At Google I/O this year, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There’s a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to start developing Daydream-ready apps, and Google has also released a Google VR Unity SDK that includes a number of DaydreamLabs Controller Playground examples to demonstrate different user interactions with the 3DOF controller.
I had a chance to catch up with Google VR’s Alex Faaborg at the Casual Connect conference where talked about some of the VR design best practices, some of the early survey results from Google showing an average play time of 30 minutes per session, what can be learned from Pokémon Go, the differences between Tango and Daydream app design, social norms around using VR around other people, and the future of conversational interfaces.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So at Google I-O this year, Google made a big announcement in the world of VR, saying that VR is going to be coming to all of the Android phones through the Daydream VR headset. So, Samsung has their Gear VR, which is kind of like a subsection of Android phones and very specifically to the Samsung line of phones, but yet the Daydream is going to be a lot wider adoption and has the potential to be the largest installation base that's out there of any VR headset. Today, I have a chance to sit down with Alex Faborg of the Google VR team, and he's going to be talking about VR design best practices, about all the research that they've been doing in surveys, as well as how to specifically develop some of these mobile applications for the daydream VR. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. This is a paid sponsored ad by the Intel Core i7 processor. VR really forced me to buy my first high-end gaming PC And so Intel asked me to come talk about my process. So my philosophy was to get the absolute best parts on everything, because I really don't want to have to worry about replacing components once the second gen headsets come out and the VR min specs will inevitably go up at some point. So I did rigorous research online, looked at all the benchmarks, online reviews. And what I found was that the best CPU was the Intel Core i7 processor. But don't take my word for it. Go do your own research. And I think what you'll find is that the i7 really is the best option that's out there. So this interview with Alex happened at the Casual Connect conference that was happening from July 18th to 20th, 2016 in San Francisco. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:01.956] Alex Faaborg: Hi, I'm Alex Faborg. I'm a designer on the VR team at Google, work on the publishing and developer engineering group. Mostly right now I'm focused on VR design best practices and helping our partners build the best applications they can for the platform.
[00:02:14.883] Kent Bye: Great, so we're here at Casual Connect, and you gave a talk about some of your VR design best practices. So what were some of the things that you were sharing with this crowd here?
[00:02:22.938] Alex Faaborg: I think particularly for this crowd, it's a little ironic showing up to explain how casual gaming might not work actually that well in VR. Obviously, any sort of time-based mechanics aren't going to work because users aren't going to just put on a VR headset randomly throughout the day. We're not going to see the same kind of short-form interactions that we have with mobile. We're expecting sessions to be 30 minutes in length. So really, developers need to think about this as an entirely new platform. Even though it involves a phone, it's a totally different context for the user.
[00:02:49.159] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that I was just talking to some other people making the same argument that it feels like it's quite a commitment to dive into a VR experience. Once you decide to go in, you're kind of making a decision to completely isolate yourself from the surrounding area. And I also expect that it's going to be more in the privacy of your own home and less in a bus or in public spaces. Because I just feel like there's a lot of kind of complicated social dynamics that are happening there. So yeah, I'm just curious from your perspective if you see that people are going to mostly be doing some of these experiences at home or if you expect people to be doing this out in public.
[00:03:25.106] Alex Faaborg: Yeah, I think definitely from all the current devices out on the market, we're seeing people use them at home. Maybe one exception would be like business travelers and hotels or maybe in an airplane because people already have neck pillows and those already kind of look silly. So maybe the VR headset kind of helps with the neck pillow for full head coverage. I don't know. That's probably the only situation in public where I think we may commonly see VR.
[00:03:47.820] Kent Bye: And you mentioned that Google's been doing a number of different research studies and looking at different questions and doing surveys. And so what kind of results that you found from that that get applied to VR design?
