Denny Unger is the CEO & President of Cloudhead Games, and he’s been working on the VR adventure game of The Gallery Six Elements since March 2013. Denny talks about the challenges of hardware integration as well as how to deal with rotations & locomotion within VR in a way that is comfortable for users.
His team has come across a “VR comfort mode” solution for rotating in VR by snapping 10 degrees at a time similar to how a dancer would focus on a specific spot while turning. He also talks about how other VR design elements such as pacing and scaling can contribute to a sense of presence.
Denny talks about the challenges with working with integrating so many different types of hardware at a point where it is still really new and raw. He sees that motion control is the future of VR because it can help create that natural sense of presence.
He then talks about Valve’s influence in VR, and how they’re working with indie and AAA developers to help integrate VR into future gaming experiences. Denny had a chance to experience Valve’s famous VR room, and gives some of his impressions of what really stuck out for him, and his vision of the future of having a living room Holodeck.
Finally, he talks about the future of VR with what he sees as low-hanging fruit of horror and first-person shooters, and that indie developers will be the ones who are innovating and helping to define the VR medium. But also that Oculus’ collaboration with Facebook has the potential to define the VR social experiences, and how that will shape the social culture of the metaverse. Denny also had one of the first successful, VR game Kickstarter campaigns, and more info on that can be found here.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro. Gallery: Six Elements. Puzzle solving adventure
- 0:29 – Realizations of locomotion in virtual reality. Challenge to integrate all sorts of hardware. Locomotion is unchartered. How to deal with rotations & velocity in VR.
- 1:09 – What is VR comfort mode? Any motion not driven by the user can be uncomfortable. Rotational velocity can make players nauseous because of the vestibular disconnect – VR comfort mode spins increments that is similar to spotting for spinning dancers within a software context.
- 2:15 – How much of an offset did you use? Around 10 degrees, but not sure.
- 2:43 – How did VR comfort mode come about. Started with 180 turn, and then brainstormed quick snap turns. Turning didn’t feel comfortable to early release players.
- 3:43 – Is it proprietary? Want it to be adopted and become an optional standard in games.
- 4:12 – How does scale play into designing VR experiences? A lot of engines get it right. Have to get into VR to look at it. Getting scale 1:1 will help with creating a sense of presence.
- 4:46 – Why is pacing important? Having a slow enough velocity to realistic pacing scales for pacing and presence
- 5:38 – Integrating motion tracking with game controllers? Implementing both. The future of VR is motion control. Right now the tools are a bit raw, but it’ll get refined. It is the ultimate experience in VR.
- 6:28 – What were some failures of things that didn’t work. Locomotion and tank mode vs move with where you’re looking. Dealing with Unity fixes that don’t work. Making sure that your head doesn’t clip through. What happens when you push into a wall?
- 8:00 – How do you deal with the clipping issue? A blend of dimming and other solutions.
- 8:51 – Consulting with Oculus, Valve, and Sixense. Collaborating with Oculus VR perceptual psychologist on VR comfort mode. Ways to make it look VR comfort mode prettier. Talking with Valve about positional tracking and it’s influence on game design. Working on Steam VR overlay system that allows developers to transfer your control systems to different VR HMDs. Sixense has provided hardware support, and integrating the Razer Hydra with their game to bring in motion controls into their game in a way that’s easy for users and developers to use.
- 11:11 – Valve’s Steam Dev Days event as a turning point for VR. Valve understands that VR will change a lot of different entertainment ecosystems over the next five years. They jumped in on it, and thinking about how it works for gamers, indie developers, and AAA shops. They showed their magical VR room as a proof-of-concept of the ultimate VR experience, and the Holodeck in your living room. That was a great experience.
- 12:48 – Experiences of what you saw in Valves demo. Portal robots felt real since you were able to walk around it.
- 13:42 – 4k demo scene demo that was converted to VR. It was very impressive because the sense of scale you can get from VR
- 14:20 – Where you do see VR going? Lots of horror games and first person shooters. Indie developers will be driving a lot of the innovation. There will be lots of low hanging suit. What Oculus does with Facebook could potentially drive the market. If Zuckerberg is really enthralled with the metaverse, then would could see a radical transformation of our online culture, and how we interact with each other. Overarching change will be the social interactions.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.058] Denny Unger: I'm Denny Unger, creative director and president of Cloudhead Games. We're working on The Gallery 6 Elements. We've been working on this since last March, 2013. And it's basically a puzzle-solving adventure game made for the Oculus and for Morpheus, hopefully, is what we're kind of intending.
