Ben Lang says that we’ve been at Year Zero of VR for three years now, and the official release of the Gear VR today marks the first official launch of a consumer-ready virtual ready head-mounted display. Ben joins me on the podcast to talk about some of the technical details that allow the Gear VR to drive such a compelling virtual reality experience, as well as some analysis of the larger virtual reality market. There are a lot of high expectations that virtual reality will be able to grow and evolve into the ultimate potential that we all hope it can be, and so we take a look at how the smartphone market evolved over time and what we can expect to see over the next year.
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Today is the consumer launch of the Gear VR, and I talked with Ben Lang about some of the hardware that allows the Gear VR to drive such a compelling VR experience, some of the improvements that have been made over the last couple of iterations, and some of the larger issues that we’ve already started to see within Android fragmentation across versions of Android and different versions of Samsung phones. There have been various compatibility and performance bumps along the road across different hardware and software versions, but hopefully those will be minimized now that the Gear VR has moved beyond being an “Innovator Edition” and is now released as an official consumer product.
My initial reaction to the Gear VR was like many people’s: “Wow! This is a lot better than I expected it would be.” The Gear VR doesn’t have positional tracking like the Oculus Rift DK2, but yet the resolution is actually higher and there’s an imperceptible difference in terms of latency and immersion that can still happen with the untethered Gear VR HMD.
It’s actually quite amazing that the Gear VR can drive the quality of experience by being powered by a cell phone. For $99, it’s a bit of a no-brainer to get the Gear VR if you already own either a Samsung Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge.
Not having to deal with any wires and the portability and ease at which you can carry the Gear VR around has proven to be an extremely convenient way to share high-quality virtual reality experiences with friends and family or at virtual reality conferences and meetups. I’ve found that the added benefit of position tracking is not worth the effort to unhook all of the wires of my desktop PC and deal with transporting it around along with a monitor.
It’s true that the Gear VR can’t yet drive the same level and fidelity of VR experiences as a PC can, but it’s certainly good enough. The simplicity and ease that it offers to be able to quickly share a VR demo is such a higher benefit than having to deal with the hassle it takes to show a DK2 experience on-the-go.
Ben and I talk about what to expect from here now that the first consumer virtual reality headset has been released. The consensus seems to be that it’s still at the very beginning of consumer VR, and the ecosystem is going to take time to develop and mature. Ben says that VR is still evolving through a three-way chicken and egg problem between VR HMD manufacturers, VR game and experience developers, and consumers.
Oculus kickstarted the hardware side of things with the Oculus Rift in 2012 and the Gear VR last year. They were the first company to provide a comprehensive SDK so that the software developers could start to create virtual reality experiences. Now developers have had three years to experiment with the medium and create the first VR games and experiences, the VR community is ready to start bringing this hardware and experiences to the public.
And because it’s already been three years, there’s a perception and anticipation for the VR ecosystem to explode into the mainstream. But Ben cautions this line of thinking by saying that it’s more likely to take more time to fully grow and develop the market and full ecosystem. There are a lot of lessons to learn from the smartphone market, and it’s not entirely accurate to look to the wildly successful iPhone launch as a template for what’s going to happen with VR. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone to ever launch, and there had been millions of smart phone users that had to slowly be cultivate over many years.
There’s a lot of anticipation and excitement within the VR community, and there are a lot of indie developers and start-up companies that will have to plan on how they’re going to make it through this first year of consumer VR that may end up being a smaller market that is not going to be able to completely financially sustain them just yet.
Ben says that the snowball will have to passed back and forth a number of times between the VR hardware manufacturers, VR software developers, and consumers before it is able to start to take off in any type of exponential growth curve. But with the release of the Gear VR today with a store filled with VR games and experiences, VR is finally ready to be introduced into a wider mass-consumer audience.
With that, I just wanted to congratulate the Oculus and Samsung teams, and all of the VR developers who have helped get VR to this point. It’s actually really quite amazing to think about all of the work that it’s taken to get to this point, and it’s exciting to see VR cross this chasm into mainstream and start making all of our VR dreams come true.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.016] Ben Lang: My name is Ben Lang. I am the co-founder and executive editor of Road to VR, a virtual reality news website. And I've been following VR for a long time. And we're coming up on the release of Samsung's Gear VR headset, their consumer edition for the first time. And it's a pretty interesting preamble to all the other headsets that are coming down the line, the desktop level headsets that are coming over the next three quarters.
[00:00:40.248] Kent Bye: Yeah, I actually just recently upgraded my phone from a Nexus to a Galaxy S6 because the S6 is both compatible with the latest innovator edition and the new one going forward. So you're going to be able to use either the Note 5, the Galaxy S6, or the S6 Plus. And when I looked at all of that, I kind of saw that I, you know, the curved screen wasn't really giving me all that much. And so I just figured I'd go with the standard S6 for Gear VR. And it turns out that it's really quite amazing. I can't really even tell a difference in loss of field of view. The resolution's great. It's just really a solid virtual reality experience.
[00:01:16.773] Ben Lang: Yeah, so the compatibility with the various Gear VR headsets and their phones has been an interesting topic because for your layman who see cardboard and that sort of thing, and you can throw pretty much any modern phone in there, and you'll be able to get some level of VR experience For those people who haven't actually tried VR for themselves, you get a lot of them saying like, wow, come on, Samsung, like make this compatible with all your phones. Like it's just that easy. But in reality, you know, it's actually pretty complicated what they're doing. They're aiming for this really high level VR experience that is in many ways competitive with what's going on in desktop. Not in every way, but in many ways. And in order to get that level of fidelity, they're really pushing these phones to the limit. They're pushing the software to the limit. And they're doing an impressive job. So for all those people who kind of misunderstand maybe the difference between cardboard and devices like that, that are just, you just put your phone in and everything is happening on the phone. The difference here is actually the experience is much higher fidelity and it requires a very careful control over all the parameters. And so that's why there's this limited compatibility at this moment. You know, we could see that change down the road, but that does come with the fact that it is far and away the best mobile virtual reality experience that you can buy right now.
