I had a chance to try out VREAL’s VR streaming technology a few weeks ago, and I think they’ve made some key technological breakthoughs that makes it possible to livestream an entire virtual reality experience. Rather than render out a 2D, first-person video or a third person mixed reality video, VREAL is sending a smaller set of serialized data so that you can render all of the VR objects, cameras, and internal state of a VR experience at 90 fps by utilizing your own PC hardware. I had a chance to catch up with CEO and founder Todd Hooper to talk about VREAL’s streaming plans, key features, and functionality including video exports, website ecosystem, and future plans. Just as streaming has become a big deal in video games, VR streaming is going to be an even bigger deal since they’re combining the magic of social VR interactions with watching their favorite personalities be immersed within VR experiences.
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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. On today's episode, I talk to Todd Hooper, who is the CEO and founder of VReal, which is a live streaming VR technology. So I first heard about VRail when they announced it at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and Expo this year. And they had reached out to me before the conference trying to set up a demo and to check it out. But when I go to conferences, I tend to not schedule too much. I try to keep it pretty open to see what kind of emerges and the big stories that I find interesting to cover. And after the first day, I sat down at a table while Reverend Kyle was streaming their conversation while we're eating lunch. And they were all talking about VReal, about how really cool it is what they're doing. And it's not just like live streaming a 2D mixed reality, but they're actually live streaming the full virtual reality experience so that other people could be in the VR experience while other people are playing it. And so I thought, wow, that's a really interesting idea. I wonder how they're doing that. I didn't get a chance to talk to Todd at SVVR, but I did reach out to him when I was going up to Seattle to cover the White House's Artificial Intelligence workshop that just happened a few weeks ago. And so that's what we'll be covering on today's episode is talking about VREAL and this live streaming technology and kind of the future of immersive streaming and VREAL. But first, a quick word from my sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Unity. Unity is the lingua franca of immersive technologies. You can write it once in Unity and ensure that you have the best performance in all the different augmented and virtual reality platforms. Over 90% of the virtual reality applications that are released so far use Unity. And I just wanted to send a personal thank you to Unity for helping to enable this virtual reality revolution. And to learn more information, be sure to check out Unity3D.com. So this interview happened at the VReal offices on Tuesday, May 24th, 2016. And it was right after we had done a little demo session where Todd and I were third person observers in these other experiences. So we weren't able to actually control or interact with anything. We're kind of passive observers, but we're able to walk around this virtual reality scene and change scales and watch other people play VR games. And so it was really pretty cool actually. So. With that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:43.504] Todd Hooper: Hi, I'm Todd Hooper. I'm the CEO and founder of VReal. We're a VR startup in Seattle. And what we're doing is bringing together two of the big trends, really. VR as the future of gaming and VR games as media. And with the rise of things like Twitch and YouTube, we've seen lots of people now want to watch games as well as play games. And we're building a way for people to do that in VR.
[00:03:05.238] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could tell me a bit about what's actually happening. Because I just did this demo where you have these games that are out there. You're able to integrate your SDK. And then what does that enable?
[00:03:16.047] Todd Hooper: So really, the concept is that I'm playing a game, and you want to join me and hang out with me in the game. Today, the way you would do that is just transmit an image of a screen, a 2D screen, to someone else's screen. Pretty simple, right? Of course, that doesn't work for VR, because I've got my own point of view of the game. You probably want to have a different point of view. So what we've done is we've built technology that sits inside the game engine, captures what's happening and then transmits that up to a server and then retransmits it to everyone who wants to watch. So when you are watching, we were playing in a game with Keith was playing the game and you and I were watching. Keith's machine is actually playing the game. Our machines are dynamically re-rendering that game from our point of view with our headsets, but we're inside Keith's game. So it's a lot of technical work to get it to run reliably and at frame. We spent the last year basically doing all that work and then a couple weeks ago we started sort of showing it more broadly to people.
[00:04:09.234] Kent Bye: So what it sounds like is that rather than trying to capture a 2D image that you're sending essentially a video file across the internet to something like Twitch. So I know some people have been doing mixed reality streaming where they may put a camera and they're sending a video image. It seems like the way this would work is that you would actually be downloading the program and then having the metadata that's specific to that game be sent over in terms of the actions that are happening. And then your computer would be rendering what's happening, but yet you would be kind of more of a passive observer in that scene.
[00:04:42.357] Todd Hooper: Yeah, the idea is very similar to watching games on Twitch or YouTube today. You're definitely watching the game, but you're also in the world as an avatar, and so you're able to socially interact, wave your hands, do emotes, and actually speak with your voice. You're correct, though, that we're not using video. We've basically created a new type of data structure that effectively lets us capture what's happening inside the game engine and then re-render that on demand. And it can be live, and what you just saw, and you could probably hear from the audio in the room, is maybe less than a second of latency. but also can be on demand. So for example, Keith could have played that game last week, and you and I could get in there and have a real-time social experience inside a game that was played previously. So there's a lot of cool things that you can do with it. It really opens up a very different way of streaming games. But we think mixed reality is great. I think it's an awesome way to show kind of what VR games are like. It's not very practical. You know, most people are not going to set up green screens and have motion track cameras in their house. And the reality is, I want to be in the world with you, right? You're playing the game. I have a headset now. I want to just put the headset on and be in the world and hang out and enjoy this game that you've told me about and see how good you are or how funny you are and things like that. So we think it fits very well with the way that you see games stream today. It just takes that to the next level in VR.