[00:03:59.806] Alex Faaborg: A lot of it's really encouraging. We're finding that people will use VR devices. The session length is pretty much based off the quality of the content. So people will stop using VR when they finish an application or don't find it interesting anymore, which is great because it means for developers they can really craft deep, immersive experiences that the users are going to have a lot of fun using. Other things we're finding, the gender balance is really good, especially with mobile VR. So hopefully we'll see that more reflected in the content being created. In terms of, there aren't really genres right now for VR applications. It's really kind of wide open. So I think that's kind of a blessing and a curse for developers, because they can't speak in kind of the same terminology of other platforms to say exactly what it is they're making. But it's also great in terms of the breadth of creativity that's available right now.
[00:04:47.537] Kent Bye: Yeah, in your VR design talk, I think it's hard to talk about VR without mentioning a lot of the open problems with locomotion, moving around, motion sickness. So what were some of the big messages that you were trying to get across in terms of comfort in VR?
[00:05:02.263] Alex Faaborg: Well, it's definitely something people need to take into account as they're designing their experience because, you know, part of good design is you want people to really, you know, enjoy your experience and not feel uncomfortable. But there's a lot of options out there from, you know, teleporting for locomotion to, you know, blacking out the user's peripheral vision if you do have them moving. So Daydream Labs has done quite a few experiments with locomotion and there's some really interesting stuff. As you get more into like VIVE and 6DOF, being able to climb a ladder involves some amount of movement on your part, which seems to help a bit with dealing with locomotion. You know, obviously anything involving walking around more is going to help with locomotion. It's something the developers are going to trip over at the start. But hopefully, you know, we're starting to see a lot of best practices already out in applications, like Eagle Flight is doing a great job with blacking out peripheral vision. A lot of the Vive titles are doing some really interesting things with locomotion. So I think over the next year or so, we're going to have a good vocabulary of options for developers.
[00:05:55.422] Kent Bye: And I think one of the things that was mentioned at Google I.O. is that all of the Daydream VR applications that are submitted are going to be required to use the 3DOF controller. But to me, there's a big enough difference between a 6DOF controller and the controller for Daydream VR to kind of warrant completely new design patterns from a VR design perspective. So I'm just kind of curious to see if you've found the same, if that people who have already developed Vive games, you know, it's not going to be a matter of just doing a direct port over to have it work just the same within Daydream, but just curious to see what kind of experiences you've had in terms of trying to abstract that out and what kind of like natural fluid motion you're able to get with the controller.
[00:06:35.301] Alex Faaborg: Yeah, so it's actually performing quite a bit better than we initially expected in terms of what you can do with it. There's some interesting things you can do with the accelerometer to sort of have like faux 6DOF, where as you're picking up accelerometer data and movement, you can to some amount have the virtual object move in six degrees. Obviously, it's not as good as something that's fully tracked with, you know, external lighthouses, something like that. So there is quite a bit of work to adapt a game over from Vive to using this type of 3DOF controller. But it doesn't mean it's completely impossible to do some of these interactions. Some of them are still pretty useful. One demo we had was just slicing fruit on a cutting board, which requires 6DOF movement because you need to move the knife around a bit. And it actually felt really good. Remarkably, it didn't break proprioception too much. It was functional. So I think there are some possibilities there.
[00:07:26.742] Kent Bye: And in your talk, you had mentioned that there has been a number of different open source demo projects that Google has released for Daydream VR. Maybe you could talk about some of those apps that are available that people can take a look at and learn how to get some insight and inspiration for how to develop a Daydream VR app.
[00:07:43.020] Alex Faaborg: Yes, so the first one we did was, I guess, a year and a half ago, the Cardboard Design Lab. That covered things like locomotion, gaze cues, spatial audio, keeping the user grounded. A lot of that stuff's actually still pretty valuable, even for Daydream. Most recently, because the controller is the new thing that everyone's interested in, we have a new set of open source demos called the Controller Playground, and that has, I think, 14 or 15 demos in there of completely different game mechanics that you can use for The controller, things like playing tennis or object manipulation. We have a real-time strategy game in there. So really simple in terms of the gameplay. It's just to prove out the controller mechanic. But it's the kind of thing that you can grab the source code, play around with, and maybe build a full game around if you're interested.