[00:02:36.823] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I was excited to see that they made it compatible for both the note five and the S six, because originally the original innovator edition was just the note four. And then the next one was just like the S six and maybe the S six edge, or there's different sort of variations, but going forward, they figured out a way to. Build it and architect it so that it'd be compatible with all the phones, either the note five S six and S six plus or edge S six plus. Yeah.
[00:03:05.055] Ben Lang: Yeah, yeah. So it's actually for those who haven't been following along very carefully, it can be confusing, which is, you know, not necessarily the consumer's fault. The release of gear VR has been really interesting in the way that it has mirrored both what's happening in the virtual reality industry, which is this careful development and progress before really wanting to put it out there to consumers, but also in what's happening in the just the overall software and technology market, which is we're getting companies releasing products. I would say at an earlier point in their development cycle, you're getting, you know, in software wise, we've seen this, you get early access, you get betas. And then even some of the quote, you know, launch titles are in a sorry state, depending upon how well a developer has done to get them ready. But now we're starting to see that with a lot of hardware, you know, Kickstarter. crowdfunding like that is familiarizing people with this idea of getting kind of early hardware that's going to get better over time with different versions and updates and that sort of thing. And so Gear VR is maybe one of the largest, you know, Samsung, maybe one of the largest companies to take this interesting kind of beta rollout, really. So they never called it a beta. They've always been calling it the innovator edition from the first one that was released back at the end of 2014. and to the second one that was released into 2015. They were calling these the Innovator Edition. They were saying, you know, these are for early adopters, you know, your hardcore enthusiasts and developers. But that didn't stop them from selling them in Best Buy. And, you know, unless you're really following along, just looking at the boxes of these things on a shelf in Best Buy, you might not understand that whole backstory. So it's an interesting thing for me to see how they're doing all this. Of course, now, We're just at the point where they're about to release what they're calling, it's just Gear VR now. They're no longer calling it Gear VR Innovator Edition. So this is the thing that they're actually saying is consumer ready now. And along that whole journey, we have had compatibility with various phones. So the first one was the Note 4, the second Gear VR was with the S6 and S6 Edge. And then the consumer version, the Gear VR, which is about to be launching here, That one is compatible with, as you said, the S6, the S6 Edge, the S6 Plus, and the S6 Edge Plus, and the Note 5. And actually, the way that they did that is pretty interesting. It's a new docking mechanism that actually has to adapt to the size of those various phones. But it's good to see, right? Because now more people than ever are going to be able to access this really cool virtual reality experience. And if you already have one of these phones, At $99, it becomes a pretty compelling add-on for something, you know, if you don't have a high-end gaming PC and you're not planning on investing a lot into VR. 99 bucks for the experience you're getting out of Gear VR, that's pretty exciting.
[00:06:07.635] Kent Bye: So what is it within the actual Gear VR headset that they're doing that makes it different from a cardboard? Do they actually have an IMU in there? And maybe you could talk a bit about, like, your understanding in terms of, like, what they're actually doing that makes it different than, just say, a standard Google Cardboard.
[00:06:23.053] Ben Lang: Sure, that's a really good question. And you're right. One of the biggest things is an IMU built directly into the headset. So, you know, every phone that we have, every smartphone today has an IMU or accelerometer gyroscope package, which helps the phone understand its orientation. But the fidelity of the sensors of those sorts of sensors built into most smartphones is not good enough for the really, really high fidelity tracking needed to make VR great. So your iPhone, your Samsung, whatever, your Android phone, the sensors in there are good for understanding if your phone is held upright or portrait or landscape, maybe for doing some tilting in some games and even some rotation. But really great VR experience requires very, very precise, very low latency, high performance tracking. And so the phones that we have today are largely not equipped with sensors that are up to that task. So when you just drop your iPhone in a Google Cardboard, even if the iPhone was as powerful as a desktop computer, it's limited by the information that that sensor can provide when it comes to head tracking. So Gear VR fundamentally has extra hardware actually built into it, which is a very high quality sensor for that head tracking. And that's like the foundation of what makes VR great. You have to make it so high fidelity in terms of how good the tracking is to make people believe that the scene in front of them is actually real before you can do anything else, before you can tell a good story, before you can play a fun game, that's got to be good. And that's what they've done on Gear VR. In addition to that, you have, you know, high quality lenses for a fairly wide field of view. And you also have like a trackpad so that you can actually control your phone, because otherwise, you know, you have to hook up to a Bluetooth controller or just have some sort of VR experience where you, let's say, start playing a video and then you put it in there and then there's a very limited means of interaction aside from looking around. So it's a really solid platform for mobile virtual reality.
[00:08:25.891] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious. I haven't seen and actually tried out the gear VR with the D pad, but I'm, I'm curious about, there's some of the games like a snow strike was developed by, uh, Damon Pachosky here out of Portland, Oregon. He was part of the gear VR mobile game jam. And I thought it was a really solid, fun game and he ended up making it and putting it into the store now. it's a really fun game where you're based upon like swiping you can actually like the velocity that you're actually swiping on the trackpad and so a game like that i wonder if now that they've had the d-pad so it kind of looks like they have grooves in the trackpad if it's still going to operate the same way of being able to kind of swipe and throw specific tracking the velocity or a certain trajectory with that swipe pad Or if they've just kind of said, Hey, you know, from this on out, we're going to have just kind of like standard controls. So I haven't actually seen it or tried it yet. So I'm curious to see how that actually plays out.