[00:05:56.995] Kent Bye: Yeah, because essentially it seems like this is designed for people who have their own PC, their own hardware that can drive an experience like this. So rather than having people physically come over, you're really leveraging the fact that there's a lot of this PC hardware that's out there and that people are able to dive into the experience and start to use their own processor to be able to create a social experience in a game which may not have necessarily integrated a lot of social experiences within it by default.
[00:06:24.619] Todd Hooper: Yeah, I mean, the games that you just saw, you know, they're not social games, right? They're single player titles, and we've added RSDK to those so you can have a social experience. And you're right. I mean, by default, if you have a desktop VR headset, you've got a PC that can drive it and can render that game. And we're not doing the game logic or the physics or anything like that, so we actually have quite a bit of headroom to render social activities and things over the top of the game. The interesting angle to add to that is mobile VR. Obviously, you just did a great interview with the Google guys. They announced Daydream last week. There's the Gear VR is out there and cardboard's out there. So what we can do as well as instead of taking that game session to your PC to render, we can take it up to a cloud server and render it out to a video and then send that video to a web page or to a mobile VR headset. So on a mobile VR headset, obviously you don't have motion tracked hands, you don't have 60 OF, but you do have pretty good 360 video. And so we can send you a version of that experience for mobile VR as well. And we think mobile VR will be a very popular way to consume that content. Of course, if you want the best experience today, that's always going to be the Vive or the Rift on the desktop.
[00:07:29.883] Kent Bye: So you've essentially figured out a way to put a 360 degree camera to capture the full experience of what happened and be able to render it out at 60, 90 frames per second, and then take that metadata and render it out into a video is what I understand what you just said there.
[00:07:46.175] Todd Hooper: Yeah, exactly, yeah. And we can do that offline. And then the tech basically integrates with any Unity or Unreal-powered games, which based on my non-scientific survey seems to be 90-95% of titles out there. We haven't seen a lot of titles that don't use Unity and Unreal.
[00:08:01.152] Kent Bye: So what's the limit in terms of how many people you could have a shared social experience with whenever you're in a game?
[00:08:07.213] Todd Hooper: So that's a good question. So one of the analogies I like to think about it and how you might think about it, right, is like going to, say, see Oprah on the talk show, right? Oprah's standing up there on the stage. She's the streamer. We're sitting in the audience. We're friends. Now, at any time, you and I can talk freely because we're in the same social graph. But if Oprah wants to, she could come down and she could pass the microphone to you and say, hey Kent, welcome to the show, welcome to the stream, you know, where are you watching from today? And you can say, oh, I'm in Seattle today. All right, great. Okay, she takes the mic back. Now you're just talking to me, you're not talking to the audience anymore. There could be 10,000 other people in that audience. We don't need to see them. I only really want to see the streamer and the people that I know. So if I don't know Lizzie who's sitting here, she doesn't get rendered into my space, right? So even though you may be playing a game that doesn't have the capacity to physically render thousands of avatars, and we would never attempt to render that many people anyway, you can actually have the space kind of virtually extended to create a fairly large number of people. So in terms of the tech, it scales pretty much like video or any kind of streaming that you see today. So, you know, we anticipate no problems of having thousands of people watching a stream in real time.
[00:09:18.337] Kent Bye: And so what is the name that you call this stream? Is it like a scene graph or what type of, what do you call the data that's being sent over?
[00:09:25.962] Todd Hooper: We call it VRL. VRL is our short. I don't know what that stands for. But yeah, we call it that. I mean, it's a different sort of data structure. You know, we don't think anyone's done this before, to our knowledge at least. We joke internally there's 10 ways you might do this, there's 9 ways to do it wrong, and there's the V-Ray way. A lot of people look at it and say, well you just added multiplayer networking to all those games. Well no, multiplayer networking is great, but if you want to go into the technology, There's three big problems with multiplayer networking, right? One, it's radical surgery to put multiplayer networking in your game. Most developers would say no, you know, I don't have time to do that. Two, multiplayer networking stacks usually scale to like 16 or 32 or maybe 64 players. And then three, multiplayer stacks are usually live and there's no way to really record them and watch them again later. So, you know, there's a lot of trivial ways you might get something similar to what we've built, but it would only work for one particular game. Building it in a way that it can be easily integrated across a wide variety of games, that's really what we spent a lot of time working on.