[00:08:24.924] Kent Bye: And in your talk, you were showing some range of motion and kind of focus. You had two different ways of describing that. Maybe you could talk about when you are thinking about trying to design a VR application, kind of these bounded ranges that you're really focusing on in terms of where to put the actual user interfaces.
[00:08:43.668] Alex Faaborg: So I think one of the first things you want to think about when designing your app is, is this a seated or standing experience? There isn't a right answer there, but be intentional about being one or the other. Obviously, if it's like a tennis game, you're going to be standing. But for the seated experiences, then think about if you actually do want to require the user to have a swivel chair. Because there's a lot of scenarios where the user, on an airplane in a comfortable chair, that they don't actually want to swivel around. And if you assume that you want to limit users to just seated without being able to move all the way around, then we have some guidelines on field of vision and also field of neck movement, so you can make sure that your experience is staying in a comfortable range for them.
[00:09:20.760] Kent Bye: And within the last week or so, there's been a huge amount of interest in Pokemon Go. Some people calling it augmented reality, even within the app, it has a little button that says AR. I think people who are purists within the immersive computing would kind of debate the level of which there's actual augmented reality with something that would be more along the lines of something like Project Tango, with actually being able to scan the room and place objects that have occlusions and whatnot. But since Nian Nian is a part of Google, I'm just curious from what you see as kind of the cultural phenomena of augmented reality and what you're able to see what people are doing with that application and what VR designers can learn from what Pokemon's doing and what kind of AR can learn from what VR has already done.
[00:10:02.813] Alex Faaborg: Yeah, it's been really exciting to see how much that's taken off recently. They're not actually part of Google anymore. They were spun out as a separate company. But when they were part of Google, we actually shared an office with them. They were in the same building as us. And I guess a few things that have surprised me about the launch is it looks like users will sort of compensate for the lack of Tango. Like we're seeing a lot of people sort of pose the Pokemon in the right position when they take a screenshot. So it's augmented reality when you mix in the user's imagination and them kind of calibrating for it. So I think that shows probably some market demand for the device to being able to do that itself and have these creatures actually jump around and interact with the environment because people are already imagining that even though it doesn't work. And it's been really exciting to see this emerge as it looks like a killer application and something that is going to be very memorable for a big moment in AR.
[00:10:52.408] Kent Bye: Well, what do you think that VR can learn from AR in this specific use case of Pokemon Go?
[00:10:58.304] Alex Faaborg: I'm going to answer more generally first. I think one of the things about VR design that I always find really frustrating is when people force interfaces into fake computers and tablets inside VR. I think this is in some ways kind of like the modern VR skeuomorphism that we feel like, oh, it's more familiar to have this iPad floating there that has, you know, interface on it. But people are, you know, obviously able to figure out, you know, augmented reality interfaces just floating in space in a VR environment. There's absolutely no reason for you to have to cram your UI into a fake computer. So for AR in VR, you can do all sorts of interesting things with mixing interfaces and the virtual world at the same time. Obviously in VR you have total control. Now Pokemon Go specifically, I think the way in which it's cooperative and multiplayer is really exciting. And I think in VR we're going to see a lot of that start to emerge as well. A lot of the social experiences in VR, you know, people you know or people you're randomly meeting, whereas Pokemon Go kind of builds on top of people meeting in one location. And I think, you know, having those same kind of dynamics play out in VR could be really neat.