[00:09:24.301] Ben Lang: Yeah. So the gear viewer has seen iterative design as it's gone from the first innovator edition to the second and now the consumer version. And one of the things that's been changing the most is that trackpad on the first innovator edition. You know, people found it hard to understand where it was on the headset. You know, if you put a person in there for the first time, I would usually physically take their hand and take their finger and put it on the side of the trackpad and say, here's the trackpad, because all it was was a simple outline. And that was it. When they went to the second version, they added a little dimple in the middle to try to give people some sense of where it was. And the same thing on the back button that's above it. And then I guess, you know, that still wasn't enough. So now they have gone this route. with these grooves in there, which, like you said, is in a D-pad kind of layout. It's not buttons, but it's still a trackpad. But it now has a texture to it. And the grooves are aligned so that people understand, like, when you're demoing to someone, you say, OK, swipe forward. But it's on the side of your head. What does that mean? I think with those grooves, now they understand it helps make that orientation of what forward, up, down, and back actually means. And so, you know, I'm hoping that that will get people more familiar more quickly. And I do think that the trackpad on the newest version with the grooves will still work this very same way at a technical level. Whether or not the grooves would impact a game that is specifically designed to kind of use like a more free and open trackpad without grooves in it, I'm not sure. But I think, you know, as long as you can technically swipe your finger still, it should be fully compatible and the same experience that you would expect.
[00:11:02.337] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I just wonder, there's a lot of tapping-based games as well. So if you can just tap anywhere on that and it still registers as a tap.
[00:11:10.021] Ben Lang: Yeah, I think the whole surface is still a touchpad. They've just added a shape to it to try to give that quick introduction of what is up, down, forward, and back means. So that when games say, swipe forward, hopefully that makes sense. Because when it's on the side of your face and you can't see it, it's hard to know what forward means.
[00:11:26.965] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think one thing to pay attention to and to watch as this develops over time is how much of the Android ecosystem is going to fracture. For example, during the Gear VR mobile game jam that happened, sponsored by Oculus, there was a Lollipop update that some people just did automatically, and it actually broke the Gear VR support. So right in the midst of the Gear VR game jam, people, whether or not they developed on the previous version of Lollipop or Lollipop, it would impact the performance. And there was actually a hit to performance in the initial versions of Lollipop. So I don't know if that's something you've been tracking in terms of the different flavors and whether or not, depending on your carrier, whether or not, you know, say like Verizon, I guess, is kind of known to be traditionally bad at updating the Android systems and some platforms are gonna be better. I think the thing I'm worried about is that if you have automatic updates set and that for whatever reason there's an update that comes out that breaks the Gear VR support, If you're building a Gear VR experience, it's hard to actually maintain all the phones and all the different versions to do quality assurance testing if there's going to be differences in the different versions of Android.
[00:12:37.027] Ben Lang: Yeah, so actually I've been tracking this particular problem actually since long before VR. So I came out of mostly kind of mobile tech journalism. And this is fundamentally kind of a tech problem. It's not just a VR problem. This fragmentation of platforms and You know, how do you decide what devices you're going to support and that sort of thing? You know, some developers look at creating a virtual reality game for mobile and they say, okay, well, if I put it out as a cardboard app, there's millions of devices that can run it. If I put it out as a gear VR only app, you know, we're looking in some number of thousands currently more soon, but it's a totally different thing, but the experience is very different. And weighing all those things is hard from a developer standpoint. And when you introduce the complexity of just the entire Android ecosystem, which is this big, very complex thing with so many different players, it can become challenging. You can have these situations, like you said, where the update broke your VR compatibility for a little bit. That's one of the reasons why they called it an innovator edition. They knew some things like this could happen. I think now that they've removed that label, they're making a bit of an implicit claim that we're not going to have those troubles anymore. But even with a company as big in the mobile space as Samsung, they're still not immune to the cons of this sort of ecosystem where, yeah, it is totally true that phones don't get updated very often, or maybe they get updated and it actually reduces performance. So it's really going to come down to, is the user base of Gear VR substantial enough to make Samsung say, you know, hey, we have to test this. to make sure we're not ruining the experience for all those customers. And I think that we're getting to a point where VR is such a big deal that that's going to be very high priority for them. But we may get to a strange state in the future where you're at the end of the S6's lifespan, let's say, and you can make that last upgrade to the newest version of Android. But it might not work with Gear VR, right? Because it's, at that point, an older phone. I'm not saying it's definitely going to happen, That's the kind of scenario that may happen. Someone might have to choose, do I want this very latest version of Android, even if it means the performance of the phone is not going to cut it for gear VR. So it really comes down to the companies in this ecosystem to communicate well and effectively with the customers. And you know, what are the consequences of actually updating?
[00:15:10.745] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think it'll be interesting to watch. Also, the early editions of people who were early adopters of the Gear VR may have gone ahead and got the Note 4, spent a lot of money, you know, $700, $800 on a phone to be able to be one of the first users of this mobile virtual reality. And yet, one of the things that I'm seeing is that a game like Land's End will have compatibility for both the S6 and the Note 4. But then for some reason, there's some things that are different on the Note 4 than the S6. Do you know exactly what the differences are and what's happening there in terms of like Note 4 versus the S6? There seems to be hardware differences.