[00:10:31.715] Kent Bye: So it seems like, you know, in Unity and as well as Unreal, there's game objects and within those game objects, they have where they're at in position in space, as well as a variety of number of scripts and variables. Are you essentially just like tracking every single game object and then where it's out in the scene and then sending that data over the wire to be able to be rendered in somebody's running that same application in real time and just replicating it?
[00:10:56.147] Todd Hooper: It goes a little bit deeper than that. You have to go a little bit deeper. We have invented the game engine effectively to enable us to do that. Just doing game objects and things like that, you would have challenges with things like procedural geometry. So you can't just take that simple approach. On the other hand, you don't want to go too deep because the deeper you go in the graphics stack, the more data there is. And so you can't stream it. So we're kind of in the middle there. You know, we haven't sort of broadly disclosed how it worked. We'll probably be doing that later in the year, I think. Probably do a technical white paper or something like that.
[00:11:26.341] Kent Bye: Well, I think the big thing that you would want to have really low latency and high precision on is the actual avatar of the person that you're watching in terms of their hands, as well as their head movement, where they're looking at and where they're pointing and whatever action that they're doing. That seems to be the central focus of everything. And so maybe you could talk a bit about if there's any special considerations that you had in order to recreating this sense of human presence through this technology.
[00:11:50.121] Todd Hooper: Yeah, I mean, that was really one of the first things that we started playing with when we started prototyping early last year. It's interesting, like you say, you get that sense of presence. The minute you see a head-shaped object, I mean, it could even be a cube, and some hands, and a voice, and you see that motion, your brain starts to fill in everything else. So now, you know, we've got to the point where we have animated avatars with eyes, and we're doing some lip motion that's synced to the voice as well. So it's gotten far more realistic without crossing into the uncanny valley. The actual animation rate that's required for the head, I think we're capturing that at the same rate that the game's captured at, so it's running at 90 frames a second. To be honest, you don't actually need that much data. You can actually have substantially less data. I don't think we've done a lot of experiments in how low it can get and still look human, but Yeah, as long as we capture that data, as long as when you look at my avatar and it reflects the orientation and movement of my head and my hands, it seems to be something that people very, very quickly associate that with you. So we actually have a live, real-time side channel that actually does all the avatar animation and the voice that runs separately from the game. So like I said, you can go back and watch a game that was played earlier, but all the avatar animation is running basically on a separate thread. And so you see that in a different way. And so far, it works great.
[00:13:07.682] Kent Bye: And so in your demos, one of the things that you had was this MOBA where you're changing scale to be able to have large scale and small scale. And to me, that was really interesting and compelling to see this giant human acting, you know, because I know that he's sitting there doing the actions. And so this is the first time that I've really seen a person, you know, in a VR experience like that, playing a game and being able to see that from that small scale, but also to be able to, to get to the same size and kind of see the miniature scale of see what he's working on. But to me, it feels like these games that jump scale in that way are going to be super compelling. And so I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts on that.
[00:13:45.478] Todd Hooper: Yeah, so, you know, I had the same impact. The scale change thing straight away gets people and people, you know, they really love it. So, you know, Keith and I started doing that prototype a long time ago. And one of the challenges we saw was, you know, there's a lot of great room scale games, but we hadn't seen any that really felt like more like a MOBA or an esport title like a League of Legends or a Dota. which that game is kind of inspired by at a very, very, very light level. But also the ability to kind of hover above the battlefield and watch the battle and see the person that's directing the action, but then also have the ability to kind of, you know, chat and just, you know, have a nice social experience. So the minute we got the scale change stuff working, and you have to think kind of how you use it, like unrestricted scale changes are kind of problematic because you can end up in the middle of the action, you have things clipping the camera and that's not a lot of fun. But having areas for people to shrink down and watch the action at human scale, but kind of just out of the action by maybe 10 or 20 feet, seems to be the way that we found at least that really, you know, it's like going to the game, right? You can walk onto the field and watch the game, you can go up into the bleachers, but you can also fly across the field and watch from there. It's a really, really, really compelling combination. I'm looking forward to playing more games to do that for the purposes of this one that we put a little demo together that kind of showed that concept to try and popularize it a little bit.
[00:15:09.872] Kent Bye: Is there any other type of game genres that you think would do particularly well with VRail?
[00:15:15.439] Todd Hooper: You know, it really comes down to the streamers. If you go and look at streamers today and how they stream games, you know, it's about the personality of the streamer. So there are some games that are more kind of let's play, explanatory, this is how you might play this game, get too excited about a game. And it's primarily about their skill. And so it can be any game that is great. And of course, the games that you saw, you know, room scale games where you can see the person and what they're doing and, you know, really, really compelling. Some games, I think, are more almost like comedy shows. They're hilarious. Either they're very droll, or they're very funny, or they're creative. One of my favorite streamers is Markiplier, and you see him in a VR horror game. He has these amazing looks of terror on his face. So those games, it can be anything. the sandboxy type games like Surgeon Simulator and Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption they kind of lend themselves to more of a performance where you have the freedom to do kind of crazy things and your body's in the performance as well now because you're not just sitting there you know sitting with a with a controller in your hand so I'm really looking forward to seeing what people do. We've found that room-scale titles that are sandboxes are really great, battle games like the VR Legends game that you saw are a lot of fun. The more drier type of titles like simulators, you know, they may not be as much fun to watch. You don't see as many people streaming those online. But again, my philosophy is not to try and anticipate too much what streamers will do. It's just to build an awesome platform, give them great tools, and then put it in the hands of those people. And then I know that they will do things that will amaze me. I'd rather just let them amaze me.
