Finding the Fun in VR with AstroBeam and Schell Games

[Music] welcome to the navic gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novic growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and AD advisory services for more information visit [Music] www.nic.edu means either building complex infrastructure yourself or choosing among Legacy providers who's inexperienced in games or questionable

reputations pose real risk to your business luckily there's neon the dtoc platform built for games as a merchant of record with customizable web shops optimized for conversion and modern apis that let you use your existing liveops tools neon is trusted by some of the biggest names in gaming to help you sell direct without the typical overhead to start selling direct and finally take control over your full player experience simp L head to Neon pay.com or check out the link in the show notes and with that let's jump into the episode hi everyone in this episode we're joined by Devin Rhymer the founder and CEO of Astro beam and Devin is the guy behind the hit game job simulator as well and we're also joined by Ed Saxton the chief product officer of shell games which has worked with all sorts of companies and helping them make games across platforms for this conversation we'll dive specifically into to Virtual

and mixed reality exploring how these guys operate in a constantly evolving environment and how they find the fun in fully immersive experiences we'll also dig into what to make of various improvements in Technologies like hand tracking voice and NPCs and how these Technologies are changing what's possible in virtual reality lastly Sam distaso is making his hosting debut today which is exciting it's a really awesome conversation with people in the trenches and building the future of games on VR let's go Ed thank you so much Devin thank you so much uh my name is Sam dtoo for anybody tuning in um we are going to be talking about some really uh interesting things that are happening in the VR and the Mr space where things are headed I've got a couple of the Pioneers um in this world who have created some of the most um compelling and exciting and human experiences out there so love to toss it

over uh to you both to do a quick introduction and then we'll just start diving into all things vrm uh so Ed do you want to give us a brief introduction a little bit of your background of what you're doing right now and then we'll hand it to Devin yeah hey uh I'm Ed Saxton from Shell games so Shell Games is a VR studio located in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania we're about 160 people now so that's that's relatively big but uh we do bunch of crazy stuff from like educational tablet games to the VR that I think people have seen and were most known for I expect you die Among Us VR uh things like that to theme park rides so like we have a pretty wide range of the stuff we work on and I am uh I'm the chief product officer there yeah um and I'm Devin Rhymer I'm the uh founder of Astro beam um we are working on VR games but really focused on your voice so being able to naturally speak directly to NPCs and have them talk back and do actions in the world

and then formally I was the co-founder of alchemy Labs we made the games job simulator and vacation simulator can I ask how did you just to start off with how did you get on to the idea of job simulator uh Devin specifically and that one when everybody was talking about all the things VR could be and do and everything you landed on that and it ended up taking off like wildfire but how did you land on the idea uh so um yeah we were really early to Modern um VR um we were I convinced my co-founder that to drop everything and announced that we were PIV our company to VR um this is like dk1 time um and so uh we got really in there we were like working on so many things and we kept running into these roadblocks where the games weren't actually that engaging um because the time we're using keyboard and uh game control we like this is just it feels like a little addition to games but not like a big thing and we just kept

working through that and then we had built up a really good relationship with valve and then they were like hey we're working on this secret thing that's going to be all tracked and then we had talked to them and they were like could you make us a demo this is like November could you make us a demo by GDC to show off this hardware and by the way it doesn't exist yet um and we're like yeah of course we could do that and so the the thing it just like was one of those game development processes that the constraint of everything just LED in the right direction um my wife was eight and a half months pregnant so I couldn't travel our team was remote and valve sent us one headset so we had to fly everybody to my house up in Canada and we went in the basement and we just worked for one week because all we had was one week to like turn out what ended up being that thing and uh yeah we worked all day and then we drank and then we went to bed and then we just like repeated it was just like this epic thing but we kind of had this like IDE aide that you know what do you do with

