John Dewar of Studio Transcendent talks about their prototype VR experience called Rapid Fire: A Brief History of Flight. It’s a first-person educational experience where you’re standing on a virtual airfield where you see everything from the Wright Brother’s airplane to a F-22 raptor fly by in a historical air show.
It’s a really compelling virtual field trip where you’re able to really get a sense of the relative scale of these different aircraft, but also experience things that would be way too dangerous to experience in real life — such as having an aircraft break the sound barrier just 100 yards away from you and few hundred feet off the ground. It’s a great example of realistic sound design to see the disconnect between the visual feedback being disconnected to what it actually looks and sounds like to break the sound barrier.
They developed the Rapid Fire demo in order to demonstrate some of their technical and storytelling capabilities, and John talks about some of the innovations that they had to come up with in order to get these animations working with the Unreal Engine 4. In particular, John highlights the material editor features of UE4, and how that helps him create some really compelling unlit textures, and some of the other tricks they used to get it to work.
John also worked on a Mobile Gear VR game jam game called Tiny Cannons. It’s a multi-player artillery game where you can shoot canon balls at each other. They used the Unreal Engine 4, which in hindsight may have been a little bit too bleeding edge considering that the Gear VR support only got released shortly after the game jam began. John believes that the UE4 support will eventually be on par with Unity for mobile VR development, and is really still in an experimental phase where they’re trying to figure out the hidden monsters of interactive multiplayer experiences with UE4 and the Gear VR.
Studio Transcendent is also the sponsor of the extremely comprehensive and awesome VR Digest newsletter, which is led by a former tech reporter named Ian Hamilton. Ian has also recently started writing for Upload VR, and is one of the more rigorous and exciting VR reporters to hit the scene recently. If you’re not already signed up for the VR digest, then I can’t recommend it highly enough since Ian and the rest of the Studio Transcendent team do a great job of covering all of the essential news that’s happening in the VR industry each week.
Finally, John hopes to carve out a niche of creating more non-interactive, story-driven and narrative experiences for VR. They’re looking for work-for-hire gigs, but also see that there’s a lot of opportunity to create a number of their own original VR content experiences. You can get in touch with them via their Studio Transcendent site.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.955] John DeWar: I'm John Dewar with Studio Transcendent and we are working on a content studio that produces premium virtual reality content. We're looking to do work for hire as well as original content and what we're showing here at the show is our first original content piece which is an air show called Rapid Fire, A Brief History of Flight. And you get to stand out on the runway and watch aircraft of the last century fly by, the Wright Flyer, the F-22 Raptor, and everything in between. And it's a very exciting and bombastic and somewhat educational experience.
[00:00:45.283] Kent Bye: The thing that I noticed of actually experiencing this at GDC is that it really gave you a sense of scale of the different airplanes, but not only scale, but also speed at which they're flying by as well. Maybe you could talk a bit about what your intention was to show some of that.
[00:00:59.714] John DeWar: Yeah, I think that's interesting and you need to kind of, by putting people next to something that's at the proper scale and we're holding them in one place so you can lean around and get that kind of DK2 experience where you really feel like you're with the aircraft. And I think there's something about just aircraft as a subject matter, the fact that they're a hard surface object. You really believe in them, I think, in a way that you don't believe in other things in virtual reality. It's a little bit of a lower bar for presence, maybe. So yeah, in the realms of some of the improvements that we've done is we added kind of an effect when the Concorde comes by. Now there's like a vapor compression sonic boom wave coming out behind it and stuff like that, just kind of give it a little bit more of a feeling of realism and solidity.
[00:01:45.014] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was the thing that was probably the most striking to me when you have something going by supersonically and then you don't hear the boom until it's already past you and sort of like, oh, you know, it sort of clicked in my mind because I've never seen something fly by me that closely at supersonic speed to be able to connect in my body what it feels like to have that delay between when I see it go by and then when I actually hear it.
[00:02:07.062] John DeWar: Yeah, it's kind of fun to do more of a realistic take on sound design that way. I always like it when people do sound design where the lightning flashes and then later on the thunder comes, like in real life. But you see that so rarely, it's kind of interesting.
[00:02:21.061] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, maybe talk a bit about the technology that you used in terms of the engine and some of the things that you learned along the way of making that experience.
[00:02:29.005] John DeWar: Yeah, so we use Unreal Engine. We're pretty much just 100% on Unreal Engine these days. And we had to invent quite a few things just to get the animation in. The default way in Unreal is to just use skeletal animations attached to skeletal meshes. When an airplane is covering, you know, kilometers in space, it's kind of becomes impractical in some ways. There's just little things that the engine does that are not ideal. So you end up with clipping problems and animations that don't run all the way through and just a little bit of performance issue. So we invented a way of getting the keyframe data in just kind of as pure curves and running the animation that way. And I think that was probably one of the more innovative things we did. All the airplanes are actually recorded out of a flight simulator. So there's kind of a process where it gets processed through Maya and then exported again as keyframes. It's telemetry data. So it's a pretty interesting thing to do. It gives them much more of a sense of realism. And I think that's partly why it feels realistic when you're in the experience.
[00:03:33.102] Kent Bye: Yeah, my experience of working in virtual reality is that things that I think should be simple are never always quite there or you end up having to fill the gaps in that way or, you know, just from my experience of just editing FBX files or something that was like a big pain to try to even figure out. So it sounds like you had to do that on both your flight experience, but also I'm sure with your mobile game jam game using Unreal Engine, what was that like?
