Daniel O’Brien is the Vice President of Business Planning and Management for Virtual Reality at HTC. I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX Prime in the HTV Vive private demo area. Dan talks about the first time that he tried Valve’s room-scale VR, and some of the story for how the collaboration between Valve and HTC began.
Daniel talks about how creating the Vive has been a true collaboration between Valve and HTC, and that they don’t like to get too much into the details of who did what because they’ve both had a part in creating the hardware and software for both the developer kits and final consumer version.
Daniel said that there will be some upcoming announcements with more information on the final consumer product as well as the timing of the release. He said that there would be a limited quantity at the end of this year, but didn’t specify whether that limited quantity would be available to the general public or released to specific developers. More details on the target release dates and some more details on the final specifications, as well as some of the extended capabilities, should be coming soon.
I asked Daniel if he thought that the initial HTC Vive experiences would primarily be games, and he did say that he expected that a lot of the initial experiences and innovations would be coming from the gaming market. But he expects that there will also be a healthy ecosystem of non-gaming applications that will be emerging within the next couple of years. He didn’t specify how many dev kits have already been distributed or what percentage were sent to non-gaming applications, but it does sound like there will be some non-gaming applications released for the Vive as well.
Finally, Daniel talks about the some of the marketing initiatives for the HTC Vive, and that it’s not something that you can read about in a magazine to understand it. They’re dedicated to providing opportunities for people to experience room-scale VR first-hand with their World Tour, as well as going to various tech events.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.256] Daniel OBrien: Hi, I'm Dan O'Brien. I'm the vice president of business planning and management for VR at HTC. So I manage the teams that work on our content, dev outreach, our engineering teams, as well as our sales and marketing teams.
[00:00:28.641] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could talk a bit about your experience at GDC and what that was kind of like to reveal all this work that you've been doing in collaboration with Valve.
[00:00:37.618] Daniel OBrien: Well, you know, that was a really exciting week. We started working together last year, early last year. And our executives actually met together. And it was very organic. And we had very complementary capabilities. And we saw a real opportunity for a partnership. And we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about choosing to work with each other. And we went to work right away. Last year we really put together a plan for attending actually Mobile World Congress and GDC and we revealed the partnership at Mobile World Congress and that was a big surprise for a lot of people. That was very exciting. A lot of companies actually knew. There was about 20 companies inside the know there and actually everybody kept quiet which was nice. But we iterated together. We worked together on putting together that dev kit release and showing that off. And that was really, really exciting for people. A lot of people were very surprised about not only the partnership, but just that we were able to keep quiet about the actual product that we were going to be revealing.
[00:01:42.364] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, maybe you could tell me about your first personal experience with this technology. Did you go to the Valve room and see the demo? And maybe what was your experience of that?
[00:01:52.890] Daniel OBrien: So yeah, I actually went over to the Valve office and I did their fiducial marker room demo where you walked around on their early prototype, which they got to show a lot of people. And they were really just bringing people into the know of just room scale, right? And room scale VR. And at that time it wasn't using the lighthouse laser tracking. And I was just amazed. I was amazed at how real it was, how the presence and how tricked my eyes and my body felt in that environment. And I was like, wow, this is... This is going to be life-changing. This is going to be different. So we really just put our heads down very, very quickly and said, how quickly can we move? And realistically, how quickly can we build a dev kit? How quickly can we get to a commercial hardware? And we found we could move pretty quickly. We actually had, HTC had been designing for VR before we met Valve and thinking about our solutions and thinking how we could do that. And Valve had been pioneering this whole room scale design and capabilities. And that was just a whole other level. And we got to see that with the demo. And then we really brought just complimentary expertises to the table to get to where we are today.
[00:03:02.934] Kent Bye: And so since that time, there's been a number of dev kits that have been sent out to developers who are actively working on different experiences. And can you say about how many developers receive the dev kits?
[00:03:15.406] Daniel OBrien: No, we're not communicating a specific number. What we're saying at this point is we have distributed a lot of kits. We're going to continue to distribute kits through the summer, the remainder of the summer and this fall and leading up to the launch, you know, where we'll have limited quantities at the end of this year and then more in Q1.
[00:03:33.961] Kent Bye: So I guess what's that mean, limited quantities? Does that mean that you have to kind of qualify to buy one? Or is it going to be a supply and demand? Or what's the plan in terms of this being available and then kind of the wider release in the Q1 of 2016?
[00:03:47.465] Daniel OBrien: So we're just going to stick to our line. But yeah, we're going to have an announcement later this year. And we're going to reveal a lot of things around timing, availability, launch partners and titles. We really want to be a good partner to our dev community and really lifting up the community and lifting up the partners. But later this year, we will do our announcement, and we will be revealing all of those fun details, the final ID, the final controller ID, all those fun details for consumers. And we're going to hold until we get to there.