your hands lots and a lot of the ideas we had were kind of job related and we kind of started working on the things and we when we ended up starting working on a kitchen real life wow this is kind of interesting because all of a sudden you don't have to teach players all of these interactions they can just get it and then we're like wait a second what if it's all about jobs and at the time I was reading all those books about the singularity which is ironic considering what I'm working on now but like reading all these books about the singularity and then I was like oh what if it was like robots trying to do stuff and then we're like no it'd be way better instead of like post-apocalyptic if it's like Utopia robots solved everything solved all jobs and they felt bad for the humans and were like how do we make you feel happy let's show you what jobs used to be like and that was just kind of went from there I I love that the The Singularity is what led to those amazing robots that you see in job simulator uh okay thank you for this background I'm really I think you've done obviously amazing

pioneering work even before what you're doing right now what you're doing right now gets me very excited um but before we dive into it uh and ke talk chat a little bit of the Shell Games progression from I expect you to die I know Jesse shells like a legend in the space and then obviously Among Us VR just all the cool things y all have been doing yeah it's crazy to join a studio with you know Jesse at the helm as VR is becoming a real thing because Jesse was doing VR when they were basically like helmets hanging from the ceiling to absorb the weight on top of your head right uh he worked at Disney in the virtual reality studio and um so I joined mid I expected eyes run so I remember asking a lot of questions like the development uh and the premise behind it was again like Devon talked about the the medium especially at that point was really constrained like it's still VR is a constraint Mr is a constraint but it was really constrainted then like what can you do these headsets and things uh and in a

brainstorm somebody had come up with the idea of like you always end up with like the heroes and movies getting like you know tied to a chair or on the train tracks or something like that and like oh VR is also good if if that spot too if you're not moving around so what is what if we just put our hero in these situations where they're like locked in a spot and you have to solve it and like that you know the idea of being like stuck in a car what makes the car interesting like let's put the car on a plane like that's something that would happen to a superhero um and I think much like jobson which huge fan of like uh the the humor in it too sort of nods to the constraint a little bit like if you take yourself really seriously in those moments like you just feel out of place so when you add that element of humor in there you start to realize like oh this is how it is and like you can't you can't take it too serious I'm like we put you in the most serious of situations like we literally expect the player to die multiple times times before they finish the stakes are as

high as they could get so like you wipe away some of that with humor and it's it's really exciting and then that's that has just continued to grow with us and those principles one of my favorite things when I joined and talking with the ipy die team was uh they were doing a ton of play testing at that time and the the thing that really made I expect I what it what it is now is we would have players coming in at that point everyone's pretty naive to VR and they would try to do something so then that would go like okay that's a way to solve the puzzle now right like they tried that that's the way the human brain works like let's make that doable and I think that shows and we've tried to use that design lesson in a bunch of stuff that we've done it's so I love how you both put that with uh humor and first principles for this new hardware literally worlds and environments that we're in and sudden way maybe you can boil it down and say listen gaming the whole function of gaming or

at least a part of it can be when there's something humorous involved not always but something that feels very human I remember um when I was at altspace VR and it was a tiny startup our CEO used to always tell us the fastest way to feel immerse is to laugh the second you laugh you're immersed like that's the moment and we've built out and did all types of that's why we got started with virtual live comedy shows as like the initial starting point for things cuz it was like you get people laughing and all of a sudden you're not worried quite as much about the heaviness you're not trying to figure everything else out you know how to joke and kind of laugh with folks um to that end just for a second this a little bit of a dovetail if we look at where the current state of Hardware today and where it looks like things might be heading which is obviously say it's untethered maybe it's lighter and lighter form factors how do how will you two think about first principles what feels human when

you're developing for that kind of Paradigm and is it any different or do you think it'll be pretty similar to how you kind of approach early VR days oh it there is you know what I'm finding is over time as we develop things we're giving more and more control to the user which means from a game development standpoint you're losing more and more control and you need to figure out how like a thing that I say at Alchemy and I continue to say at asra beam is designing things to embrace the chaos right it's like Ed was talking about like oh that person just thought of that now that needs to be an answer right that continued through all of our um early VR work and now we're working on like talking to NPCs and AI people can say whatever and they think whatever all of a sudden it's like oh man we have to do this whole thing again where we're kind of relearning all of these rules TOS which is like let the