[00:16:51.637] Kent Bye: Well, the thing that it reminds me of is in Tilt Brush, there's a feature to be able to save a painting to the gallery and then it paints it like really fast. And so it seems like being able to record a stream of a Tilt Brush session, but maybe I wouldn't want to watch it in real time. Maybe I would want to speed it up by 2X or 3X. And so would that be some sort of feature to be able to record something, but then to be able to play it back at an accelerated speed?
[00:17:15.069] Todd Hooper: Yeah, we'll have a scrub feature, so you'll be able to play back at an accelerated speed as well. The streamer, you know, might control that or as a spectator, you could control that as well. Tilt Brush would be a great one. You know, you see artists like Glen Keane that did the Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas working in Tilt Brush. You know, wouldn't it be awesome to stand there and chat with him or just to see him do that in real time, I think would be pretty amazing. So, and you've started to see that with streaming as well. People start to stream more creative kind of content. So, although VReal is primarily around games and creative content, You know, we're not limited to just games. We think anything that we're interesting and entertaining for people to watch is potential for the platform.
[00:17:52.177] Kent Bye: And so the thing that comes to mind as I do this demo is, you know, kind of thinking about whether or not it would be possible to do some sort of asymmetrical gameplay where you have one person who's streaming, but yet, you know, there may be a dozen or a thousand people that are watching and figuring out if there'd be some sort of lightweight way for them to interact with the game and the environment to create some entirely new different types of gameplay. And I'm curious if that is something that could be done through your SDK.
[00:18:19.964] Todd Hooper: Yeah, definitely. So that's definitely one of the things that we're looking at. We've started to see that already. Twitch Plays is a great example of that kind of emergent gameplay. Proletariat has a game they've been showing that has a little bit of that. And there's other companies that are working on similar concepts. And so the SDK does enable us to have some feedback from the audience to the streamer. What that takes is still TBD, you know, one of the ideas that we like in the kind of freeform physics sandbox games is just being able to pass something to the audience to play around and throw around, almost like a kind of beach ball at a concert that you see they pass into the audience. I think that does require an additional level of thought from game designers. And I think a lot of VR game developers are still very focused on just getting their initial games out there. But we think that bringing the audience into the game, now that you feel like you're really in the world and not just watching on a screen, that's pretty compelling. So I think it's going to be really interesting next year as we get this out into the hands of more developers and see what they want to do. How do they want to engage the audience? And how do the streamers want to engage the audience in the game as well? and we're looking forward to doing that.
[00:19:28.733] Kent Bye: Yeah, I started looking into some of the history of streaming online and video and found that, you know, back in 1999 or so, there was a QuickTime 4 streaming, Windows Media streaming that came out. And then like a year later, the second season of Big Brother, they had live streams of people in Big Brother, which is a reality TV show. And then about eight, nine years later in 2007 was when Justin TV launched. And I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time and I heard about it, and I was watching some of the very early streams of Justin.tv, which eventually, you know, turned into Twitch and has this whole live streaming. But we're about nine years away from that, 2007. We're in another period where it seems like this next generation of streaming with Periscope is coming out with Snapchat, which is sort of like a more edited version of live streaming. And now VReel, which I think is, you know, to this next level of virtual reality streaming. So there seems to be like this progression that I see this history of streaming. And where do you see this going in terms of, you know, this new immersive media platform and, you know, how streaming is going to kind of play a part of this new ecosystem?