[00:15:48.677] Ben Lang: Yeah, well, so this is another part that plays into the complexity of this ecosystem of so many different devices. And, you know, even for the Note 4, you have that phone was sold at one point with two different chipsets. So from the consumer, it looks like the exact same phone. But if you have one versus the other, you might actually get different levels of performance. So specifically with regards to Land's End, that game that recently came out, they pulled the Note 4 version, most likely because it had certain performance problems that they maybe didn't test for. So they pulled it from Note 4. They kept it on the S6 and said, you know, we're investigating. bringing a Note 4 version back. And that probably will mean going in and doing a custom version to fix some performance problems. And we are starting to see, even though the first consumer gear VR is just coming out, we are actually starting to see the first game developers basically saying, you know, sorry, we can't support the Note 4. And they're starting kind of with the S6 and beyond. And that's the risk you take when you buy something that is early and called innovator edition. Personally, I think that there's probably some people who got caught up not really fully understanding what Innovator Edition meant. Because, you know, as I said, if you go into Best Buy, you see Gear VR box. I don't know that they were aggressive in trying to explain what Innovator Edition meant, whether that meant, you know, that your phone would not support the newest titles in less than a year's time if you were to buy into this. So again, it's this responsibility on the manufacturer, I think, too, be clear about this stuff. And that is important, not only for VR, but this whole ecosystem of like early hardware, early software.
[00:17:27.136] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I guess one, one thing I've heard is that John Carmack, the CTO of Oculus was very instrumental in doing a lot of this mobile gear VR development on the Android. And I got the sense that he was trying to get at some point, like access to the root kernel of Android or the phone hardware. So I'm trying to get a sense as to what your take is as to how much secret sauce the actual Samsung hardware had or whether or not some of the innovations and stuff that he was doing in terms of optimizing the Android operating system is something that's going to be kind of universally distributed across all the different you know android and that's something that eventually we're going to see that we're not going to need the special gear vr even headset that even something as simple as a google cardboard would be able to have enough of both the internal hardware but also the software and everything else and that's required to make is the gear vr as special as it is if that we're going towards that, or what your sense of how much kind of secret sauce proprietary things that Samsung are still doing within these phones in order to make such a compelling mobile VR experience?
[00:18:35.017] Ben Lang: Yeah, so there's definitely two major factors that make the Gear VR great, or let's say much better than what you get out of a cardboard. And so that's one, the built-in sensor, which is much better, which we talked about. And two, the stuff that they're doing on the software side, to basically make sure that that sensor can communicate as quickly and accurately as possible. And then a bit of a subset also on the software side is a lot of what Oculus is doing with their SDK to basically help developers squeeze every ounce of power out of the phone that they're using so that they can get this experience that is really, really impressive for a mobile device. And so the software side could definitely be rolled out to every phone, perceivably. You know, it should be technically possible that you could have basically Android, rather than Samsung building these special software components, Samsung and Oculus, building them into the firmware of their phones. Presumably, if the same work was done at the Android level, you could just deploy that as a kind of native feature of Android, you know. This is VR-ready, maybe some sort of standard for accessing IMUs in Gear VR-like headsets that have their own hardware on board. The further term future is not just rolling out the software into every phone to make VR as good as it can be on those phones, but the further term is to eliminate the need for that dedicated IMU altogether. And this should also be technically possible. We'll probably see in the future, a couple of phone manufacturers saying, Hey, this one's VR ready. Like we built in a highly calibrated, high performance sensor that is as good as what you get on gear VR. And we have the software built into our version of Android. Maybe in the future we have, you know, it becomes commonplace. Just like every phone has a gyroscope nowadays. Maybe every phone in the near future has a VR ready sensor in there.
[00:20:32.287] Kent Bye: Yeah. And you know, I spent a bit of last week kind of doing a deep dive and really exploring a lot of the games and experiences that are out there. One of the experiences that I really got into and played all the way through was this hero bound spirit champion game with the game pad. It was really fun and they keep track of how long you end up playing it. And it took me about five hours to get through the whole game. And what I noticed is that I'd be playing and then the battery would start to go down and I then it would be down to a critical level. And then I would have to like basically play until the battery just died and it just kicked me out. But I understand that the next version is going to somehow power the unit. Is it going to have a power cord or how does that going to work in terms of being able to plug in and maybe have more sustained longer play sessions?
[00:21:22.783] Ben Lang: Yeah. So this is kind of one of the arguments actually against doing the whole phone based thing. Like it's really cool if you're already on the phone that you can just buy a headset like your VR for 99 bucks, plug it in, and you've got this whole new experience from your phone. But the question of usability, can I take an hour or two hours to play a VR game with my phone in the middle of the day and bring my battery life down 25%? Am I going to do that just practically speaking with the rest of my day and needing to use my phone? You know, that's one reason why people might say, why don't we just have an all-in-one unit so that it's dedicated to VR? It has its own battery, and I don't have to worry about draining my phone. every time I want to play some VR here. So as of the second Gear VR Innovator Edition with the S6, there's actually a micro USB port on the device itself. So with the former version, that was not the case. You plugged your phone in, and your phone was the battery. And when it died, you had to take your phone out and plug it in. The S6 Gear VR has a micro USB port right on it. So you actually plug in while you play. That's not ideal, of course, because you want to be spinning your head around. You don't want a cable coming off of it. But if you don't want to lose all the juice on your phone, you have that option. I believe the very latest version also has a micro USB port. And yeah, it'll just be a matter of, is the user willing to give up that battery life for the experience? And I've actually used devices in the past where you might not think that's a major thing, but so like Google glass, for instance, really neat, interesting device, which I would use way more often if it didn't kill the battery on my phone. If it didn't affect the battery in my phone, I would use it all the time. But it does. And so it's actually, you know, it actually doesn't make it as practical to use in many cases because I rely on my phone for a lot of stuff.
[00:23:01.301] Kent Bye: Yeah. And one of the initial rounds of the note for version of the gear VR was that I think games had a lot more problem with overheating and it seems to be occurring less often with this latest edition of the innovator edition with the S six. So I don't know what else has changed in terms of how they've been able to do the power management or to prevent the phone from being too hot because that's another really annoying thing when you're in the midst of playing a VR experience and then the phone gets so hot and overheated that it has some sort of way of detecting that internal temperature and then doing a kill switch and basically saying, okay, you have to take off the VR now and give it a little break in order to cool down.