[00:00:29.319] Kent Bye: I see. And so being an adventure game, maybe you could talk about some of the realizations that you had in terms of locomotion and virtual reality.
[00:00:38.244] Denny Unger: Well, I mean, that was the thing going into this whole production. We didn't quite wrap our heads around was just how big of a challenge it would be to make all of these disparate pieces of hardware work together in a way that made sense. And locomotion in VR is sort of like this grand uncharted territory. So we spent a long time coming to terms with what was comfortable, what didn't make people feel sick, and how to address some of the bigger challenges with rotation and velocities in VR.
[00:01:06.475] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could describe to me the comfort mode and what that means in terms of a potential solution for locomotion and virtual reality.
[00:01:14.100] Denny Unger: Right. So one of the big issues in VR is it has to do with rotation. Like, anything that's not driven by you, the player, tends to make you sick. And one of the key nausea-inducing things is rotational velocity. So if you're spinning in a circle, if it's driven by a game pad, that's kind of moving at a set velocity around that circle. And it's not being driven by you, the player, standing up and moving your body around. So that creates an instant vestibular disconnect between what your eyes are seeing, what your ears are feeling. So you really have to address that as a developer. How are we going to have players turn comfortably in a game? So we came up with VR comfort mode. The easiest analogy for it is basically it's like a dancer, a ballerina spinning in a circle. And she's always spotting, she's always looking for that spot in the distance so that she doesn't ever feel dizzy while she's doing her rotations. So we've basically done that kind of simplification in a software context. So you never feel dizzy when you're rotating. And it's an option. Not everybody's going to love it, but it's something that does really address the issue for the majority of players.
[00:02:14.737] Kent Bye: I see. And so if you were to say that there's 360 degrees in a circle, then how much of an offset are you rotating the background when you are doing this comfort mode?
[00:02:24.582] Denny Unger: Right. Well, we played with a lot of different values. I can't actually tell you the exact value. The second, I think it's like 10 degrees and it happens very quickly. There's, there's a few frames that happen between that offset. So you do get a sense of motion. It's not an instantaneous ratchet, but it happens fast enough that you don't get that vestibular disturbance.
[00:02:42.898] Kent Bye: And so how did you discover this? How did that come about?
[00:02:46.640] Denny Unger: Well, we were talking about doing things with the joystick where you basically be able to turn 180 degrees right behind you. And that ended up evolving into a conversation about how we could do sort of quick snap turns and how that might feel in VR. We released the Exploration School demo in December for our backers. And that had just sort of a traditional rotation happening. So you push right on the right analog stick and you would rotate in a circle, right? And for a lot of people, that just didn't feel good. It feels different with a mouse. A mouse, you can kind of control the velocity of the turn by pushing the mouse faster, so you kind of have that sense of how fast you're going to turn. So we had to figure out a way to build in that sense of predictability with rotations. And from the feedback we got from the EX school, we realized we had to sort of tackle that problem. And also, when Oculus announced that they were doing sit-down experiences, we realized that because players couldn't stand up and rotate in a circle, you know, by standing and doing that job, we had to come up with a really novel solution for rotation.
[00:03:44.293] Kent Bye: And so I saw that it was also a proprietary solution, and what's that mean? Does that mean that other people won't be able to use the same mechanism, or how is it kind of locked down?
[00:03:53.715] Denny Unger: I actually want this to be adopted by a lot of people and indies especially because I think it will become or it should become an optional standard. It's something that I think will address the big problem for a lot of gamers that have problems with VR and rotation. So it's something I hope to see used, you know? Yeah.
[00:04:11.543] Kent Bye: I see. I'm curious about, you know, you mentioned in your bio about scale and how scale kind of plays into the designing of a virtual reality environment.
[00:04:20.140] Denny Unger: Well, getting scale right is, depending on what engine you're using, you know, the scale values, the sort of native scale values can be completely wrong for VR. Like Unity doesn't quite get it right. I don't think any engine really gets it right. The only way to make scale feel accurate is to just get in there and start playing with scale values. So you see it a lot in games that are converted for VR. and they just sort of hastily do a port or a conversion and you look down at your body or your car or whatever you're looking at and the scale, you feel like you're sitting in a tinker toy or something like that. So scale is reality. So if you can get your scale one-to-one, then it's going to feel more real, more present.
[00:04:56.607] Kent Bye: You also mentioned pacing as being an important part of a VR experience. Maybe you could talk about why you say that.