[00:03:58.032] John DeWar: Yeah, I mean, the Unreal Engine on the Game Jam was probably not the smartest choice. I mean, it's a great engine, but the Gear VR support is very new. It was pretty much kind of got finished right as the Gear VR Jam started. So we were kind of feeling bleeding edge in the Unreal community. There was a lot of interesting things happening. So in the end, our experience ended up, we just kind of kept it on KitKat just to be safe. And it's a little bit hard for people to try from downloading off the internet. Yeah, a lot of effort went into making the multiplayer work. It turns out that there's not really an online subsystem built for Unreal that works fully on Android yet, so you end up having to do this crazy console thing to get the phones connected, and it's all just a little bit not fully baked yet, but I'm very confident that it's going to be a great solution for the Gear VR, because, I mean, one of the things that's nice is the material editor is super easy to use, I eventually just recently in the last few days switched all my textures over to unlit textures for performance reasons, but it was easy to make them look good with the material editor.
[00:05:05.113] Kent Bye: And yeah, so talk a bit more about your VR Jam experience.
[00:05:08.635] John DeWar: What did you create for it? So we were just trying to do a multiplayer. We felt like we wanted to get experience with that because we know that's going to end up being a really killer app for VR is having social experiences. So the whole kind of game was built around that idea that you just, you and one other person, and you can see their head and the head movements that they do projected in your virtual reality. And then they have a small cannon, so it's basically an artillery game. So you have a miniature cannon that you're controlling, they have a miniature cannon that they're controlling, and you shoot cannonballs at each other. And then you have your head movements, and eventually we want to expand that out so that there'll be a lot more to interact with than just each other's cannon. You'll be able to do things like shoot each other in the face and get different reactions out of the character and things like that. So I think it's something that's obviously got a long way to go to be as cool as we imagined it, but it's going to be pretty interesting and it'll be social VR. Also, the VR Jam project, the tiny cannons. We're going to try and refine that and get it ready in time for the Note 5 launch. You know, I think it's a good experience so far. It's not very done, but when it gets fully realized, I think it's going to be a very compelling fall Oculus consumer launch experience. So, that's exciting.
[00:06:29.234] Kent Bye: Is there anything that Unreal Engine can do in Note 4 that, say, Unity is really hard or not easily accomplished?
[00:06:39.144] John DeWar: No, I think it's probably easier to use Unity right now for a lot of different reasons. But the Unreal Engine materials are more accessible if you want to get into really doing customized unlit textures. So I think unlit materials, and I think that's been a strength of it for this project. So yeah, it's just like if you don't have someone who's really an expert in writing shaders, I think you might get some benefit out of Unreal for that reason. And also, if you're just comfortable doing Blueprint scripting,
[00:07:08.508] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things that I've been really enjoying that's coming out of the Studio Transcendent is the VR Digest, which is sort of like a weekly summary of all the biggest news that's happening. And I keep a fairly close tab on the Reddit, and I don't read everything, but there's often things that you dig up that I may have missed, and I'll be like, oh, wow, that's really important. And so maybe talk a bit about that process of creating this weekly digest from the VR Digest.
[00:07:33.166] John DeWar: So my friend from junior high school, Ian Hamilton, was a tech reporter at the Orange County Register until recently, and he is working on RVR Digest, so he does most of the reporting for the week. He and I are both pretty obsessive about following Reddit and Twitter, so between the two of us, I think we catch most of the important things, and then he will put the newsletter together on Tuesday night, and then I kind of go and put the finishing touches on it. And then we have another person, Elisa, who does the final editing and she publishes it. So it's a team effort and, you know, it's something we're just doing for free right now as a service to the community, trying to grow the list out. But people seem to really be responding well to it and the list is growing quite a bit every week. So I'm thinking it really feels like something that's worth doing and that feels some gratification for doing because it's getting some traction in the community.
[00:08:28.870] Kent Bye: Great, and so what are you looking forward to here at the SVVRCon then?
[00:08:33.093] John DeWar: Well, I'm really hoping we find a client for our content studio. We could get some cash flow going, that would be great. I want to get lots of people signed up for VR Digest and the more people on the list, the merrier. It just makes it better for everybody if there's more of an audience there. Just want to show a lot of people what we did with rapid fire. I'm really excited I think the last few finishing touches that have gone on make it even more exciting and I'm really looking forward to seeing people's reactions to it and and what do you see is like the sort of the ultimate potential for some of these VR experiences I know with
[00:09:09.760] Kent Bye: the rapid fire, it seems to be a little educational, but I'm just curious from your studio, Transcendent, if there's any specific thing that you would really like to focus on and how you would like to help bring about what you see as the ultimate potential in VR.
[00:09:25.975] John DeWar: I mean, I think we're still really experimenting. That's kind of behind doing a game, a multiplayer game for VR Jam, was just to kind of experiment in that direction and see, you know, find out what the hidden monsters were in that direction. I mean, I think that our real focus in the near term is going to be on narrative content. So like Rapid Fire, it's more non-interactive. story-driven content. And I think we'll go even further in the story direction. Rapid Fire is sort of a report in some ways, or a documentary, but maybe more in like a fictional narrative direction. And for the Rapid Fire experience itself, I think we haven't really gone after the market yet, but I think that there could be a market in the museum space for it. I think any aviation museum would be well served by having it available for people to try. That would be a really ideal outcome for that project. And we really just built it as a demonstration of our capability. But if we could make some money off of it, it would be really great.
[00:10:27.309] Kent Bye: Great. And anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:10:36.755] John DeWar: I guess I should just clarify that we are definitely focusing a lot of energy on original content coming up and not just Work4Hire. We'd like to get some cash flow from Work4Hire, but it seems like there's a lot of opportunity out there for original content right now, and there's quite a few grants and funding sources for that, so we are developing a bunch of concepts in that direction. look for a lot more of original narrative content. Hopefully in the second half of the year, we'll put out a couple of really interesting projects in that direction.
[00:11:08.824] Kent Bye: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. 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 voices of VR.
