In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the lowering of the minimum specification for an Oculus-ready machine, as well as some new announcements from Oculus about their support for room-scale VR.
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These topics are difficult to really cover since a lot of information is protected by non-disclosure agreements, but I was able to talk to a number of different developers off-the-record and synthesize these conversations into this op-ed podcast. There are still a lot of open questions, unknowns, and concerns that I try to dig into a bit more, as well as the overall vibe and other private hallway discussions that were happening at the San Jose Convention Center.
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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 I'm going to be doing something a little bit different today on today's podcast. I'm going to be giving a little bit of an op-ed of some of my takeaways from Oculus Connect 3. There was a lot of news that was announced, but there was also quite a lot of issues that were happening that not a lot of people felt comfortable talking about on the record. And so I just spent a lot of my time near the end of the conference just going around and just getting some feedback and Doing some reporting on different topics that I want to talk about today on today's podcast some issues that I just kind of see that are a little bit concerning and So I just wanted to dig into it a little bit more and also just talk about the things that people weren't really talking about Publicly at the conference and so that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast But first a quick word from a sponsor today's episode is brought to you by fishbowl VR and Fishbowl VR provides on-demand user testing for your VR experience. They have hundreds of VR playtesters who record their candid reactions with a turnaround time as fast as 24 hours. You can solve arguments, discover weaknesses, and get new gameplay ideas. User testing is a vital part of the development cycle, and Fishbowl VR takes care of all the logistics so you can just focus on the creative process. So start getting feedback today at fishbowlvr.com. So Oculus Connect 3 just happened from October 5th to 7th, so let's go ahead and dive right in. Okay, so I'm gonna first cover some of the highlights, the big takeaways and news bits that came out of Oculus Connect 3. I think there was a lot of really great things that happened at Oculus Connect 3. It's always amazing to get the VR community together and there's a lot of just hope and optimism about the future of VR and There's also for me some concerns that I saw perhaps some red flags that I just wanted to call out and just a high level overview of those concerns was The minimum specification was lowered at this point. We haven't seen any independent verification of that And so we talking a little bit about how you know, that could be fine It could be great for VR, but it could also be concerning or bad direction for be able to go in also there's a number of room scale claims that were made by oculus and i think there's more of the story that's been told so far so i want to unpack that a little bit also the vibe at oculus kinect 3 was just a little weird and off part of it i think is just because there was a controversy that happened beforehand and wasn't fully addressed and that's part of it. But there's also just kind of like this direction of what is this event? Is it a developer event? Is it a marketing event? What's the sort of the larger mission of why we're here? And so I think that confusion just kind of gave a vibe that was a little weird and off for me and some other people as well. So I wanted to first go into a lot of my big takeaways of the conference and the big news bits that came out of it. So First of all, web VR, I think, is going to be huge. The fact that Nate Mitchell got up on stage and said, we're going to be putting a lot of effort and initiative behind web VR. Facebook's going to be creating their own web browser. That's huge. Traditionally, Facebook's been a pretty closed walled garden. And so for them to put some effort and initiative behind web VR, I think, is a great thing for the open web and the metaverse in the future. I think that Quill is amazing. It's an amazing tilt brush-esque, but different. It's more like being able to make dynamic animations. It's something that's really kind of like its own medium in a new way. They call them cool illustrations, and it's like a mix between illustrations and Adobe After Effects animations and it's just like a new thing. It was amazing. And Dear Angelica is great. Oculus Medium has come a long way and I'm super excited for that in terms of being able to democratize the process of creating 3D objects and potentially even 3D printing them as well. But I had a chance to talk to Brian Sharp and as well as the team of Quill as well. So we'll be having some podcasts about that. I think that the Robo Recall was probably one of the most impressive new games announced at Oculus Connect 3 with Epic Games evolving Bullet Train into this whole futuristic place where you have to recall these AI robots gone rogue. And a lot of fun gameplay with that, and it just looked amazing. And just a lot