[00:23:38.528] Ben Lang: Yeah. So there's actually a bit of a fallback mode in between the like the hard stop and full performance. So if your phone starts to heat up too much in the gear VR, you'll, you'll get a pop up which says, It needs to cool down if you want optimal performance. You can keep playing, and as far as I can see visually, it seems to just cut down the rendering in some way. It appears to be resolution. There might be more things on the back end. But it appears to just cut down the visual fidelity so that the phone isn't running as much and isn't as hot. These phones are meant for ultimately a very different thing than VR. held out in our hand and not cranking through what is the equivalent of a very high-end graphics for mobile constantly for an hour or more. So when you put them into this VR situation and it's in a headset and it's near your face, which is already warm, you get this problem where you have to be very careful with not only your power management, but your resource consumption. And so it comes down to more processors go along. They become more efficient, both in power consumption and heat dissipation. There's an interesting interplay between the Note 4 is bigger, and so it has more surface area to dissipate heat potentially, but the S6's CPU might be more efficient. So even though it's smaller, it doesn't have as much area, it may ultimately be more efficient. And so the solution to making sure this doesn't happen is really making sure that you have developers being very careful with their performance parameters, and maybe even a situation where Oculus is testing apps and saying, OK, this one can run. for 30 minutes in these conditions with no overheating, and so you're good to go. I don't believe they have an approval process like that yet, but it might be something that is good for the end user to have something like that.
[00:25:29.438] Kent Bye: I definitely noticed playing different games how some games would be a little bit more of a resource hog and drain the battery faster than other games. So I think there's definitely a correlation there between the intensity of what you're running versus how long you can get to play it with the battery life. But one really compelling experience that I've been jumping in and out of over the last couple of weeks has been the Oculus Social. Have you been able to try that at all?
[00:25:53.712] Ben Lang: Yeah, I have. And it's definitely really exciting, easy to access taste to what social VR can be.
[00:26:00.753] Kent Bye: Yeah, I sort of hop in and out and it's kind of interesting how right now they just have Twitch and Vimeo. So there's kind of a limited amount of what you can watch from Vimeo. They kind of have a curated list of things that they've kind of pre-approved. And Twitch, they also have different channels, but I know that some people have figured out a way to, um, if you are a member of Twitch, then you can watch any of your followers. And some people have been able to kind of even hack that to be able to then follow themselves with the second account and then kind of control what they want to watch and stream whatever they want to stream. So there's been a little bit of a wild West days in the Oculus social right now. And, um, I'm sure that as time goes on, that may get locked down a little bit more, but I kind of wish that there was other options of things to watch. You know, there's no YouTube in there. That would be something that would be really great to be able to just pull up any YouTube videos. Even to just watch the Oculus connect to developer sessions in a room with other VR people is something that I would love to do. But I don't know if there's different dynamics between like Google and Oculus and Facebook. If there was no explicit agreement there, that seems to me to be one of the biggest holes in terms of the video streaming options that are out there. Everything else has kind of been announced in terms of Netflix and Hulu and there's Twitch and Vimeo, but there's no YouTube.
[00:27:22.265] Ben Lang: Yeah, no YouTube and Oculus Social is a very apparent missing thing. My opinion, I don't know this for a fact, but my opinion would be is that it does come down to relationships between these companies. You know, you have Google, who is a gigantic company, and they have many things in works, and they're very much into VR at this point. But, you know, that's not their core business or anything. So I think there's some politics going on. You know, Google wants Android to be the platform for VR, right? And there is, in some ways, some overlap between what Gear VR is doing and Oculus and Samsung, and what Google wants to do with Android. But it's kind of strange, because Samsung is a huge company, hugely involved in Android. And then Oculus wants to be close with Google to get YouTube. But they're competing, in a way, in a different arena. So I think, really, the ultimate solution, at least for users to actually get what they want, which is, yeah, let's sit around, watch YouTube, and laugh at funny videos. is the easier way seems to be, let's just, rather than saying, OK, you're allowed to watch these specific channels, let's just put the web in there. Let's just let people access stuff through the web like they normally do. Because if you could have that screen be a web browser instead of a locked, hard-coded content bucket, then you can just navigate to YouTube. And what's stopping you from watching it that way? And other social platforms are actually doing this. Converge and Allspace, for instance, they don't have official partnerships with Google or YouTube. But because they have web browsers in there, it's easy enough to just say, let's navigate to YouTube and watch it.
[00:28:55.837] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's I think one of the big glaring holes that there is no web browser to be able to go to any web VR content. And I wonder at what point that Oculus is going to open that floodgate because in some ways they're being very tightly controlled in terms of what type of experiences that people can have in VR. I know a number of different anecdotal things that I've heard in terms of VR developers that have created something for the Game Jam They thought it was solid, but then in the process of it trying to get accepted to the Gear VR store, they've been very restrictive in terms of what they're going to have in this initial consumer launch. I think they're very concerned in terms of having like a good VR, VR that's going to be solid and not make people motion sick, but also have a level of quality so that as they're putting this consumer launch of VR into people's hands for the first time, they really want to show the best that's out there. And so because of that, they've been a little bit more restrictive in terms of what they're accepting, but also not made it too easy or available to get things that are not through their official walled garden accepted and be shown onto gear VR.
