a lot in home. We found that it can be used on the plane as well, in the back of a car. I wouldn't recommend driving with it on. And certainly it's something that it's really down to the user to see how comfortable they are wearing this thing. But from a personal standpoint, this is something that we feel you can use pretty much anywhere. That's the beauty of having a completely portable VR experience. That being said, we also have an HDMI out that will be showing off at E3, which allows you to then plug Game Face into a TV, and you can then play your games as a New York console on a TV, but of course with the much more powerful SoC that we have.
[00:10:10.753] Kent Bye: And that's sort of the technology side. I guess I'm talking about the specific VR content of, like, what type of VR experiences you feel would be good to kind of dive in and out of.
[00:10:20.158] Edward Mason: I'm fine. So, again, summing back to what you particularly want to experience, we found we have a couple of cool horror demos where you're walking around castles and most people can't stand more than two or three minutes of that before having to whip their heads off because they get too freaked out. So that's a very cool one. We find movie experiences as well. We have 360-degree video players. We also have virtual cinemas made by a chap called Gosho, Seb Gebhardt. He's a great guy. and they have effectively made a virtual cinema. So you can load up any rectangular 2D or 3D content, so a 2D movie, 3D movie, and it'll play in the virtual cinema. You'll be free to turn around, kind of similar to the Rift Max I'm sure you've probably seen online. So this is something that, if you want to watch a movie, let's say, you're welcome to watch any standard 2D or 3D movie in a virtual cinema. If you have 360-degree content, you can watch that. But of course, let's say if you're sat on a plane and you don't have access to a swivel chair, there's no point trying to immerse yourself in 360-degree content because you won't experience it all. So there are certain applications. We've been working a lot with emulation as well, so that you can emulate old school games in VR. We've got a Dreamcast working where we've hacked the field of view, well I say we have, one of the developers we're working with has hacked the field of view so that you actually no longer have the 4x3 screen, it takes up all of your field of view. Which is very cool, so you can play Jaguar, Radio, or Sonic in a huge screen. We'll have head tracking built in very soon as well. So emulation is something that we've worked a lot at because obviously the guys who are playing with VR now are the guys that played SNES and Dreamcast back in the day. So it brings this nostalgia effect as well. So really, it depends how long you want to sit down and play for. We have so much content and we realise content is king and we've been building up a huge amount of it to be able to provide to anyone. And this is something that we will open up our OS. We're developing a VR build of OS, an Android build of VR. that we will open up to any other chap. So these guys who are making the phone-in cases, for instance, they have a big problem where they have no content. And so we are opening up all of our content to these other devices so that they can just load on a VR OS onto their existing device and then have access to all of the content we built up, access to the platform that we built, and basically just not have to do the hard work.
[00:12:04.385] Kent Bye: Do you see that there's any way to take some of this Android-developed content and port it over and experience it in the Rift?
[00:12:10.745] Edward Mason: Yes, it is. And we've been doing the reverse of that. So we've been taking a lot of the Rift demos and we've been porting them across to Android. So we have Tuscany and we have a couple of the VRChat. In fact, we have this fantastic cross-platform communications application. So you could be wearing a Rift in VRChat and you could be talking to someone in Game Face with a Game Face on in the same virtual gallery. So we have this very cool cross-platform application at the moment. So it's something that Yes, definitely ports will happen, but I think more likely than not we're going to have ports going from PC going to Android, up until we have some really genuinely interesting stuff being generated specifically for Game Face. But that being said, we don't really want exclusive, we don't want to stop other people progressing VR, we want everyone to have access to this. And I think this is really, we're embracing the Android ethos of a free platform.
[00:12:49.622] Kent Bye: Awesome. So another thing that comes to mind is getting a text message or a phone call. And do you imagine people dialing in and having a VR chat with you? Absolutely.
[00:12:58.566] Edward Mason: So we've actually held a couple of talks, if you will. So on Reddit, there's a very strong VR community. And there's this chap, Graham and Jesse, who put on these VR chats every week, where basically all the VR community gather into these virtual coffee shops or chat rooms. And they all talk to one another, and they share ideas about VR. So yes, I mean, this is already happening today on a weekly basis. So what will happen in the next year or two, I think, will only get better and better.
[00:13:18.613] Kent Bye: I see. I guess there's a user input in terms of avatar. I guess that's yet to be explored in terms of what your body's actually doing in putting that in. I don't know if you guys have thought about that as well or how to integrate that.