of fun to play. So that was a huge announcement. and a launchpad. I think the launchpadders in that community that has formed I think is going to be doing some really interesting and cool things. I had a chance of doing podcasts with six of them and so I just look forward to getting those out as well. I think another big change from this year from last year at Oculus Connect was that last year the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you know, got on stage for a few minutes and said, hey, you know, VR is great, we support it, thanks. But I think this year Mark really spent a lot of time on stage and First of all just saying that VR is really kind of crucial to the future of Facebook and that you know with a mobile phone you really have apps first in terms of just that's how you interface with your Technology and he sees a future with virtual reality where it's really people first. It's really based upon the people in your life and rather than the apps or the specific technology in that way. And so VR for him is really moving that direction. And he did this whole kind of proof of concept demo about being able to share virtual avatars with other people where they are stylized. I think the Uncanny Valley has still got a long way for us to actually feel like we're co-present with other humans. And so I think from what Michael Abrash said, I think we're going to be firmly on the stylized side of the Uncanny Valley for a long, long time. and that they started to add some emotional reactions. I know that I've done an interview with Hal Lee where they were starting to figure out how to do facial recognition and emotions and put it into VR. And so they were starting to show some of the very early prototypes of that, whether it was from like strain sensors in the camera or additional cameras that were looking at the face. It's hard to tell how they were actually implementing some of those emotional cues that were being shown, but I think the larger point is that this is what they imagine the future being, where you could be co-present with different avatars and different 360 video virtual spaces, as well as have live streams of actual people piped into the experience as well. So it's kind of like this mixed reality social space that I think they're really going towards. Also, they announced a persistent social SDK so that you could create an avatar and really stylize it and be able to go from experience to experience with the same avatar and digital identity so that you don't have to constantly be recreating your own identity within these experiences. And so that was interesting to see. In years past, Oculus Connect has been an opportunity for Oculus to really announce a big technology that was going to be in the immediate pipeline in hands of developers, but this year that wasn't really the case. Oculus Touch controllers are the next big thing that's yet to come out, but they were announced last year. And so this year they announced that they're actually working on something that's somewhere in between a Gear VR and a Oculus Rift headset. So it's like a standalone solution that has all the computing power within the headset and it has inside-out tracking so you're able to do full positional tracking and it was a little unclear as to whether or not this Santa Clara prototype is going to be able to receive wireless streaming from a computer but I can imagine a future where you could have both kind of like this standalone solution but also potentially connect to your computer as well. The standalone solution is something that's a really very early prototype. A few journalists had a chance to go hands-on with it, but it's nowhere near being ready to be productized or released yet. They're just saying, hey, this is coming. So it was just their opportunity to kind of announce something new. but really the new thing that's coming up is oculus touch controllers and so there's just a lot of focus on different content for how to use the touch controller to me the touch controller is very ergonomic i think it feels a lot better than holding the vive controllers actually and there's also a couple of extra buttons that are there that are easily accessible for your thumb and i think that actually opens up some new gameplay opportunities that is going to be different from the Vive. So just a quick note on that is that, you know, the Oculus Touch controllers are different from the Vive controllers. You both have triggers and so you can kind of do a lowest common denominator between the two. But some of these Oculus exclusives that are going to be using these extra buttons, I think it would actually be a little bit difficult for some of those to be a direct port over to the Vive. So I think you're going to see a little bit more abstracted gameplay capabilities within Oculus Touch controllers, just because those extra buttons are there, and they can do more things. And so, you know, everybody wants everything to be everywhere, but these controllers at this point are different enough that they could actually enable different gameplay that is just different. But I think the challenge with the Oculus Touch controllers is that I don't know with the whole distance of the room scale is gonna actually be a viable thing. We'll be talking about room scale a little bit more