[00:20:37.006] Todd Hooper: Yeah, that's a good question. It has taken a while to get here. I think the concept of streaming took a while for people to understand. I remember Justin.tv, and you know, it was interesting to watch. It never really got critical mass. Once they figured out people wanted to watch other people play games, I think that's when, you know, Twitch, I think that was 2011, And, you know, Twitch was acquired in 2014. So that's only a three-year period. So once that idea was planted with people, I think it got traction very, very quickly. I remember, actually, at a previous company that I worked at, I would see games start appearing on people's second monitors. And I was like, oh, what are you watching there? Oh, I'm watching someone play, you know, Dota or something like that. And I was like, oh, OK. You're not playing it? No, I'm watching. And this is one of the first people that was one of the very early Twitch guys on my team. And at first I was like, well, that's kind of strange. But then I was kind of like, well, you know, he can't really play the game. He's at work. You know, he has a job. So it became this kind of pastime thing. And I think what's happened as an evolution of that is now that you have a whole generation of people that when they go home at night, they don't watch traditional broadcast media. They turn on Twitch or they turn on YouTube and they watch live streams and recorded streams. And so those people have cut off from the traditional, you know, their parents probably came home at night and put on NBC or ABC. So those people have cut off from that traditional media. It's created this whole new ecosystem of people that really are kind of grassroots influencers. They've grown their own channels for whatever their specific channels are, whether you're watching PewDiePie or Markiplier, any of the big Twitch streamers. It's a very different kind of interaction. It's more interactive because you can have a relationship with people, which traditional broadcast media is just one to many. There's no loop back to the broadcaster. So I think VR will follow a very similar path. The big difference is in VR, I can't tell you about this game. You know, me telling you about VR and only using 2D video is like me trying to tell you about an awesome 3D IMAX movie and you've got a 9-inch black and white TV, right? You want to be in VR. And so at the very least, even if you don't want to put a headset on right now, you don't want to be constrained to exactly what the streamer is looking at. That's not a very comfortable view. The camera jumps around. I can't always tell what's going on. So we think that the idea of streaming is firmly already established out there. We want to pull it forward into VR, looking forward to VR games. I think gamers that have tried VR headsets understand that it's going to take a little while in the next three to five, maybe it's longer years, but they want to play games in VR and they want to watch games in VR as well. And so everyone that we've shown it to, whether they're a streamer or a gamer, you know, they understand it very quickly. It's something that's hard to explain, but that's why we always start the meeting with the demo, and then we talk afterwards.
[00:23:25.492] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd be really curious to hear some of your thoughts on some of this larger discussion in the tech community about moving from the information age to the experience age, where, you know, the experience age kind of came up on the desktop, where people were aggregating and collecting data streams of information to kind of reflect their identity, like, say, Twitter or Facebook. Moving now into the experience age, it's much more about being in the moment, being authentic, and having a full-fledged experience. I think VR is certainly a big trend of moving towards the experiential age, but also live streaming is something that is not something that you're necessarily meant to kind of save and hold on to. You kind of have the experience, you're there, you experience it, and then you kind of let go of it. And so to me it seems like VReal is really kind of leveraging these two trends of both virtual reality and live streaming, kind of bringing those two together and I think kind of really marking what can sort of be seen as a generation gap between the Z generation, which has been very into Snapchat, very into live streams and very much into this kind of disposable culture where you're just in the moment and experiencing it rather than trying to save or hold on to things.
[00:24:38.406] Todd Hooper: Yeah, I like that. I like the kind of ephemeral nature of streaming. Like you said, it's much more authentic. I think VR brings more authenticity to it in the sense that I feel like we're in a physical virtual space together. And I think people are also more likely to treat each other as real humans than just like names on a screen with little tags next to them. So I think from that perspective, I feel like it is more authentic. It is interesting to see generationally the shift. When you came in, Kayla was talking about, oh, she's a Snapchat fan and I've started to, it's been great having people around us that are using more of that stuff because we've been looking at that and saying, how can we use some of those concepts in VReal? The streaming thing definitely is a generational thing though. I've definitely seen, if you go to meet with a lot of the streamers and we interact with a lot of the Twitch streamers, It's pretty inspiring. These are young people that you know, some of them come from fairly inauspicious circumstances and they create these media Channels that represent them and before you know it they've got thousands and thousands of people that are actually Interested in what they have to say and enjoy hanging out with them and they create a full-time career out of it so if you'd said to me 20 years ago that there'll be people that'll be like self-appointed and Video channels on the internet. I mean there was a couple of people early that you maybe saw the hints of that But to think that that power will be kind of democratized and it will be based around video games I mean, it's one of those things that it's kind of an emergent human behavior that I don't think anyone saw it coming, but it's pretty cool. And I think VR has a way to make it even more interesting, potentially more engaging. And one thing that we know about gamers is they've always been seeking to get closer and closer to the kind of total immersion in the game. If I think back about my career as a gamer, it's always been about bigger screens and better frame rates and the latest graphics and surround sound and all those kinds of things. And so VR for many of those people is an endpoint. And so those same trends for streaming and sharing content in the way that you mentioned, they're going to be present in VR games as well.
[00:26:40.074] Kent Bye: So do you imagine a time where you're going to have like a website where some of these V reel streamers are going to be able to build their audience and subscribers and announce to people that, Hey, I'm about to start this virtual reality stream session. People can kind of dive in. So are you going to have like this hub for people to be able to build their audiences in that way?
[00:26:58.924] Todd Hooper: Yeah, so there'll be definitely a website where we show all the streams. You also got to experience our lounge where you can hang out and meet your friends and see which streams are available as well. And we'll be fleshing that out over the rest of this year. The other thing that we're working on very hard is enabling people. I mean, people have existing communities on Twitch and YouTube. So they don't want to leave those people behind. And you know, you and I are enthusiasts, right? We have VR headsets, but 99.9% of people do not. So the ability to create a 2D video from the VR stream that looks really good and push that out to Twitch and YouTube is very, very important to us because most of the streamers have told us, hey, I'm excited about VR. I want to start streaming VR this year. I don't want to leave my audience behind. My audience is excited about VR, but they don't have headsets yet. It will take years for the majority of gamers to have headsets. So we want to be able to bring those people into VR, kind of evangelize VR, give them a really good feel of it. But then also, it serves as an impetus for people to say, man, I'd really like to put a headset on and join Kent in this stream, in the virtual world, rather than just watching it on the screen.