[00:05:02.542] Denny Unger: Sure. Pacing in VR is super important for a variety of reasons. Again, it comes down to velocities. So in a lot of games, especially, you know, your run-of-the-mill first-person shooters and that kind of thing, they tend to sort of blast you through a scene at 30 kilometers an hour or whatever the unrealistic movement speed is for walking or running. And I think slowing things down to realistic scales, realistic pacing scales, is super important, again, for immersion and for presence. And giving players really a chance to look around and absorb the places and environments that they're in, I think is really important for conveying a sense of presence.
[00:05:37.846] Kent Bye: And do you have a hand motion tracking as well, or are you just focusing on the game controller? And I'm just curious if you're doing both, how you kind of, like, make those design decisions.
[00:05:48.135] Denny Unger: Yeah, so both, absolutely, because not everybody's going to have access to motion controllers unless it's natively applied to whatever package Oculus or Morpheus roll out. So we're trying to account for both and we've done a pretty good job of implementing gamepad and making those arm interactions still feel kind of good. I think that motion control is sort of the top of the pyramid in terms of experience, and it's another tool that allows you to really make people and players feel engaged and part of the environment, so it's an important... I think the future of VR is definitely motion control. It's going to go there, it's just that right now the tools are a bit raw, they're a bit rough, but it's going to be refined because it is the ultimate experience in VR.
[00:06:29.162] Kent Bye: And so having been doing some development in virtual reality for the last year, I'm just curious about any of the failures that you did in terms of trying out things that just didn't work at all.
[00:06:38.257] Denny Unger: Failures. Well, I mean, there's so many that I can't even... I can't even tell you. Let me try to think of a few. It always comes back to locomotion and what your sensibilities are with merging. Because our game is an experience that is embodied, you have a body, you can see your body, you're existing in that virtual form. Coming to terms with that and making sure that all the locomotion that's happening makes sense. Like, for example, When you're walking in a straight line in VR, do you want to give players a tank mode where they can look around freely while their body walks in one direction? Or do you want their body to track with their vision? Do you want it to align with that? So we made a lot of sort of hilarious mistakes with trying to blend these different movement modes and none of it felt right. You felt like a contortionist, you know? You didn't feel appropriate to a specific direction. I think that's where a lot of the hilarity came in. And then dealing with Unity physics, Unity doesn't have a great physics engine, so you end up coming against a lot of issues that just don't work, like making sure that your avatar's head doesn't clip through walls and, you know, all kinds of really strange issues that are specific to VR. That was actually a big one. Or what happens when you put your virtual hand against a virtual wall and push out? Does your body move back? Or does your arm basically not go anywhere, you know? So you come up against these really weird challenges, and the only way to kind of resolve them is to get in there and see how it feels in every mode.
[00:08:00.905] Kent Bye: Yeah, with the positional tracking that's sort of come up again, like, how have you addressed that issue? I mean, you put your head through a wall, and does it turn black? Or how have you been dealing with that?
[00:08:08.966] Denny Unger: So I don't think that's the right... I think it's a blend of things. Rather than being able to stick your head through a wall, I think that would feel far worse than implementing another solution. So for example, if I'm standing against the wall, and I lean my head over, or my torso over to the wall, and it's at the point where it could clip, I would rather see the body get pushed away from the wall, but I would also augment that with some kind of dimming, some kind of secondary feedback that's telling you that you've sort of crossed that line of proximity, but also sort of dimmed down the visuals. It's kind of the same idea of doing like a snap rotation. You're trying to solve a problem by sort of skipping over it in a really abstracted way. So I think you have to come at it from that way.
[00:08:50.875] Kent Bye: And so you've said that you've done some consulting services with Oculus, VR, Valve, and Sixth Sense. Can you talk a bit about what type of consulting that you're providing to them?
[00:09:00.557] Denny Unger: Sure. So with Oculus, we talked with their perceptual psychologists about our solutions with VR comfort mode, and what we were actually doing, the values used, and how we were implementing, and whether or not that was a successful strategy, and whether or not they had thought of these things before, and how far to push it, right? So there was a lot of talk back and forth about ways to make that look prettier and really what it comes down to is the action happens so quickly that you can't really gloss over it, you can't add special post effects, you can't do anything. So we had some really interesting back and forth dialogue with Oculus about that. And so with Valve we're also talking to them quite a bit about positional tracking and how that influences game design and we're working with them on their SteamVR overlay system. So basically that allows you to, as a developer, very easily sort of transfer your control mechanisms in VR to a number of headsets and peripheral devices. So I think Valve is just really conscientious about how SteamVR is going to apply to every developer and future headsets because it's going to be a competitive market, you know, and I think they see that. So they want to work with smaller indies like ourselves to understand what our challenges are and how to make that work better. In Sixth Sense, we've been working with them since, well, very early on, just after our Kickstarter, and they provided hardware support for us from the beginning, and it was really the first time that we were able to take a pre-existing technology, the Hydra, at that time it was called, which was made by Razer, basically licensed from Sixth Sense, and so they released the Hydra, and it was a great tool that never really saw its sort of ultimate utilization. And I think that VR, obviously, once everybody got their hands on a viable headset, they realized, wow, this is a great sort of stepping stone product we can use to bring in motion control to our games. So Sixth Sense has been super supportive that way and we've just been working to try to basically help them help us bring to market a really comprehensive motion control technology that is really easy to use. Both from a consumer's perspective and from a developer's perspective.