[00:29:59.857] Ben Lang: Yeah, that is absolutely true. I mean, I think from the get go, Oculus has had a very Apple approach about them, you know, and the Apple approach is. If we don't think the user experience is good enough, we're not going to put it out there. I mean, I've literally spoken with people who've worked at Apple who say they'll, they'll build stuff and it'll just never go anywhere. Or maybe it'll pop up, you know, in some Apple thing 10 years later, because ultimately it's a very singular vision about this has to work with a certain level of intuitivity. Otherwise, even if it's a great, useful thing, if it doesn't have that user experience, then we're just not going to ship it until it does or not ship it at all. If it never gets there. And, you know, there's alternatives to that. You know, this is the whole Android versus iPhone thing. It is controlled and high quality or open and do whatever you want with it. And so, yeah, Oculus is definitely taking that Apple approach. And I think they're doing that purposefully. I think it comes from a place of, like you said, wanting the VR experiences that they are showing to be very high quality and to be very impressive and to sell people on the concept of VR. You know, I think they've taken it upon themselves earlier in the whole development of the VR industry, Oculus was making a lot of headway before any of these big companies jumped in and they had this vision that, you know, we have to sell the world on VR and not just on Oculus. And so I think that's partly why that they've taken this very, uh, high threshold experience approach to most of what they're doing, you know, and you see this through not only the stuff that they're allowing into the store, but their marketing. and their developer ecosystem and all that sort of stuff.
[00:31:35.881] Kent Bye: So one of the things I found really interesting at like Oculus Connect, John Carmack in his keynote, he's alluded a number of different times that they're doing a lot of metrics and watching and seeing what people are actually using and doing within the gear VR. And it was kind of surprising or perhaps not so surprising that what they're finding initially is that people are spending about half and half in time in terms of the game experiences in the actual games, which is where a lot of the thrust and a lot of energy that's been put in so far, but also some of the different just experiences that are not game oriented. And so whether that's looking at photospheres, whether it's looking at 360 degree videos, things that aren't traditionally seen as kind of like the pure VR. So I think it'll be interesting to see as things progress. I did an interview with Amat Mahajan. He worked at FarmVille for a while and then has a lot of experience within the mobile space in terms of apps and he's now starting a VC and one of the things he told me was that what he's seeing in the virtual reality market is very similar in a lot of analogs to what was happening in the mobile in terms of the same type of like there's a store, there's featured apps, and there's kind of a whole ecosystem in terms of building out networks within your apps. And so I think that there's going to be a lot of lessons learned from the different mobile gaming and that are going to apply to the same approach of doing VR games. But it'll be interesting to see how that spreads out in terms of the ecosystems of both. What Oculus is really categorizing into three categories, which is first the games, then the apps, and then the experiences. So things that are solving a problem, productivity, doing something, whether it's just having experience where there's no agency or sort of goal, but you're just having an experience. And then the more explicit games that are kind of using the traditional game design to be able to have interactivity and fun.
[00:33:30.132] Ben Lang: Yeah, there's a really interesting discussion about, you know, what is a game? What is an experience? What is a story? What is an app? You know, I imagine Oculus has some internal guidelines as to how they're placing things in these different buckets, and usually it feels pretty natural. But occasionally you come across an example where it's like, is this a game or is this an experience? And I think what you said earlier about they see about a 50-50 split between games and experiences, which I think the expectation before that data came out would have been it would be mostly games, because they're fun and gamers and whatnot. But I think it's the power of virtual reality to immerse people that it actually opens the door for so much more of the experiential end of things. So, you know, at your most basic, you can have a game like Tetris, which is, it's just a set of rules and mechanics and some noises. There's no story, there's no narrative, there's no characters. And I don't think Tetris in VR is the killer app, right? Or just to talk about that as a metaphor, I don't think a VR app that is just consists of rules and some sounds and you just do whatever the rules are. I don't think that is the best use of virtual reality strengths. I think actually, whereas on the console gaming side, we're seeing a very hard drive in many places for, you know, mechanics and progression and all this stuff. I think on virtual reality, there is a reason to pull back on that and focus more on characters and story and emotions. And I think that's going to be ultimately a healthy thing going forward. I think that's what people are interested. You know, it's like from one game to the next, you know, from Halo to Call of Duty, let's say, they're fundamentally very similar. You're going to learn that the mechanics work a little differently and you can do some different stuff. And there is story in there, but the focus is on the mechanics and the shooting and the gameplay. And that's not a bad thing. But virtual reality calls for, I think, more methodical types of experiences because you feel like you're there. And if you can feel like you're anywhere, The most exciting thing to do is not going to be to go teleport yourself onto the moon and play Tetris. It's going to be to teleport yourself on the moon and do something that involves being on the moon, right? Pretend you're a research scientist and you're uncovering aliens or something like that. It's not going to be about transporting yourself somewhere just to experience new game mechanics. It's going to be the other way around. It's going to be to find the experience. And then how do we make the experience fun?
[00:35:52.565] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that there will be some games that are super fun and compelling. I've certainly had some different game experiences where I just really got caught up in just losing myself and wanting to get to the end and getting caught up in the story. Two of those were like the Hero Bound Spirit Champion and also the Smash Hit was a really well-designed and beautiful Things are flying at your face, really great gaze control and fun mechanics. And so I do think games are going to be a thing. And I agree that people are going to have these other experiences. And a lot of me wants to have these types of experiences where I go into VR and I feel like I'm coming out a better person. And just to kind of defend the Tetris a little bit there, just because I did play the super hypercube, which is kind of like the PlayStation VR. It's essentially like Tetris in 3d. And I will say that it's super compelling because you're able to kind of try to imagine what a 3D object looks like and try to, as you're rotating it, it's a lot more difficult than say the 2D version because it felt like as I was playing it, it felt like I was growing my mind and I was actually becoming better at visual spatial skills because I was playing it. And that's the type of experience I think I want to have is that when I go into virtual reality, I feel like I'm like building and growing myself. You know, there's the game Cerebrum, which was all about like trying to do brain training. And that question as to whether or not we can have these games where we go into VR and create transferable skills that we're cultivating within a VR experience and then coming out. And then our real lives were either smarter or quicker thinking or larger working memory, or just like things that you could do to really kind of rewire your brain and then come out into reality and then be able to see the effects of quote unquote playing in VR.