[00:28:03.952] Kent Bye: As we shift from the information age into the experiential age, I think there's going to be a bit of a disruption and shake-up in terms of the major business models that are there. I think we've been pretty ad-driven in the information age, but in the experiential age, we may be moving to a model where people pay up front for an experience just like they go to see a live music show or any other kind of live event. And so, do you imagine that at VReal you're going to be using some sort of ad-based model or move into sort of a pay-per-event model?
[00:28:33.562] Todd Hooper: It's a good question. I mean, obviously the ad-based model is out there. We've seen that today on a lot of streaming platforms. When you're in the world and, you know, if it's a limited event, like you said, you can definitely see the subscription type model or the event model being more popular. Another one that's interesting to us is, you know, you have an avatar in the world, right? You have a representation of yourself. The first thing that people tend to want to do is they want to change that to represent who they are or who they want to portray themselves as. And that's a potential monetization model as well. One thing I've learned about building platforms like this is not to preempt what the monetization model would be Obviously, I just mentioned four models. It will be probably one of those. It may be something that we haven't anticipated. Again, we want it to get in the hands of streamers, the hands of gamers, and then have them tell us, yeah, you know what? If there's a live event, we'd really like to pay for this and have some special level of access. Or perhaps we'd just rather buy digital goods for our avatars and for our friends to share. I think that's a question really for the market to decide. And then we serve the market as well as we can.
[00:29:37.026] Kent Bye: Do you have any specific memory or story of being in a live stream vRail session?
[00:29:42.731] Todd Hooper: You know, it's pretty amazing. Like, when Allie joined us, she's our community manager. When she started doing the streams, she's a streamer. And before that, you know, most of us working in the product, we'd done some streaming and played with it, but we weren't hardcore Twitch streamers. I mean, I don't go home at night and stream on Twitch. And just seeing the change when she did the streams, the level of animation, the level of interaction, just simple things like, hey, welcome to the stream. Hey, thanks for visiting us. And I've started to pick up some of those things and it started to influence the way that I've done it. Because sure, we may have been standing in the same room, but the reality is when streamers and gamers get their hands on V Reel later this year, there'll be people all over the world that you'll never meet in real life. And so for me, one of the things that is cool about that is just the ability to meet people and have pretty close to a physical interaction and have fun and engage in a positive way and hopefully escape some of the more sort of toxic behavior that we've seen in gaming. That, to me, is one of the really, really exciting things. And now that we've got real streamers coming in and using it and showing us what they're going to do with it, that's really, really promising for the future.
[00:30:45.856] Kent Bye: Yeah, there seems like with virtual reality, there's going to be a whole new set of skill sets that people are going to need to cultivate or would be beneficial to cultivate, such as event hosting or being able to create spaces that feel welcoming and to notice how the environment is driving the different types of social interactions. In this particular case, you know, there's kind of two primary audiences that a video game designer would need to be designing for. First of all, the people who are actually in the first-person perspective driving the game, but also making sure that the third-person perspective of all these people who are coming into the stream and watching it would also have kind of an interesting perspectives and not having anything that's really occluding or blocking their experience of being able to watch the stream.
[00:31:30.429] Todd Hooper: Yeah, and we've already seen that. I mean, we haven't announced the games that we'll be shipping on V-Real, mostly because some of those games haven't been announced yet, but with working with some of the game developers, we've already said, we've sent them back a build, and they'll say, hey, the next level, we're going to open it up a little bit, or we're going to have an area up here that you can stand and watch the game from. So we've already started to see that. So I think definitely over the coming years, because of the immersion factor of VR, you're going to want to think about, great, this is the player, the player's having a great experience. Who else is in the level? What kind of experience are they having? And where are they going to be watching the game from? And whether that's literally like building a virtual Bleachers or having seating for people or just having fun things to sort of move around the level and watch all those things come into play So it's yet another thing that game designers have to think about for a VR, but they seem to be enjoying it So more power to them And so what do you want to experience in VR then? You know, I love social interaction. So, I mean, my very, very first VR experiences were back with Sean and Hayden in Converge. And so that's where I really, you know, there's a whole bunch of people, Rev Kyle, I'm pretty sure you were there several times. You know, people that I never had met in real life that have become really good friends that we've met in real life. And, you know, some of them even live in my city now. So that kind of opportunity to meet people at scale and form friendships, I think is pretty amazing. In the case of VReal, it's around a common love of games, which many, many of my friends are gamers. So I think that is something that if you can create a way for people to meet each other, have fun and maybe create, you know, lifelong friendships, that's something pretty cool and something to be, you know, pretty optimistic about.