[00:04:20.104] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, maybe you could tell me a bit about your experience of the controllers that you have, because there's a number of different buttons. And so how would you describe to me what this controller is able to do?
[00:04:32.414] Daniel OBrien: Well, I think one of the really fun things about the controller is one, like even in the demo experience, how we reveal it to people and how just natural it is for people to figure out how to use it so quickly. And then a lot of people come out of the demo, we've done numerous, you know, just thousands of play testing of just different users as well as our own engineers. you know, our industrial design team, which is a world-class design team, and they're really thinking about ergonomics, and comfort, and long-time usage, and using a trackpad, and using a trigger, and using a grip, right, and using those buttons, and then how does that naturally flow for game design developers as well as non-game design developers. I mean, the first thing you do when you put on an HMD is you reach your hands out, right? You want to see your hands. You want to interact with your content and your experience, and that makes the presence that much more real, and that makes it feel so much better and natural. And when you can interact with things and touch things and... So, from an overall design perspective, I think we're just thinking about a lot of the ergonomics, thinking about a lot of the function, what's natural for game developers, for consumers, and then what feels natural in their hands, you know, to interact with that environment, and we've just been long time iterating on that. And, you know, the DevKit controller, you know, really, you know, we're showing off basically the button functionality of what we'll have in that final design. But the final design will look significantly different from that.
[00:06:03.816] Kent Bye: And this collaboration between Valve and HTC is a really interesting one because you have a software company that innovated on this hardware side, but yet you're kind of more on the hardware side. And so how do you think about how that split and that collaboration is developing and who's doing what?
[00:06:21.615] Daniel OBrien: Well, we don't like to go into too much about who's doing what, and we don't want anyone to feel undervalued in what they contributed, because it is a true collaboration where HTC actually has a massive software team, and a hardware manufacturing capability, and a design hardware manufacturing capability, and world-class designers with multiple awards for amazing designs. you know, Valve has been pioneering this VR space, right? And these guys are true craftsmen, you know, in the software field and their products, right? And what they create. And so they really did an amazing job coming up with SteamVR and the tracking solution and the Lighthouse solution. And we really had to work on the dev kit together. We had to look at what works in the sensor design and how it all came together. So there was a lot of iterating back and forth. We actually had to learn things together as we started developing the product. And we had to make adjustments both on the software side and the hardware side. And when you look at it and go, well, who did what? I could sit there with a PowerPoint slide probably and go, okay, this stack was done by this person and that's pretty boring. I think in true feelings, you know, I look at it and go it was a real partnership to get to where we are today. You know, to get to the hardware that we have today, the teams really had to work very hard together, very long hours together. They had to iterate on the hardware. You know, we had to spin up versions of that hardware, trying different sensor positions and different sensor angles and learning things that worked and didn't work. And then once we went to the laser tracking, we had to learn a whole set of new things about what worked and didn't work. And we're continuing that process together. And I wouldn't take anything from Valve. I wouldn't take anything from the HTC team either. These are world-class engineering teams working together.
[00:08:15.977] Kent Bye: And I think another interesting thing about collaborating with Valve is that they have Steam as a distribution platform. And so how do you see that as an advantage or how that is going to help with the HTC Vive?
[00:08:29.624] Daniel OBrien: Well, you look at Steam, and they're a world-class software engineering company. They've really been leading in this VR space and being very open and helpful to the community and other VR, not only developers, but other partners. They have this amazing platform, right? It's a world-class platform that they've built from the ground up themselves. And they have 125 million active customers. That's a really healthy base. And it's a really, I think what's great about it is developers that want to develop VR content, they should feel really good about bringing their content and putting it on Steam. That's a very healthy place for them to bring their content. It's a very healthy place for them to monetize their content. And it's a great partnership in that respect. I think it's great for devs, right, and creatives and the people that want to come up with things. And how can they then distribute it? I think that's a huge advantage right now. The Steam existing user base and the Steam Consumer base people really they love steam, you know and steam users love steam There's some of the most passionate consumers and customers that I've ever interacted with So valve being very much into gaming Do you foresee that the majority of the applications on the HTC Vive will be gaming applications?
[00:09:51.873] Kent Bye: Or do you see that there's a lot of other non gaming applications that we may see?
