Aaron Davies is the Head of Developer Relations at Oculus VR, and he talks about how the interest in VR development has exploded since the Facebook acquisition. He discusses some of the applications that in development ranging from VR surgery training, education, film & media, enterprise apps, data visualization, telepresence, social apps to virtual reading experiences and comic books in VR.
Aaron also shares his initial experiences with the Rift and his reactions to simulator sickness. He also talks about one of the most compelling experiences he’s had in VR within the Minecrift mod with some of his co-workers at Oculus.
He also talks about what type of resources will change in terms of what can be provided to independent developers since the Facebook acquisition, and what other types of issues that Facebook will be helping Oculus solve.
Finally, he talks about the importance of the community at this early stage of exploring the VR medium, and what he sees as the ultimate potential of VR and what the Metaverse can provide.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro & how the VR development community is branching out beyond gaming since the Facebook acquisition
- 0:50 – What will change in terms of what types of resources can be provided by Oculus VR for independent VR developers + what specific competencies that the Facebook acquisition will provide to the Oculus VR team.
- 2:12 – What industries beyond gaming are doing with VR development for the Oculus Rift including education, academia, history, film & media, and virtual comic books & virtual reading experiences
- 3:46 – Aaron’s first experiences with the Rift, motion sickness, joining Oculus, and the most compelling experience that he’s had in VR
- 5:38 – Aaron’s 60-second pitch at SVVRCon & the importance of the VR community
- 6:33 – The potential of what VR can bring to society & vision of the Metaverse
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.036] Aaron Davies: Aaron Davies, Head of Developer Relations at Oculus. And what's going on with the community is what you want to know? Well, the community is moving really fast. I guess probably the number one thing that I'm observing is the community is branching out into all sorts of different demographics where if you had asked me the same question a year ago, I'd say, oh, the game developers are doing awesome. Well, it's not the game developers anymore. It's the people in the education space. It's people doing you know, enterprise level oil and gas, big data visualization, it's people doing different social applications and virtual telepresence. So that's, I think, the number one trend that we're observing with the community right now is just that it's branching out into lots of really exciting spaces.
[00:00:50.521] Kent Bye: And so before the Facebook acquisition, there was some concern in terms of resources available for independent developers. Can you talk a bit about what's going to change in terms of what type of resources you're going to be able to provide to the whole virtual reality developer community?
[00:01:04.703] Aaron Davies: Yeah, I think, you know, Brendan has been really bullish on to the point of making it one of the terms of our acquisition is we want to remain as independent as possible. And I think that that's something that fits really well within the culture of Facebook from everything we've been able to observe so far. So really when people ask kind of how it's impacted or how it's changed things at Oculus, it feels virtually transparent to me. The only thing that I bring up is that it solved a lot of problems for us that we were focused on, but maybe a little bit more concerned about, man, are we going to be able to do this timely? in terms of bringing in the servers and backend and monetization and localization platforms. So all of these types of things that were sort of, in one light, a distraction from our focus on just executing VR, have now been solved for us, or are being solved through this partnership. So it's a really good thing on that front, and I think that in terms of the way that it impacts developers and what they expect from us and how we engage with them, it really hasn't changed anything. If anything, it has brought some new people in that want to talk to us that didn't want to talk to us before because now they realize it's really going to happen.
[00:02:12.411] Kent Bye: Great. And so it does sound like that with that acquisition event that probably did bring what you guys are doing with virtual reality to attention to a lot of new markets. Can you talk about a little bit more about what type of people you're hearing from in terms of industries?