[00:12:03.078] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the thing that's really striking to me is the location-based dimension of Pokemon Go, where it's actually connecting complete strangers, and they can start to have a human connection outside of the context of the game. And in some ways, you can have a similar type of social connections within the context of VR, but there's not as much serendipity of just bumping into people. it seems like there's something different, social interactions and AR. I think that when I talked to Robert Scoble and I was asking him about Google Glass and one of his theories was that there's actually kind of like this social taboo from breaking eye contact. So if you have something where you have a screen and you're actually looking off on that screen in the middle of talking to somebody, that's sort of like a cultural taboo and that people have this disgust or visceral reaction because it's just kind of breaking the social norms in different ways. And so I see that there's a challenge there for virtual reality because you are literally blocking yourself out from other people that are geographically located around you. Now, you have a more intimate connection with them while you're actually in the virtual environment, but I kind of see this challenge for VR that I don't see with AR as much because you don't have that eye contact break. That said, with Pokemon Go, people are kind of staring off into the screen. So it's kind of virtually creating that same type of eye contact issue that I've seen some articles talking about like the backlash from Pokemon Go of people kind of being the Pokemon Go zombies, you know, people who are just completely immersed and perhaps bumping into people and kind of not respecting the social norms in that way. So I kind of see when I look at this virtual reality and the social dimensions that are there in terms of using it in public or breaking eye contact, I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts to see if you've thought about this or if there's other dimensions because I feel like augmented reality is going to be bigger in a sense because it doesn't have some of these issues and kind of more natural face-to-face interactions, but it feels like there might be specific use cases where being able to completely go into these virtual worlds is going to be a lot more immersive or better in that way.
[00:14:05.472] Alex Faaborg: Yeah, so I guess background on this, I worked on Google Now, and then I did spend a little bit of time working with the Glass team, adapting UI over to that. So I have thought a lot about Glass. And then I transitioned from working Glass to working on Android Wear, in part because I felt like it had a lot of A lot of the same context and functionality, but in a less obtrusive way. In terms of VR, I'm really worried about pass-through cameras, actually, on these devices. Because if people start to feel like it's okay to walk around with a pass-through camera, and they can see, but other people can't see them, it creates a very, very strange situation. Even on an airplane, if a flight attendant is asking you if you'd like something to drink, and you look up, converse with them with a pass-through camera, like, that's really bad. So I'm, like, actually worried that pass-through cameras on VR devices might create a problem in that way, and maybe they're gonna do more of a disservice to VR than actually helping users. So in terms of what I was saying earlier about bringing people together, Pokemon Go, going back to the even earlier point, I don't imagine people using VR in public locations at all. But I think what is interesting about Pokemon Go is having strangers kind of come around to shared purpose. And I think having those shared purposes in VR could be really interesting for people starting to socialize more and being able to communicate and work together.
[00:15:22.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, and because Google also bought Tilt Brush, I think that Tilt Brush, in my opinion, has some of the most sophisticated user interfaces that are around in terms of being able to have a tool that feels natural and intuitive. But I can see a time where that may not scale to all the different options that you want. Even already, there's a button to kind of go and scroll through different options. So it's a challenge of screen real estate, natural intuitive interfaces, and what are some of the findings that you've found in terms of how to present a bounded set of objects that feels like it's not too much but is also intuitive to be able to scan through a large set of things?
[00:16:02.237] Alex Faaborg: If anything we're finding in VR, it's easy to quickly overwhelm the user with UI. You have this infinite screen that surrounds them, so you can quickly create something that's so complex that they're sort of taken aback by its complexity. So I think something designers need to be thinking about and be mindful of with their applications is the user still has sort of limited cognitive load and attention. and helping sort of guide them through the flow of your application without presenting everything all at once. Tilt Brush uses the geometry of the palette in a really good way so that you can, even though it's quickly accessible, you're only really looking at one surface at a time. So, you know, things like that or other sort of navigational techniques with objects floating in space, you know, help to, you know, have people focused on just part of your UI.
[00:16:43.583] Kent Bye: And one of the things that you said is that in order to get to mimicking 2020 vision, we kind of need about 60 pixels per degree. So text within VR, I think, is a challenge in terms of just the blocky aliasing that can happen. And so what are some tips that you found in terms of how to best approach displaying text within VR?