in detail, some of the things that aren't quite talked about in terms of Oculus announcing that they can enable room scale. But there's some other gotchas that they didn't quite talk about that I think is not the full story. And just this overall optimism and spirit and energy of the VR community is amazing. I think that VR is going to change the world and a lot of the people that were there are going to help make that happen. So I always enjoy seeing Michael Abrash come out and really talk about where he sees the technology going in the future. And I think the ending quote where he was quoting Edmund Binstock, just saying that Change really comes when a lot of smart people work on the right problem at the right time. And Michael Abrash just during the keynote said, hey, everybody look around. These are the people that are really trying to bring about change within the industry. And it was an inspiring moment, because it felt really true. It felt like, yeah, these are the tribe of people that are trying to make VR work. So let's move on to some of the other things that were happening at Oculus Connect 3, some of the various issues that I found a little concerning. There was a big difference between some of the public conversations that were happening and some of the private conversations that were happening. And there was a controversy with Palmer Luckey that happened ahead of Oculus Connect 3. He basically came out admitting that he had gave some money to this alt-right shitposting meme magic campaign. And it just felt like trolling and kind of like the worst aspects of the internet of trolls that are unkind and not compassionate. And Palmer basically came out saying he was supporting and giving money to this shit posting campaign. And then there was a lot of backlash that happened. It was like, oh my God, what is like Palmer funding trolls on the internet? What's going on? And there was just a lot of confusion about it. And so, you know, this was Palmer's individual actions. They weren't representative of Oculus, but I think because Palmer is such a intimately connected to the Oculus brand, they had to kind of distance themselves from that a little bit. What happened is that Palmer came out and apologized. He kind of gave this letter that felt a little like from the top down. Maybe there was some influence from Facebook. It's not really known. There was some contradictory information that was out. It felt like maybe they were caught in a lie. It was confusing and it felt like the hand of Facebook coming down and being like, let's erase this and get rid of it. And so when we all came to Oculus Connect 3, it was a bit of like, OK, are we going to address this? Is there going to be an issue? Technically, it was Palmer's individual actions, and it wasn't something that was officially connected to Oculus. And so they didn't really need to address it in the keynote or anything. I think the one area where it came out probably more was the diversity luncheon, where I think a lot of the people in the diversity luncheon were often the victims of trolling online, whether it's from racism, sexism, homophobia, you know, just the worst parts of the internet. These people that were in the diversity luncheon often are the receiving end of that. And so they had a lot of questions like, is the founder of Oculus kind of like funding this hatred that we're receiving? And so it was kind of like a disconnect that wasn't really discussed or talked about. And so there was just kind of like a lot of these private frustrations. I think the larger issue above all and everything else is just this kind of like public relations mindset that is just inauthentic. And I think that this is something that's kind of a thread through Oculus ever since they got bought by Facebook. I think once they got bought by Facebook, there was kind of like this public relations lockdown that happened such that everything's so controlled and scripted and you know, just like inauthentic in so many different ways, even just like what they could and could not talk about. And for me personally, I've just been pretty much shut out from having any sort of contact officially with anyone from Oculus. I think this Oculus Connect was the first time where I kind of slipped through the cracks and had a couple of interviews with people that were like a little bit lower level technical people with Quill and Oculus Medium, but you know, I haven't had any access to anybody at Oculus for a long, long time, and that to me is sort of like a metaphor in a certain way of just how disconnected they've become from the larger community, and just how scripted and inauthentic a lot of times things can feel. And so it kind of felt like that when it wasn't really addressed or talked about. Palmer Luckey wasn't at the conference at all. And so there's just a lot of questions like, OK, well, that he decided in his own volition not to be here. Was he told not to be here? What we were told is that he made the decision to not come because he didn't want to be a distraction. And that's likely very true. But it's also possible that Facebook kind of came in and said, hey, you know, enough. Up to this point, Oculus has operated as an independent entity. Just in terms of people's concerns about, oh my god, what's going to mean for Facebook