[00:11:11.034] Kent Bye: You attended the last Steam Developer Days conference and it seemed like there was a big push towards virtual reality there and so I'm just curious about how you see that event in terms of a turning point in terms of the history of VR.
[00:11:24.674] Denny Unger: I think it's why everybody thinks it's massive because And with a forward-looking company like Valve, you know, to really see that for what it is, like, they understood that within five years this technology is going to change a lot of different entertainment ecosystems. So they jumped on it and they're like, okay, well, how do we make this all make sense to the consumer, to you, the developer? And I think they're being super responsible in terms of how they're rolling that stuff out and engaging indies and AAAs and the whole sort of spectrum of game developers. And another great thing they did there was they showed their magical room, their proprietary hardware. And it's not something they're selling, they're not building a commercial product, but it's all of their mad engineers saying, okay, what could the ultimate VR experience be? And they've created this amazing room that really does show where it could go. It's this sort of small, closed-off volume of space that you can fully interact with. When I was there getting a demo, the very first thing I did was lay down on the floor, because I'm like, I want to do all the things I want to do in VR and see if I can push the system. And their system held up beautifully. So I was on the floor looking down a pit and doing all these things I could do to break the system. But it was a great experience, and it really did show what this sort of future living room holodeck might be. And I really do believe we're going to go that way in five years. And I think their vision is right on the money.
[00:12:48.340] Kent Bye: Were you scared of standing up at high ledges or some of the other experiences that you had in those series of demos that you saw?
[00:12:55.513] Denny Unger: No, but I think the whole heights thing was just a consequence of developing for a long time and getting over that stuff. But the one thing that did strike me was they had this portal, what were they called? I'm sorry, the sentries from Portal, what are they called? The little robots? Yeah, anyways, so they had this factory assembly line that you were basically standing in the midst of and you could walk around these robots as they're being assembled and there's these huge arms coming in and assembling parts and you really did feel a sense of danger, like you were gonna get hit by these massive moving gears, you know? And it was because you could actually walk around this object, this virtual object, and you're physically rotating your body, physically walking around a space, it felt real, you know. And it was this third bar, you know, it was crossing over into another level of VR realism.
[00:13:42.492] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you had also linked off to the 64k demo that they had converted. Do you have a sense of, you know, people are doing in the demo scene, these really intense visual experiences and only 64k of size. And so did they reverse engineer that and then turn that into VR or, you know, do you have any sense of like what they actually did to kind of convert that?
[00:14:04.986] Denny Unger: I'm not sure what they did, but it was still very impressive. It had to do, again, I think it's scale. It had to do with the sense of scale you can get from VR, even with very basic building blocks, you know, as your environment. So it was still very impressive.
[00:14:20.766] Kent Bye: So finally, maybe you could just sort of wrap up in terms of where you see VR going in the next five years or so.
[00:14:27.951] Denny Unger: A lot of horror games. A lot of first-person shooters. Honestly, I think that there'll be this sort of new renaissance with indie developers doing all kinds of crazy, different VR experiences. I think there'll be a lot of low-hanging fruit, like horror experiences. Not that all horror games are bad, but... You know, it's the easiest one to get a rise out of people, especially in VR. But I think that what Oculus is going to be doing with Facebook is ultimately going to drive or potentially drive the market. And I think that if, like, Zuckerberg is really enthralled with the metaverse as he says he is, if that's really his thing, then we're going to see sort of a radical transformation of our social online culture and how we interact with each other. That will be sort of the killer VR app. Games will always have their place and we'll do that for entertainment or whatever But I think the overarching sort of change in society will have to do with Interacting in a virtual space for work for training for education all that stuff.
[00:15:25.935] Kent Bye: Yeah Great. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you