[00:17:03.950] Alex Faaborg: use voice actors. I think something the designers completely ignore is audio, especially people coming from 2D design. It's not common for websites or mobile apps to have audio because people don't have headphones on. With VR, they do, and people forget this. Also, spatial audio is really interesting. sort of hearing is kind of a form of vision that gives you the entire scene all at once. So I think designers can do some really great stuff with audio, with presenting information, you know, instructions as users are looking at things, providing context on things users are looking at. If you really want to fall back on text, obviously make sure you're trying it in a headset and it's actually readable. You know, don't overwhelm the user with a big wall of text, which sadly a lot of applications still do right now.
[00:17:46.016] Kent Bye: And can you talk about using the Daydream controller as a laser pointer?
[00:17:50.152] Alex Faaborg: So it works really well as a laser pointer. So something you want to be mindful of is having a good focus state for the things that you're aiming at. So it's really obvious for users what's presently selected. Because it's 3DOF, if you actually have a laser coming all the way out of the controller, you have to kind of choose an arbitrary spot for that controller to exist in space. So that can be a little bit awkward because we don't know if the user is right or left-handed. The system is actually going to have a preference. As an app designer, you can query that to decide which one you want to put it on. But an even better way is just to kind of feather the laser out as it gets closer to the user so they have a general sense of it coming from them, but it's not coming to an exact point where it's going to mess up proprioception. Other things we found is if you're trying to do something like a drawing or a painting application, It's so accurate that you start to see handshake. And imagine trying to write your name on a distant wall using a laser pointer. It's really hard, especially at far distances. So laser pointing is better for gross gestures and selecting large objects than finely carving something or really delicate work, just because of limitations of our own hands.
[00:18:54.092] Kent Bye: And I can imagine that the trend that I see at least within virtual reality and augmented reality is that we're moving a lot more towards conversational interfaces. So designing interfaces that are activated through voice. But yet I can also see the value of being able to have a virtual keyboard in order to enter in special characters and passwords and stuff like that. So just curious from your perspective of doing a lot of VR design, whether or not you're really focusing on conversational interfaces or if you're trying to also do both.
[00:19:20.920] Alex Faaborg: I think both is important. I don't think you want to have voice as the only way that you can interact with the UI, just because you don't really know the context of the user if they're in a situation where it's OK for them to talk. Interfaces like Android Wear, about half of the UI is based around voice, because it's really fast and you get random access to thousands of different commands. Generally, people don't use that, especially in public. If they're alone in their car or something, they'll use it, and it's really fast. But in retrospect, probably some of those UIs probably should have been touch-based as well. For VR, what I'm really excited about with voice is we have head gaze, potentially in the future eye tracking. So there you can actually do a combination of voice and context where you could say this and the system can know what this means. And I think that's really exciting for being able to have a sort of richer control over what you're working on.
[00:20:07.865] Kent Bye: It seems like, just talking to different people at Google, that there's the Project Tango, which is now Tango, and as well as Daydream, and that these are kind of like projects that are in the same building. And I can imagine a time within maybe two to five years where there'll be one phone that can do both. But at this point, it seems like the technology stacks are different enough, and the open problems in terms of computer vision and all the different sensors that need to be on those phones. that there's not going to be a wide penetration of 3D depth sensor cameras on the Daydream phones to be able to fuse those two together. And perhaps the first Tango phones are not going to be quite ready up to spec for the Daydream. At least that's kind of my understanding. But from a design perspective, I'm curious about the types of experiences that are being created for Tango in VR. And what's different between the two? And what kind of special considerations do you have to take into account when you're doing fully immersive AR versus doing the VR?