to take over and control of Oculus? Is there going to be a lot of different privacy implications, for example, is probably the biggest one. You know, there's a lot of biometric data that's going to be recorded within virtual reality. And so, like, Facebook and privacy has had a long storied history of, like, slowly eroding our privacy. And so when you start to talk about, like, our biometric data that's going to be fed into the Facebook servers that could, like, be reading our emotional states, for example, you know, they demonstrated that on stage, then what are the implications of them having our whole history of emotional reactions to different stimuli? It starts to get like somewhat creepy when you look at Facebook's history of privacy. And so I think that's the concern. That's like, is Oculus still an independent entity? And there started to be some signs of like Facebook kind of exerting more and more control. And, you know, there's logos that said Oculus from Facebook. So I think these are just like larger kind of subtexts of the concerns about like the relationship between Oculus and Facebook But there was a big disconnect this year more than any other time that I've seen where what was being talked about publicly was a big difference from what the kind of buzz and what was being talked about privately and some of these different issues. And so that was probably the biggest one. And in some ways, it's not really of significance to Oculus, really, in terms of the functionality and technical stuff. It's just more of a potential question of, what does this mean for the overall culture of Facebook and the founding of Facebook and all these other issues? I think just kind of raised more questions than answers. But I think moving and looking at some of the other technical things that were announced, there was just, for me, some other red flags that were there. One of the things they announced at the keynote is this lowering of the minimum specifications. Well, I think technically they were always recommended specs. They never really announced what the minimum specs were. I think people just kind of assumed that they were the min specs, but now they've announced what the min specs are. Lowering it down to a 960 and lowering it from an i5 to an i3-6100 and an AMD FX-4350. So, why is this important? Well, first they announced that they're kind of doing this algorithmic approach called Asynchronous Space Warp that is allowing them to basically instead of taking the positional tracking dropping from 90 to 45 frames per second and then interpolating the movement in between. So asynchronous time warp and asynchronous space warp are these techniques that, from Valve's perspective, they don't support it, because I don't think they really believe that you should rely upon that. And so to kind of come out and say, we're going to lower the minimum specs so that we can perhaps get more people adopted into VR and have this state where you're just kind of barely meeting the 90 frames per second, it's starting to move into this realm where that's what AAA games have been doing forever with. dropping frames and sacrificing performance over visual fidelity. So I think it's just a little troubling because, first of all, it hasn't been independently verified by anybody as to whether or not this approach is even going to be viable. It is going to be an algorithmic approach to something that is software-based rather than the hardware. And so it's potential that it's just not going to be as good of an experience. But I think the other thing that this implies is that there are independent developers that are out there that now have to support larger hardware and perhaps change some of the ways that they've been doing things in order to support this new minimum spec. Now, this could actually be great for VR. This could be getting more PCs out there, more people using VR. It could enlarge the install base, or it could be polluting what people see as the bar for VR. And I think that we're still yet to be seen, to see what people actually get their hand on the hardware and to see whether or not this new Mint spec is going to be viable. But here's the thing about the min specs that they also didn't mention is that each developer has the capability to set the minimum specifications for their game. So a game developer could still set it for a 970 or 980. So it's entirely possible that a lot of developers just say, you know, we're just not going to support this lower spec and just make it a hard requirement that they have to have the higher level hardware in order to actually play the games. So now you have this situation where there's all these Oculus-ready branded machines and laptops and $500 machine. Consumers buy this machine and they get to the store and they realize that perhaps half of the games they can't even play because they don't have enough hardware because the developers have not lowered it down to them in spec. This is kind of a theoretical possibility, but it's a real possibility that could happen where either it puts more work onto the developers or for the consumers that buy these really super low-end machines, they end up not even be able to play some of the games. And if they do play the games, maybe they'll have a degraded experience that gives them a bad