[00:33:10.647] Kent Bye: So I imagine that there's going to be some ways to discover and meet people. Like you said that there's a way to have a small session with just your friends, but maybe there's just like open rooms where you could just kind of meet random people from around the world who are fans of the game as well and be able to track them and kind of keep in touch and also join future sessions with them.
[00:33:30.103] Todd Hooper: Yeah, I think, you know, certainly you can have private rooms with open mic and large public rooms that are more managed from the streamer's perspective. The thing that's interesting, you know, we didn't invent social VR, there's a lot of social VR out there right now, but it's mainly social VR where you're taking people into other worlds that, you know, I'm not familiar with, to be honest. Converge was cool. We hung out in a forest together and people there all had an interest in VR. But as VR goes more mainstream, I think it's going to be harder to find people that you have something in common with. And the beautiful thing about streaming games is if I really love mini golf and I'm hanging out in Cloudlands and there's someone else hanging out in Cloudlands and we immediately have something in common. Hey, this is a great game. Do you really? Yeah. What's your favorite level? You know, how about that one with the cannon or the one with the tricky one with the fan? How do you find playing that? So you immediately have something to talk to people about. And so I find that just like, you know, you do in game streams today, there's an immediate shared interest that kind of makes the social interaction just a little bit easier and a little bit more fun as well. Because, you know, the next step from that is, hey, this is cool, why don't we play a game and I'll watch and, you know, I can give you some tips or vice versa or something like that.
[00:34:38.420] Kent Bye: So if I were to say that VReal is kind of like the Twitch of virtual reality streaming, would that be accurate in encompassing what you're doing or do you have another way of trying to describe that?
[00:34:47.913] Todd Hooper: Certainly we've been described that way. I mean, yeah, we definitely think of ourselves as a platform for VR game streams and as a social experience for people that are excited about VR games. But I think it goes beyond that in the sense that VR games, we haven't yet seen the potential of VR games. A lot of the games that we've seen this year are great. But really, if you were able to go in three, five years into the future and look back at the games today, most of the games we have today, they rely very heavily on the novelty of being in VR. And in five years, that won't be a novelty, right? In five years, that's going to be an everyday occurrence for many, many millions of people. And so I think we are going to find the equivalent of games like a Journey. I remember if you played Journey, it's a PS3 exclusive title. You know, it's a game with no words where you meet other people in an environment and you go on this little adventure together. And it kind of came out of nowhere. People weren't really expecting a game like this. It's a very amazing game and you build these amazing bonds with people that you never really get to find out who they are. You know it's another human being, that's all you know. And I think you have two simple ways to communicate. You can move and you can make a tone, basically, that's it. So if you think about the kind of thought and the years of work that went into a game like that, it's really not feasible to make a game like that in VR today, but they are coming. I think over the next few years we'll see these amazing gaming experiences that'll bring things like Journey and other things that we can't really predict today into VR, and I think that's going to be something pretty incredible. And something that's kind of positive too, because if you can connect people in an environment like that, who knows what will happen? I think it's going to be really fun to watch.
[00:36:21.593] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:36:28.399] Todd Hooper: I mean, I talked a lot about connecting people. A lot of people feel that it's going to be this dystopian future. Everyone's isolated in their own virtual worlds. And, you know, you've seen that classic picture of the person of indeterminate gender curled up in the corner with the headset on a little paints peeling off the walls. You know, I think that may reflect a kind of older school of thinking. If you look at the technologies that we have, and we were talking earlier about, you know, Twitch and YouTube and Snapchat and all the streaming things, they're intensely social. And I've met more people through those platforms and learned more than I ever would have, you know, prior to those things. So although looking at VR today, you may see a lot of solitary experiences and you might see someone painting in Tilt Brush alone and you can't see what they're doing and it seems kind of isolating. But the reality is, you know, computers are networked. They don't need to be sitting there alone. They can be people that are doing those things together. It can be a social experience. So I think that actually the social potential of VR is something that we haven't really seen it yet. I have no doubt that it's one of the reasons that Facebook acquired Oculus, because they had an idea that it would be there. Some people think of gaming as a negative kind of solitary pursuit, but most gamers that play games actually will be playing online games and sharing with their friends. And so if we can bring some of those influences into VR and ensure that it is a social experience and that I am not isolating myself, I'm having fun, I'm being entertained, but I'm doing it in a way that's positive and with other people, that's a pretty good thing.
[00:37:56.701] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:37:59.786] Todd Hooper: It's been great having you here, Kent. I know we've been trying to do this for a while. So I listen to your podcast a lot and I'm glad to finally be on it. Thanks.
[00:38:07.530] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:38:08.950] Todd Hooper: Cool. Thanks.