[00:21:01.374] Alex Faaborg: Yeah, that's a really good question. In terms of the phones themselves, we probably will at some point see phones that are both Daydream ready and Tango phones. But the applications you're going to be loading on those will be apps that were targeting either Tango or targeting Daydream. And those are going to be a smaller set, of course, than the total number of Tango phones or the total number of Daydream phones. From design considerations, so Tango, of course, you have six degree of freedom. You also have, you know, magic window, the size of the screen that you can use to look on into the virtual, you know, augmented world. So a lot of the design work there is, you know, thinking about how you can detect surfaces to do object placement in a way it's kind of responsive design but involving the real world. And there you start to have more of the types of short transient sessions that you'd have with a mobile phone. So like Pokemon Go is, you know, a short session length, if you were to imagine, you know, like a Tango version of that. Daydream, long sessions, we're looking at, you know, probably 30 minutes plus for users in their Daydream phone. Obviously, 3DOF, so, you know, seated or, you know, standing experiences where you're not moving around very much, you know, things like tennis or golf. And the resolutions, of course, are wildly different when you throw the lenses on top of the screen. So a lot of your UI is going to have to be pretty different between those two, with lower resolution, larger UIs for VR. Yeah, I mean, they're really wildly different. It would be hard to craft an app that works well in both.
[00:22:25.243] Kent Bye: Do you have any favorite prototypes from the Daydream Labs set of many prototypes that they've generated?
[00:22:32.118] Alex Faaborg: I think the ones that really resonated with me, so the dollhouse where you can build something and then shrink down and be inside of it, really kind of struck me because I remember being a kid playing with Lego and just wanting to be the size of a minifig inside the creations. And now suddenly I was, and that was really something. Other stuff they've done, well the locomotion stuff of climbing the ladder, going down slides, like that stuff was really innovative. That was one of those ideas where once I saw it, I'm like, wow, that's a good idea. Other things I've done that really struck me, there's been a few about creating music, playing drums, things like that. Those are really fun. But what was even more fun was just kind of like throwing the objects around. It's like physics is just magical in VR. And being able to have these palettes to create things was really neat. If you haven't seen their talk at Google I-O, I'd really encourage you to watch it, because there's some great stuff in there. Also, they've created a lot of really great stuff that they haven't shown yet. So hopefully they'll have a reprisal talk pretty soon at a new conference, and they can show the latest stuff as well.
[00:23:33.511] Kent Bye: And so what do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:23:36.420] Alex Faaborg: So this is kind of oddly specific, but I grew up in Colorado skiing and I'd love to go skiing in VR, but specifically I'd love to have like a peripheral that I could actually like hook ski boots into, you know, kind of like in the movie Pacific Rim when they drive the robots. And then I actually have like force feedback with the ski boots and be able to really lean forward. Cause like when you're leaning, you're getting some amount of gravity pushing on your back, which kind of feels like you're headed forward. So I want a skiing peripheral for VR. If anyone out there wants to build that, would you please, please build that? And then you can ski on tropical slopes and massive slides. It doesn't have to all be snowy mountains.
[00:24:12.626] Kent Bye: It'd be great. Are you completely immune to simulator sickness?
[00:24:17.116] Alex Faaborg: No, actually, I get really simulator sick. But hopefully, actually leaning forward with the gravity in this case would help to some extent. Initially, I thought being simulator sick would be a problem for my job. It turned out to be an advantage, of course. Only downside is now I have all my co-workers bringing me stuff saying, hey, does this make you sick? So I'm kind of sort of the canary on the team.
[00:24:35.542] Kent Bye: I see. Yeah, I actually get very sensitive as well, and I agree. I think it's actually a benefit to be able to have that sensitivity. But what are some of the things that you find most common in terms of things that don't trigger other people but trigger you in terms of what you're able to discover?
[00:24:52.460] Alex Faaborg: So I think I'm probably pretty normal in terms of what triggers me, but the absolute worst experience that I've ever had in terms of simulator sickness where I had to immediately lie down for a while was turning up the sensitivity of horizontal rotation. We were playing around with that as possibly a solution to people in a seated position having access to the 360. Never do that in an app. It is a really bad idea. Very, very bad.
[00:25:15.052] Kent Bye: So just sort of a given multiplier in terms of either you're standing up or looking around.
[00:25:18.990] Alex Faaborg: Yeah, basically multiplier on, we did, we were smart enough to do only one axis, but yeah, multiplier on turning your head side to side could not handle that.