[00:37:33.930] Ben Lang: Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely didn't intend to, if it came off that way to paint the picture that, that we should be drawing some hard line between games and experiences. I'm actually trying to suggest that I think the way that they work best in virtual reality is to mush those two closer together, where you have games that are, that are highly immersive and experientially focused, but yeah, they don't lose, they don't lose the great mechanics, but you know, I can't help, but not go back to. something like Call of Duty, which is, you know, you're running around super fast paced. It's like, kill, kill, kill, do this. There's basically a little micro game that you're doing within a broader match. You know, you're trying to get enough kills to get a perk or reload, make sure you have enough ammo, get the good guns, that kind of stuff. I think that that sort of mechanical stuff can happen effectively on a screen at any size. But I think that feeling like you are inside the space opens the door to so much more powerful narrative. It doesn't necessarily open the door to more powerful mechanics. interesting and new mechanics, certainly. But yeah, I think more experientially driven things are going to become more common as people realize kind of the storytelling capability. And on the idea of skills transfer from VR to real life and back, it's also really fascinating. And just two quick examples on that, because I think we'll definitely be getting there. You know, you think about your favorite game, you're probably very good at it. You're presented with a system and you're asked to learn how it works and you can basically master it. If that system is something that you end up doing in real life, then you can use the game to get good at it. And so actually, there is a flight simulator for the Oculus Rift right now. It's called DCS World. And this is like one of your super simulator level things where every switch is accurate, the cockpit is accurate down to the button, and the way that you operate the plane and turn it on and get the engines going is all exactly how you do it in real life. And you know, you could spend, some time in there, getting familiar enough, flying those training missions, literally from like your house. Like I could play this today. It's not a super expensive secret military training system. I could spend enough time in that. And having never been in whatever plane it is before and get into one of those planes and probably have the skills to flip all the switches, turn it on and get it ready to fly. You know, I'm probably not going to have the understanding of how the physics of the plane work, but virtual reality is becoming so real in a way and so human in the way that we interact with it. that it is becoming very apparent that skills transfer between VR and back is going to be an important thing going forward. And then the other example quickly was actually Alex Schwartz, who is a developer and co-founder of Alchemy Labs who make Job Simulator. He's actually a juggler as a hobby. He actually goes into the Job Simulator and juggles stuff around. It's fun. He's actually talking about making a juggling training app that will do a lot of things that you couldn't do in the real world to train people who want to learn how to juggle, like slow down the balls, make them easier to grab and slowly hone people's skills to see if they can actually go then and juggle in real life. And that's really cool to be able to get, you know, even in something as simple and interesting as juggling, it's not a world changing skill, but to be able to potentially learn that in a virtual world and extract it and apply it in real life is really exciting and interesting for just basically the future going forward for so many applications.
[00:40:56.557] Kent Bye: Nice. You know, I was just at the virtual reality intelligence conference there in San Francisco. They were making a lot of predictions in terms of, you know, like how many units are going to be sold and moved and, you know, kind of trying to project out how big of virtual reality is going to be. The kind of consensus that I got from that is that 2016 is kind of going to be this limbo year where it's still going to still be accelerating and still slowly kind of taking off. It's not going to be kind of like exploding like gangbusters. And if it does, that'd be great. But people's expectations is that this is going to be kind of a slow build. And a lot of startups that are out there are kind of trying to do this long range planning to kind of have enough cash reserves to be able to make it through 2016 so that when things start to really pick up maybe in 2017. After all these new units are out there, then maybe that'll be the year that VR really takes off. But I think a lot of the early adopters that people are listening to the Voices of VR podcast or reading the Road to VR and those enthusiasts and developers that are out there, they're certainly really hoping to see this huge explosion. So now that we're at the cusp of the first legitimate consumer virtual reality release, What are you seeing in terms of like the marketing campaigns and how are we going to be able to judge and gauge how well it's doing if something like Oculus and Samsung are maybe quiet about what the actual numbers are? I'm sure we're going to be able to see some indication from the developers in terms of how many units and how many games they're selling, but how are we going to be able to gauge how successful this Gear VR launches from here into the spring when the Oculus Rift finally comes out?
[00:42:32.966] Ben Lang: That's a good question. It's either the numbers are going to be good and impressive, and so they'll say an official figure, or they'll just say, oh, it's doing great. But I think it goes back to, if you just take the mobile phone example as an analog, that never exploded. People kind of feel like it did, because by the time the iPhone launched, they had a big successful launch. But people usually don't look further back into all of the smartphones before that. that we're part of developing and getting the industry going and making that thing happen. You know, it really is a very exponential curve at the start. And so, yeah, I don't think we're going to see this crazy, you know, blow people away. Suddenly everyone's using VR. It takes time. It's this, it's this really big ecosystem of developers and hardware and consumers. And it's like, it comes down to a three-way chicken and egg kind of thing where You have to convince one person to do something first, they make a game, and then you have to have that be good enough for a consumer to buy it. And then you have to have the manufacturer willing to make a headset for that consumer. And it's like, you start with this little snowball and you keep passing it back and forth between these parties, the three, you know, the developer, the hardware manufacturers, let's say, and the consumers. And you have to keep that thing going around because you can't just have a manufacturer say, Hey, we have a million headsets. Can you guys make some content for them? Like that takes time, right? Just because they made a million headsets doesn't mean a million people are going to buy them. And so, you know, the developers still have to be convinced. It's pretty, pretty complex. There's, you know, you look down at the very fine level. It's like, is there a really great game that's going to convince people to get this stuff? I think the value is there on Gear VR now that they were able to bring the price down to $99. I think for your person who has any remote interest in VR and already happens to own one of these phones, which is fairly likely because they're pretty popular devices. It's a pretty compelling thing to say, okay, 99 bucks and I can like get my head in some pretty cool VR stuff and kind of see what this is all about. As far as getting a sense of how the, let's say the other units are doing. Yeah. It's going to be left up to either official announcements or people doing, you know, market analysis, getting that developer data, that sort of thing. But for Facebook's part, I think they're trying to keep expectations tame. Maybe, you know, set your expectations low and, and hope that they actually end up higher. Um, and so they're saying they're actually also drawing the same analogy between the VR market and the smartphone market saying back to the pre iPhone days, you know, they're only expecting hundreds of thousands of sales in the first year and not millions, but it'll get there if they keep playing their cards correctly. And if it doesn't come out of the gate at, you know, two to 5 million units in the first year, that's not going to destroy the industry. People just need to keep their expectations in check and let it build and contribute to building it.