[00:38:10.251] Kent Bye: So that was Todd Hooper. He's the CEO and founder of VReal, which is an immersive streaming company that kind of aims to be the Twitch of VR streaming. So a number of different takeaways about this technology is that first of all it's super cool and rad that they're able to figure out a way to somehow get enough data to send a lightweight amount of information real time to other people to be able to watch and they're kind of leveraging the fact that if you do have a VR machine then you're likely able to drive an experience from your own computer and so why not have you also running that same application and just kind of send that metadata that's describing what's happening in the game rather than trying to stream the entire VR experience and so Super excited to see where this goes. I think it's going to actually create an entire new ecosystem for people making a living. I mean, just like Twitch has enabled all sorts of different streamers to be able to make a living off of just playing video games, I think that there's going to be a number of people who are going to be able to do just the same within virtual reality, but a little bit more immersive experiences. I think it's going to be a little bit different though than just 2D streaming because there's an opportunity to really allow people to be a little bit more engaged in different ways. I'm super curious to see where this idea of asymmetrical gameplay is going to go in the future because you can imagine if there's a thousand people that are kind of passively interacting in an experience in a low-level way but they're able to somehow exert their agency back into the game and affect the kind of featured players then you start to get all sorts of really interesting emergent behaviors that goes above and beyond what someone might be able to do just on their own. And so if you look at some of the games that the Sony PlayStation VR is coming out with, you can see that they're actually doing a little bit of this similar thing where they're able to have one person within the PlayStation VR headset and then four people with gamepad controllers being able to interact with the one person in VR. And so It's still kind of yet to be seen where that will go with Vreel, but I think it's a really interesting idea and I'm sure that some people out there will have lots of ideas for what they could do with that. Also, just the fact that you have to really start to think about how to design a virtual reality experience to not be just interesting and compelling for the first person perspective, but start to think about like, well, what if there's all these people that are on the periphery that are watching from the third person perspective, this virtual reality streamer from VRail doing these various acts, you know. It has to be kind of interesting and create different vantage points for those people as well. So it's going to, I think, really push people to think about how to create different types of experiences. Also, some experiences in virtual reality are less about a game and it's more of an experience. And so what does it mean to kind of have this shared experience with lots of different people going through a VR experience? So I think it's going to actually be a little different than what a traditional 2D game is going to be able to do. I mean, I could imagine if you were to just create an experience in VR, not even a game, but just an experience for a bunch of third-person social cliques and groups and tribes to go through an experience together, this could be a pretty simple way to implement a lot of those different social features and could do it in a way that is super scalable. It will be interesting to see what the business models will end up being and how much it's going to cost for developers to be able to implement this within their stream and, you know, whether or not people who are going in to watch these streams, whether or not it's going to be more of an experience where they're going to be willing to pay for that live experience more than just dealing with ads that are on, say, a Twitch. I don't really think that ads are going to be the way of the future within this experiential age. and that we're likely going to be moving into a pay-per-event type of model. But, you know, we're kind of in this transition stage, so maybe we'll begin with everything being free and then kind of move into a pay-per-event type of model. It's also interesting to start to record these different experiences and be able to export them into videos. And I think, like Viril said, this is going to be an important part for people bridging from going from the 2D streaming into immersive streaming to be able to still maintain their audience and keep them engaged, whether that's with 360 videos on YouTube or Facebook or any other 360-degree video viewing platform. But you can also start to think about, like, well, this would be a great way to capture a game trailer or gameplay or playthrough videos that you're able to start to broadcast out to people who are maybe on just a Gear VR, a Daydream VR, or a Google Cardboard. So, thinking about how to use Vreel in order to export your experiences into a 360 video that may be a little bit more accessible or consumable, or just a video format that's able to kind of document your experience in a way that, you know, otherwise would be completely lost, you know, because at this point it's really difficult to, in real time, capture a experience because the computer is working so hard in order to drive that 90 frames per second it's really hard to in real time export an experience and have like full grade video quality but it sounds like this technology is able to record things which implies that they could overnight you know export at a high resolution everything that happened within a 360 degree view which is a new capability that I think a lot of people have been waiting on in order to have fully immersive 360 gameplay videos of their VR experiences, which at this point has been pretty much impossible. And I imagine that there's likely some other solutions that are in the works, potentially even from Unity or Unreal Engine. So yet to be seen where this goes, but this is kind of one of the first viable solutions to that problem that I've seen so far. So I'm really excited to see where this vReel streaming is going to go. You know, if you're thinking about getting into the virtual reality market, it's kind of very early days if you want to start to build a streaming channel and do immersive streaming. And like Todd said, it's less about, you know, your skill as a player, and it's more about your personality and your story that you have. being able to actually entertain people as you're going through these experiences. So it's going to be less about you being the best and it's going to be more about you being expressive and entertaining and telling good stories. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of virtual reality streaming stars are really able to thrive within this room-scale VR or more desktop PC virtual reality streaming with V-Real. So that's sort of my big takeaways from this interview. I'm super excited to see where this technology ends up going. I'm excited to potentially incorporate VREEL into some of my own VR experiences that I'd love to create. So with that, thank you for listening and please do help spread the word to people who are interested in learning more about virtual reality, some of them towards the Voices of VR podcast. And please do consider becoming a contributor to the Patreon that I have at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