[00:25:30.027] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's amazing about how sensitive to that we are. And you talked a bit about the poison berry theory. Just on today's episode with Jason Gerald, we talked a little bit about this evolutionary idea is one of the theories of motion sickness. Maybe you could talk a bit about that story of what you shared in terms of what you think could be one possibility as to why motion sickness is connected to like this evolutionary concept of berries.
[00:25:52.478] Alex Faaborg: Well, pretty straightforward. People who are poisoned, if they are able to throw up everything they've eaten very quickly, are less likely of dying from being poisoned, and poisons cause you to have blurred vision and ocular motor disparities. Everything feels like it's slightly laggy. So that's a pretty direct possibility for why any type of ocular visual disparity would cause us to want to throw up all of a sudden. It's been pretty well established that motion sickness is genetic. We've traced the exact genes involved and stuff like that. So yeah, unfortunately our ancestors protecting themselves from poisons out in the world is now making it hard for us to enjoy VR.
[00:26:33.950] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:26:40.895] Alex Faaborg: Well, I think what's really exciting is it just democratizing experiences and VR being for everyone. Education is going to be really interesting in VR in part because spatial memory is really important to how we think and how we are able to store memories and we haven't really tapped into spatial memory that much with a lot of our current education processes. The notion of a memory palace is kind of trying to hack that with special memory yourself, but taking kids on expeditions, they remember those places as if they were places. That helps them retain all that knowledge from the trip. So I think VR for education is going to be really, really interesting going forward.
[00:27:17.527] Kent Bye: And anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:27:20.468] Alex Faaborg: Well, if you're a developer, we encourage you to actually start creating apps for Daydream. You can build your own dev kit using a 6P and any Android phone to emulate the controller. The launch is coming up in the fall, so it should be really interesting to see what apps emerge as we get started with the platform.
[00:27:35.952] Kent Bye: And what phone do they need in order to actually run the latest versions of Daydream VR?
[00:27:40.463] Alex Faaborg: So for the viewer, we're using 6Ps. You have to load it with a special version of Android N. For the controller, really any Android phone will work. We recommend a 5X if you want to just go with something standard. And then in the fall, you'll be able to, of course, purchase actual Daydream-ready phones and the controllers themselves.
[00:27:57.470] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, look forward to it in the fall. So excited to see what happens. So thank you so much, Alex, for joining me today. Thank you. So that was Alex Faborg. He's on the Google VR team, and he was talking about best practices for VR design. So there's a number of different takeaways that I have from this interview is that, first of all, I think it was really striking to me to hear Alex kind of confirm my own suspicion that they kind of really see mobile VR being more of a private type of experience. In other words, he doesn't expect a lot of people to be using the Daydream VR out in public, especially with the 3DOF controller. And so one of the other big things is that when you're designing a mobile VR application, he said that there's kind of a couple of different questions you have to ask yourself. First of all, are you standing up or sitting down? And if you are sitting down, are you in a chair that you are only looking forward, or are you designing it for a swivel chair? So in thinking about mobile VR, without having positional tracking, you're kind of set for either you're standing up, sitting down, or being able to kind of have full movement as you're spinning around. Because a lot of times, if you're designing an application for a swivel chair, but someone is actually using it in a chair where they are, let's say, in an airplane, they can't swing around, then it's not going to be an enjoyable experience. And so the other thing that I really take away is that going into virtual reality is quite a commitment. When you make the decision to go into VR, Google found from surveys is that most people spend about 30 minutes in VR. And so that is quite a dedication and a decision. It's kind of like sitting down to watch a movie or a TV show. commit to watching the whole thing and you know sometimes you can get distracted or stop it and you can interrupt it but it seems like it's going to be a lot harder to interrupt a VR experience because you're really kind of tuning out the entire world. And so Alex says that from a VR designers perspective that's actually really encouraging because if the content is compelling enough then people will either watch all of it or they'll do it until they get bored and then jump out and do something else. So just on that note, in terms of VR and interacting with other people and social dynamics, I think it was really interesting to hear Alex's concern around pass-through cameras where, you know, it's a little bit like people wearing the sunglasses that are mirrored sunglasses where you can't see somebody's eyes. so people do that already and you know some people may think