[00:02:26.286] Aaron Davies: In terms of different industries, like I said, you know, we have a lot of people, especially in the education space, doing all sorts of different training, whether it's surgery training, so that people now will be able to do, you know, virtual surgeries on 300 or 500 patients before they ever actually even have to touch a cadaver, right? And you think about the way that that changes the cost structure of these high-end, really exclusive training environments, or stuff that's just at the public academic level where you now have students in the public education system who will be able to explore space or history or things like that. So a lot of it is focused there. A lot is moving towards film and media as well, which is really growing quite a bit. I think that right after games, that's probably the next industry that really sort of got it and started proactively looking into ways that they could take advantage of VR deliver new narrative experiences. Another surprising one is actually doing sort of virtual, John Carmack alluded to this recently, virtual comic books and virtual reading experiences where you can create environments that sort of immerse people into a story, but it still gives them enough sort of mental space to create their own visualization in their mind of what characters look like or what a story might be, but just providing a little bit of input there. So, I mean, we could talk about all sorts of things, but those are the immediate ones that come to mind.
[00:03:46.405] Kent Bye: And can you talk a bit about your own personal experience with the Rift and what, maybe the first time that you experienced and what led you to actually working with Oculus?
[00:03:55.776] Aaron Davies: Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. The very first time I saw the Rift, I was leading the emerging tech group up at Intel after Larrabee, working with Tom Forsyth and Michael Abrash. So, I came down to Oculus and looked at the early duct tape prototype, the same one that John Carmack showed at E3 2012. And I was super excited and it was stereoscopic 3D and it had head tracking and I started walking around in the Doom world and I immediately felt sick. And I don't get motion sick, you know, for too many things. So, I was sort of almost disappointed a little bit and sort of dismissed it because I had my first job out of school actually was in VR. So, I had sort of been around the block a little bit. He sent me a DK1 when the DK1s came out, and I saw a little bit more content and still felt sick in some of those things. But, you know, Brendan convinced me to come down and talk about joining. And to make a long story short, I had a really close friend tell me that if I didn't make this move, she saw my passion and enthusiasm. She said, if you don't do this, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life. And so I jumped in with both feet, even at the time not necessarily having a guarantee it was going to all pan out. The guarantee came later for me on the technology side, but on the experience side, I alluded to it a little bit earlier today, the first thing that really sort of blew my mind was having a social experience in VR, where I was doing the Minecraft mod with some other guys at the office, and, you know, it's pretty normal to see an avatar, and you understand that's another person there, but the person actually walked past me, which was all normal, and then they stopped, and then they turned their head and made eye contact with me. And it was just a blockhead, but there was an immediate sort of lightning bolt that went through me and I was like, okay, you can connect with people in a different way here. And this crosses socioeconomic boundaries. I can have this kind of a connection with someone in India or Sudan or Madagascar or anywhere across the world, right? So that for me was, on the experience side, one of the first things that really sort of surprised me.
[00:05:39.532] Kent Bye: And so we just came out of the first session of the SVRCon and you gave a 60 second pitch. Maybe you could tell me a bit of what you were trying to communicate in that pitch to the crowd of all these VR enthusiasts and developers.
[00:05:51.223] Aaron Davies: Well, I don't know how well it came off, but I think that if I were to do it again and repeat, I think that the primary point I wanted to distill it down to is the fact that these are very exciting days. They're very early days and things are moving very fast. The real magic of VR will be the culmination of lots of different technologies and systems. And right now it's very early, but we're really, really enthusiastic about how awesome it already is. And so it's just going to continue to keep getting better. But that's something that requires the community, and so that's really what's exciting about events like this, is all of these people are coming together. Some may overlap, there may be some gaps still, but as time goes on, I think that these are relationships that are gonna be really important to bring forth this medium, and then people will just take it for granted once it's consumerized.
[00:06:34.021] Kent Bye: Great, and finally, maybe you could talk a bit about what you hope to see the potential of what VR can bring to society.
[00:06:41.416] Aaron Davies: Well, it's the metaverse, right? I mean, we don't argue that we have delivered the metaverse yet. We do argue that we can deliver an amazing sense of presence. But that is the vision. That's the ultimate endgame, right? Is that we can help people not even necessarily escape, but move into an enhanced and a better reality that augments their current life experience. can help someone who's handicapped to be able to do something that they could never do before, to help someone who's in a specific economic bracket to be able to take advantage of things that wouldn't have previously been accessible. So that's really the vision for us.
[00:07:14.794] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you.
[00:07:15.675] Aaron Davies: You bet. My pleasure.