impression of VR. The other thing that I did that I think was a little troubling was that they said that we are supporting room scale. And said, oh, in order to do that, you have to buy another camera. So just buy another camera. $79. Good. Great. You're done. Except that you're not. Because here's the thing. From a developer perspective, they're basically required by Oculus to support front-facing cameras. Because that's what all the people are going to have. They're going to have two cameras by default. Not everybody's even going to have that third camera. And again, we don't even know if that third camera is going to have a cord that's long enough. Is it going to work? Is it going to be a solid experience? I mean, because I saw a lot of just dropping of tracking of touch controllers during different demos. Oftentimes, it was because I was too close to the two cameras, or it was because I'm actually supposed to be facing forward. So if I'm in the game and immersed, and I'm just turning all around, and then all of a sudden I turn around too far, then I have to face forward, and then I have to have the cognitive load of making sure that I'm facing forward so that I don't lose tracking. And there are some games that just had to, like, design around that. Like, you know, for example, Robo Recall had a little arrow that's trying to subtly guide you to facing forward again so that you don't lose tracking. This is just a shitty experience. I'm sorry. It's not as good as the Vive, and it's just, like, it's crap. And for Oculus to get up in front of everybody and say, we now support room scale. But really, you're basically requiring a developer to make a choice. They have to support forward-facing room scale. So if they have a full room scale game, then they'll have to also support front-facing and change the game to deal with this front-facing approach. I think that it's like slightly deceptive and I think that for them just to say we now support room scale there's other trade-offs that are there and like if they really wanted to support room scale then they would send out those three cameras to everybody but they're not and so that was upsetting to me as well. And I think the other thing that was just disappointing for me and a lot of people in the audience is that I think everybody was just like hoping that they were going to announce, everybody here gets a touch controller. Because, you know, when Oculus announced that they were going to be launching with an Xbox game pad, and that the touch was going to be coming later, there was a lot of people that were upset because people who know VR kind of know that the best experiences within VR are with those touch controllers. Now, I think Oculus is correct in saying that you can still have a lot of really quality experiences with the gamepad, But designing a game for the gamepad versus touch controllers are two completely different games. You can't have the same type of gameplay at all. And so they have a fractured ecosystem already. They already have a fractured ecosystem with the people who have the gamepad. Everybody has the gamepad. But yet, as a developer and the content that's available, they have to make a decision whether or not to go with the gamepad. That's what everybody has. And now you have to buy a touch controller. And so of the relatively small install base of the Oculus, you're going to be doing a subset of the people who have decided to go with the touch controllers. That's like a subset of a small set already. And so I think that, you know, the best thing they could have done at Oculus Connect 3 was say, hey, everybody gets a free touch controllers. Let's just like have a normalized baseline. But they didn't. They gave us like $49 earbud noise cancelling headphones that no one really wants. I don't want them. I mean, there may be some people, but if given the choice of getting like peripheral headphones with earbuds and noise cancelling versus like touch controller, I think like nine times out of 10 people are going to say, yeah, give me the touch controller. Probably 10 out of 10. They were just $150 more. So if you do the math, it's like $125,000 that they invested into giving that away. When they could have given like half a million dollars, could have given everybody touches. And so it's just in the context of like they are giving money to support other game development. They said, okay, we're giving $250 million to support these different games. And well, could you have like taken a half a million dollars of that investment and like given this normalized baseline for all the core developers? I think looking back on it and how like right now Vive is the market leader, they're just, I think, crushing Oculus. And in some ways it's like, are they lowering the min spec because they're desperate? Because they really want to push the install base out? Is it because they're getting pressure from AAA studios? You know, was this a plan all along? It's hard to say. No one is really giving me that level of detail. We can only speculate. But just me, personally, I have to spend the $200 in my pocket to get these touch controllers. And, you know, I would have loved to get, like, just say, hey, everybody has the touch. But that didn't happen. So, it just felt like a number of these things were just frustrations