[00:45:24.275] Kent Bye: Yeah. I think that analogy of that three-way chicken and egg is a really good way of thinking about it because, you know, a lot of the apps that are out there, I don't see any killer apps that are going to be really driving people. Like they have an experience in VR and they say, I have to buy a gear VR right now to have this experience in my life every day. I think those experiences will come and it'll be exciting to see when they emerge. But at this point, we're still in that kind of like people who are gamers, people who are kind of interested in the technology, people who are like early adopters and seeing what's out there. But yet there's nothing that I've seen that I, I feel like I need to do every day and that my life is going to be better by doing that. And so I think those, that'll be interesting and really exciting to watch, but like you said, it's still early days and it's going to be a slow and steady build rather than this kind of explosion.
[00:46:11.125] Ben Lang: So, yeah, it's like, uh, you can't, I can't think of any technology that, that actually exploded. It's like, if you look at one finite point in time, you can say, Whoa, look, that's like, it really started to take off, you know, iPhone. They packaged it all up right and it was good and they kind of revolutionized that market and got it going. But yeah, again, you have to trace back farther than that. It's like there's so many technologies that led up to that. And none of those things were industries until there was demand for them. So it's like nobody can compel this market to exist. And I think anybody who feels like, oh, if we don't hit into the millions of sales in the first year, I think anybody that feels that way, they just have their expectations a little too far forward. And part of that may be. the fact that we are going way back to the beginning of our conversation, that we're in this state of technology development where we're releasing things much earlier. So it's like the Oculus Rift development kit started as a Kickstarter in 2012. If they had just kept that behind closed doors in R&D labs and didn't announce it until they did this year, like that was the first time anybody really publicly saw it at the E3 event a couple months ago. I don't think anybody would be like, Oh, they're going to be selling millions. You know, it's like, we just got to see behind the curtain for a long time. So it feels like it's already been here and why isn't it, you know, why don't we have millions yet? But really none of these headsets have even launched. Most of the mainstream doesn't really understand quite what the experience is. So it's like, I think because we've seen this development, it's been so transparent. People have this sense that, Oh, it's been three years. since Oculus came out, but that's not true at all. It hasn't actually launched yet. So yeah, I think people just need to take their little timeline and slide it back a little bit, and they will be right on the money soon enough.
[00:48:00.337] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I'm excited. I've, I've got about 50 plus, uh, voices of VR interviews in my backlog that I'll continue to put out and I'll continue to do more interviews. And I'm sure road to VR is going to be tracking each of the new news that's coming out as we're getting closer to the consumer launch. I think we're going to see a lot of companies come out of stealth. We're going to see a lot of things. Like I had no idea that they were working on that and it's starting to really accelerate in terms of starting to see some of these early big either developers or game design studios starting to really announce their titles and especially for the gear VR, but also coming up for the launches of PlayStation VR, as well as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. You know, I think we're gonna, it's just going to be crazy amount of new news that's coming out over the next, you know, four or five months.
[00:48:50.277] Ben Lang: Absolutely. Yeah. We'll definitely be following it. And I was joking with a developer friend the other day saying, You know, we've been at year zero for VR for three years now. You know, that is that is kind of what it feels like because of how open the process has been. But, you know, it's like I work in this world. And so most of the people I talk with on a professional level are so highly involved and so close to this stuff. But like I think about just my immediate family and friends, like not a single one of them has had a chance to try anything beyond the DK2. And I cannot wait to get them in a vibe or get them in the consumer rift with touch controllers and just see them smile for the first time. It's like, that's the kind of stuff that's going to make this uptick happen. When the first small batch goes out, and then people start to really see what this technology is all about. Because if you think about back to the DK2, a lot of people have seen that now, and that's what they think VR is, unless they've tried some of these very newer systems. But the DK2 came out in 2014. So that's like almost a two-year-old VR experience. And in the tech world, two years is so long. So yeah, I'm very excited to just let the normal people I interact with around me see this stuff and have them feel like it's magic.
[00:50:01.094] Kent Bye: Yeah, that said, Thanksgiving's coming up next week, so any VR developer that's out there, go show them the latest in VR. Take your PC and your Vive and Or just pack your gear VR if you're flying somewhere and that's too complicated. But yeah, so your friends and family, some of the latest and greatest gear VR, you know, I can recommend the night cafe is one of the great ones that I've seen in terms of just a great experience in the gear VR and have them play some games. And, you know, I'd love to see some list of kind of best demos for people to show your family what's on the horizon here. So with these holidays, you know, it's a great way to kind of evangelize and start to plant those seeds for really developing and cultivating the VR ecosystem.
[00:50:41.102] Ben Lang: Yeah, that is a great idea. And I know for certain, I will definitely be bringing my gear VR around and blowing some minds.
[00:50:47.884] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Ben, I think that's a good place to stop there. And thanks a lot for dropping by and chatting about the first big release of consumer VR. It's here.
[00:50:59.227] Ben Lang: Always a pleasure, Kent. Thanks a lot for having me.
[00:51:01.809] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support The Voices of VR Podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