that's rude when you're interacting with them and they're not fully showing you their eye contact well with vr it's going to be especially problematic if people are in a vr headset and they turn on the pass-through camera and they don't take off the vr hmd and they're interacting with people that they can see but the other people can't see them it kind of creates this asymmetrical power dynamic and it just kind of feels creepy and violating some of our social norms. I think it's part of, I think what kind of taps into this feeling of the uncanny valley where you're not able to really detect the emotional cues that we're used to really seeing. And so I think that's part of the reason why I think it's really creepy is because you're really kind of like creating this uncanny valley type of scenario. Evolutionarily, my understanding is that part of the reason why the uncanny valley is such a visual reaction is that We're very tuned into detecting whether or not people are alive or dead. And that if someone is dead, then they could actually be a danger to your health. You know, hanging out with dead people is not a great idea. So we've evolved to be able to detect all these different subtle body language cues. And when you put a virtual reality headset over your face and occlude all those different social cues, then it just feels creepy and gross. And so I really agree with Alex that, uh, hope that people don't kind of make it a standard to interact with each other using the pass-through camera. It just feels much more natural to be able to actually take off the headset and be present with them in that way. So it was great to hear some of Alex's reactions to Pokemon Go and kind of seeing his observation for how people were really calibrating and making the augmented reality a lot better than it actually was. And so they were doing some internal calibration by just visually lining things up, but also kind of projecting with their imagination to make it a much more immersive augmented reality experience. Another thing is that the differences between designing an augmented reality game versus a virtual reality game are so different right now that they're really kind of calling to be completely different design patterns and experiences. So in other words, if you design an experience in virtual reality, then you're going to have to pretty much redesign it to be able to really have it work for augmented reality. I think that's true in most cases. And from my sense, and especially in running the technology, that's kind of what I took from Alex is that Yeah, sure, maybe at some point there will be some Tango phones that are Daydream ready, as well as some Daydream ready phones that will eventually be Tango ready. But at this point, they're completely different technology stacks. And not only that, but the software design that you're doing when you're creating these experiences are different for at least for right now and into the near future. It definitely sounds like conversational and audio interfaces are going to be connected a lot more. And there was an interesting point where he kind of sees this fusion between eye detection and conversational interfaces. So when you're looking at something, you say, select this. And by looking at that, then they know that that's what you're talking about. So instead of having to give a specific command to say, open up Minecraft, you can just look at it and say, select this. And so kind of combining the gaze-based interactions as well as voice-triggered actions I think is one of the things that I found interesting. I just wanted to also just call out that there is a whole Google VR Unity SDK that's out there. You can find it through Google, but there's also some Daydream Labs controller playground that you can Google and look at some of these example projects where you can start to do your own DIY dev kit. So in other words, get a Android ready phone that can run the correct version of Android to be able to run some of the applications on Daydream in the phone, let's say on Google Cardboard. But also just taking a regular phone and using that as the 3DOF controller and be able to print off some of these templates to be able to actually mimic what it was going to feel like to be able to hold this controller in your hand and be able to experiment with what it feels like to use this 3DOF controller within a mobile VR experience. And finally, I think that the Daydream VR platform is most likely going to be the biggest platform for the biggest audience size, because essentially you're taking the Android phone and putting on a headset that's likely going to be anywhere from $50 to $100. I'm imagining it's going to be in the same price range as the Gear VR. But because people already have these mobile phones and using them day to day, it's just an extra hundred bucks to be able to really get into some really much higher quality virtual reality experiences. So I'll be really interested to see how the launch goes, what the price points are, and curious to see what type of games and experiences that are going to be created for the Daydream VR. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for listening. And if you'd like to support the podcast, then please spread the word, tell your friends, and you can join the email list at voicesofvr.com to be kept up to date to announcements as well as virtual events that are going to be happening. And if you'd like to contribute to the podcast, then become a donor. You can donate at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