[00:13:29.780] Edward Mason: So presence is obviously very important in VR. If you don't have presence, all you have is an immersive big screen in front of your face. So, what we have been playing around with, and the VRChat guides have done very well, is they allow you to load in a custom avatar. So, for instance, we have guides when we go into these VRChats, we have the Hulk walking around, we've got, like, Frodo, we've got Link, we've got all these dudes walking around that you wouldn't expect to see, other than they're the usual avatars. So, yes, today, while we have random assets that are all over the internet that we can load up and put into these VRChats, I do feel that in the next few years, you're going to have people taking very high-resolution 3D scans of themselves and putting that as their avatar, so they will, in fact, be able to resemble themselves when they're in a virtual environment. That is one option, but of course the whole beauty with VR is you can be someone completely different, so that may not be the route some people will go down. So it's certainly interesting to see where it's going to develop and move on to. One thing I will give the VR chaps credit for is they've done something very cool. They've linked the head tracking of the Oculus Rift or Game Face to the avatar's head. So I can see if your avatar's looking at me or not. I can say, hey, pay attention, look back at me. And it's something that's really cool. It's a great feature and it really gives you that extra level of connection that you are talking with somebody somewhere else.
[00:14:31.730] Kent Bye: Great. And what's the state of Game Face's funding? Are you going to Kickstarter? Are you trying to raise VC?
[00:14:38.612] Edward Mason: Yeah, we're not going down the Kickstarter route for a few reasons. First and foremost, we're going to get the dev kit out first. We may reconsider by the time we go down the consumer version. But for now, we're just focusing on getting a good quality dev kit out to key developers by the end of this year. From there, we will then start planning for the consumer version. But I think we'll probably just go down the private funding route. We have been going around VCs for the past couple of months, and we've had great feedback pretty much from everyone we've seen. And so yeah, it's just a waiting game now. We want to show off what we're showing off at E3 first, and then we'll pick it up with more seriousness.
[00:15:03.462] Kent Bye: And so since you've been involved with this a while, did you see that the funding event with Facebook and Oculus kind of changed the tone of fundraising?
[00:15:09.965] Edward Mason: Without any shadow of a doubt. So we showcased our first prototype back in August of 2013 back in London. And that was before Sony had announced what they were getting into, that they were going to start doing VR as well. So by the time Sony came into the market, everyone started listening. And of course, Oculus were the underdog. They were the small guys that no one had heard of. But then Sony came, and people started paying more attention. to VR and then shortly thereafter with the whole Facebook acquisition then that just shone the torch on it and it has now become mainstream. So while I say it's not become mainstream yet but it's certainly the foundations have been laid for it to become mainstream and I think for VR to succeed and to get into as many people's hands as possible we needed some company like Oculus to be acquired by someone like Facebook. Now What will come of that, we don't really know. Personally, I'm not a big fan of Facebook. I haven't actually got a personal Facebook account. It's something that, to my own detriment, I've avoided social media, everything apart from LinkedIn. So it's something that we feel that it's going to be an interesting future, to say the least. I mean, no one knows where the metaverse will end up in a few years, but certainly I hope we don't only have the metaverse that is owned by one company.
[00:16:09.410] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the potential of virtual reality and where it could go?
[00:16:13.624] Edward Mason: The beauty of virtual reality is there are so many unknown unknowns. I really see this as kind of the exploration of the new world by Christopher Columbus. This is something that we now know, there's this whole virtual world that we don't even know how to interact with and we're only going to see more and more developments as time goes on. And this is a very exciting time because gradually as time goes on we'll come up with new input methods, new technologies that'll help with battery power with, I don't know if you know about foveated rendering, the idea that you don't need to render all of the pixels on one screen. Instead, you render only a fraction, maybe 5% of the pixels, where you're directly looking at. And then you can blur out the pixels in the extremities. And what that allows is, with very low latency eye tracking, to reduce the amount of workload that's put on the GPU considerably. And that, in turn, should have a positive impact on something like Game Face, where we don't have the GPU power that someone like Oculus or a PC will have. But nonetheless, we can still create that immersive experience. So yeah, that answers it. Lovely.
[00:17:03.708] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thanks so much.
[00:17:05.109] Edward Mason: Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.