that were building up. You know, just to take a step back and say, you know, anytime the VR community is coming together, it's awesome, it's amazing. I had a great time at Oculus Connect 3. It was just weird. It was a weird vibe, because is it a developer conference or is this like a marketing event? Because as a journalist, I'm there and there's a bunch of new games that I'm covering that felt very much like the same approach that they did at GDC where they had a bunch of game developers, you could go try out the game and do an interview with the developer. And that's fine. You know, for the first couple of years of Oculus Connect, there was the first year they had demos of Crescent Bay. The second year they had demos of Oculus Touch and Toy Box and, you know, some of the new Epic game titles. But this year is a little bit different. They didn't really have, like, brand new technology that was, like, vital to the developers to be able to change the way that they develop anything. They were just kind of showing the latest Touch content. And so the reason why I say, is this a marketing event or a developer event? Because if it was a developer event, then they would have perhaps spent like the money required to give everybody touch controllers. So that's why it's like, it was just kind of weird and frustrating. My own personal experience was like a whole other journey as well. To me, it was just awesome and amazing to connect with the different fans that have the podcast and just to hear different feedback and That's part of the reason why I guess I'm going and doing a little bit more of an op ed. And, uh, yeah. And I'm also just trying to figure out how to make this, what I'm doing here at the voices of VR podcast sustainable. I have a new sponsor, fishbowl VR. They do some great things with user testing and like, it's going to be a test, whether or not the, my listeners are going to be supporting fishbowl VR. And then in a couple of weeks, I don't know who my next sponsor is going to be. And so I spent a lot of this. conference just being like hey like I need some help either a new corporate sponsor or should I just really get the patreon sponsors up so you know if you're listening to us and you enjoy the podcast then go to patreon.com which is a VR become a patron a few dollars makes a huge difference as I'm trying to figure out how to tell the truth rather than be liked I think that's it's hard It's hard because I'm an outsider. I don't really already have access to Oculus. I'm doing this kind of op-ed puts me at risk of just them cutting me off. But you know what? It doesn't really matter because I don't, I'm not really getting cut off from anything anyway. I mean, It's been over two years since I've really had a chance to do an interview with anyone from Icalis. I just seem to get shut down every opportunity that I try, which I think is again, part of my frustration is that there's just a kind of a lack of empathy with what's happening in the community. And if anybody who's listening to the Voices of VR podcast knows, I'm like the voice of the community, and they don't see it. It's hard for them to see that I'm just like this second class citizen. The upside is that I actually did get a couple of interviews with Oculus Story Studio about Quill as well as, you know, Oculus Medium. But other than that, I've been pretty much shut out. So I have nothing to lose. I'm an outsider. And so I just want to speak the truth for once. Because like, everybody's thinking and everybody's talking about it. But like these types of issues I'm talking about on today's podcast, no one can go on the record and talk about it. Because all the developers have to sign all these very complicated non-disclosure agreements that have them bounded to be able to not talk about any of these specific things. So they have to violate these contracts for them to talk to me. But it allows Oculus to operate in this veil of secrecy so they could do whatever they want and no one questions it. Part of the reason why I'm doing this is because I think some of these decisions that Oculus is doing could actually be bad for VR. and I don't think we're getting the full truth about it. It's not independently verified yet, so I'm skeptical of it. And I just see the reactions of these independent developers, and it's basically like offloaded onto them. They have to deal with it. A lot of these developers have a lot more work on their plates now with these announcements to aim for the Touch launch, and I just don't think that's fair. So yeah, with that, I just wanted to thank you for going along on this journey with me today. you know if you feel called to support me and to support this kind of journalism then become a patreon donor you know go to patreon.com slash voices of vr just a few dollars a month it makes a huge difference for me right now i just want to tell the truth rather than be liked and that's not always easy in today's world then i just need support i need the help either it's a sponsor or patreon support I need the support to continue what I'm doing, because I think it's important. I think it's valuable. If I can just continue to be an independent journalist and doing my thing, then I just want to help VR succeed and live into the ultimate potential of VR. So thanks for listening.