[00:09:57.855] Daniel OBrien: So what I would say on that is that gaming, you know, Valve is a huge software company that not only makes games themselves, but distributes games, right? They're known for that. That platform is known for that. It's an amazing brand for that. But thinking about VR content, right? And thinking about the creatives and thinking about the developers and thinking about the storytellers and the people that want to come up with the creative solutions for VR, where are they? Who are they? What studios do they work in? Whether they're indie or large studios, who has the expertise to create this kind of content? And they are game developers. You know, they are coming from either the entertainment industry or the game development industry. So these guys, when we think about what is going to be that primary content in the very beginning, it's of course going to be gaming and we want to encourage that. Because not only are they the most skilled people to understand things like geometry, shading, texturing, and storytelling, and then solving the problems of storytelling now with room scale, right? And the things that we've done to flip linear storytelling. the challenges that we've now created with room-scale VR. We've created all kinds of new problems for creatives and devs, right? But they're excited about solving those problems. What's so great about the dev community that's going to really just sink their teeth into these problems and create great experiences, they're going to build tools. They're going to build solutions. They're going to build... The dev community is going to build the best practices. HTC, Valve, we're not going to tell people what's the best practices. The devs are going to tell us what's the best practices. And when they actually tell their story and when they come up with their experiences and their games and whatever they come up with, they're going to now pave the way for the non-game industry to come to life. And then it's limitless, right? It's cliche to say, but it's limitless in what you could do with the Vive and what you could do in VR and the types of experiences and the niche, you know, verticals that you could go into from education to medical to, you know, so many other places to virtual travel to you know, social situations, you know, in VR. There's a million ideas, you know, that I can come up with. You know, if I have the opportunity to just stop worrying about the business for a few minutes and actually just think about the creative ideas that we could come up with, the industry's going to grow and mature, but it's going to grow from these devs first, and then it's going to mature after that. And I'm just stoked about every new experience I get to try. and the vibe and, you know, see what people have come up with. You know, here at PAX, you know, we're showing off the fantastic contraption and that's just so fun. You know, I built this amazing contraption. I was really going for something massive in scale and I pulled this pin out and it popped half of my contraption. And I was so, you know, everybody in the room was watching me and just hysterical laughing at me. And I was just like, that was a truly brilliant idea. everybody's coming up with just so many different ideas and I was just, those are the things I'm really looking forward to and I just, you know, the devs were excited about telling their story, you know, because that's what people are going to use, that's what they want to, they will buy the Vive to have these experiences and experience these different creatives and the different stories and the storytellers, so I think that's what we're really excited about.
[00:13:30.102] Kent Bye: Well, the final question that I always ask everybody, and you kind of touched on it a little bit, but just to kind of put it more directly is, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:13:42.753] Daniel OBrien: It's a really good question. It's a really hard question. I'm going to give myself a pass on it and say, I don't know what it is. And I don't want to be prescriptive ever about what it should be. I want to put HTC in the position that says, whoever thinks they have that idea and they want to come work with us, we want to work with them. And we want to help their idea come to life. And that's what we're excited about.
[00:14:09.181] Kent Bye: OK. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:14:13.555] Daniel OBrien: you know, we're going to be out there with the Vive as much as we can, trying to get people to experience it, right? It's so hard to, you can't experience the Vive on a, in a magazine, right? You can't experience it on a billboard or a TV screen. So we're out there. We're going to try to get to as many people as possible. We're going to be going to more shows. bringing our truck around, we're going to actually expand our footprint of trying to get people exposure to it. So, you know, follow along at the, you know, HTC Vive, you know, on our social feeds and find out where we're going to be next because we're really excited to show people.
[00:14:45.452] Kent Bye: Yeah, you have the world tour for the Valve HTC Vive truck that's been going around the country. And I guess that's a challenge, because room scale VR is so different than even sitting down VR. So it's an extra challenge that you have to really get in there and see it. So that's going to continue, it sounds like.
[00:15:05.753] Daniel OBrien: Yeah, when it comes to the tour and getting people those experiences, when people are going in to see the Vive today, they get to see a very robust room scale, right? We like to show off the robustness of how much scale and volume of space you can do VR in and how immersive that can be and how fun that can be. We pretty much expect people to do experiences around the size of maybe like two yoga mats. You know, that's about, you know, to give people a point of reference of what we think the size will be. But it's a scalable solution. We can go to this big volume of space, we can go to the seated experience, and it works great. And so we really feel like we've got a great solution with the SteamVR tracking and the Lighthouse tracking. You know, people are going to be able to have lots of different experiences with the Vive. And we will start showing off more of the versatility of the Vive in the coming weeks and months. We'll show off more experiences, and we'll bring more dev experiences for people to come and try. We have the truck out there. We're going to be at a lot more shows. We announced we're going to EGX. And we'll continue to show off more. We hope to be involved with more game jams, getting more people exposed to it, getting more developers exposed to it. You know, and then we'll look to create a lot more opportunities for people to come and actually do the vive, you know demos that's a big challenge for us to solve right now because that's that is the most compelling thing and I think the most compelling thing for us is getting people into the experience and then capturing that moment when they come out of that experience because that's the aha moment where people really feel They see the promise and they see that it's real and they feel really good about it. They're excited about it. They're excited about what's to come, you know, from this.
[00:16:51.785] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