user do things survive like continue have the user think they're super smart we spent so much time is like I expect you die also does an awesome job of this where every you're like yeah no one's ever thought of that before it's like yo thousands of people thought about that before that's why it works but also that's awesome that you feel that way yeah one of my one of my favorite ioi play tests was a lot like that where somebody was solving a puzzle and they kept dying and they're like they were really down they like h h and then they solved it on like Tri five and they literally said I am the smartest man in the world and I was like that's it that's what it is but that's I mean this is crazy like when you think of VR like it's been going a long time but consumer facing it's a really young medium like we are involved in something really young and uh it's defined by the people playing it right like people play it they decide how they use it they decide how they like it and that that evolves what we as developers continue to make it it's super fun because it's

it's always new it's pretty fresh um and there's great Hardware out there right now that's really affordable that's accessible to take with you it's super fun to see people playing it and have more and more people enjoy that you know it's so true I mean I we were uh I don't know if we were talking about this Ed separately but it was you even look at how like the gorilla tag game and how they got started and they're like well you know you have your hands and controllers and that just seemed like a natural way to kind of get get started moving in this new kind of Paradigm and those types of Innovations to your point in some ways there's been so many tiny miniature hype cycles that come up and down and come and go every six months that it can feel like it's been around for a lot longer but I don't even know when you say that it this new kind consumer facing VR industry kind of started in this round do you say that it started when it was a tethered Rift to a heavy gaming PC like maybe that's a pretty small you know

user base and you can count for that so uh here's a question for you all and this is just a brief hypothetical um if after the DK2 we could snap our fingers and the quest three came out afterwards um how would the industry have changed if that would have happened and I'm the only reason I ask it is because when I talk to people outside of this gaming space or outside of the technology space many of them will say like like early on they'll see some of the viewers like oh that's what I want and then they'll ask oh when can I be able to do that easily when will I be able to put my mom in or my son in or just hang out casually and now you fast forward like now the headsets are pretty incredible actually um but what do you what do you both think do you think that the industry needed to go through this call it all

the hardware iterations to kind of get there and that'll end up being the best for the industry or do you think that oh it's a shame we couldn't have caught lightning in a bottle right when some of those early videos of dk2s kind of came out to have a consumer facing VR Hardware that could have met those needs right off the bat uh I guess I I'll jump in the I think that we are way more software bound than we're Hardware bound and we have been for some time if all of a sudden Quest 3 would have launched at quest one we would have got a lot more games that looked better because for anybody that developed for Quest one it was hella hard um that was some of the hardest optimization work I ever ever did um to get things to work well on that device but there's still so many less like there's games that are coming out now that you're like there's no reason hardware-wise they couldn't have shipped a quest one or Quest two right

um it was just we're figuring so many things out that's in the VR realm in the Mr realm like M because it took a long time to get to that point right so much learning is currently happening right and that's going to take a lot longer and so we're kind of like waiting for those Cycles so that would have kind of sped up but there was a lot of things that need to happen on the software side to get anywhere close to where we are right now yeah you talk about Mr too and I think because of the way it's it's sort of staggered a little bit um is we're learning all those design lessons in Mr again they're just they're close like we lump all these things Mr you know VR under like XR umbrellas and things like that uh CU they they are really similar but when you start designing for the two of them it is it is different like the way people play those games is very different the way they feel when they're in each of those environments is very different um I know for long time like I've always thought

that Mr was going to Trend really casual and then you know VR was going to be where you go to like really feel this immersion uh but then I see games like spatial Ops that are out there right now and I see people building like these like indoor Mr shooter things that are huge like that's the opposite of casual right so like people are figuring it out as they go along and they're figuring out what make sense um so let me just to piggyback on that uh Ed do you think to have compelling social experiences in this future we're heading to do you need there to be other humans or can you take a Devon approach and say you know what we're gonna have Smart NPCs and that can drive the social interactions oh wow that is a that is a great question I'm sure Devon has a very different lens on it than I do like based on his work um I look at this industry and I think like in order for it to continue to grow and continue to

take off there just needs to be more people playing it and talking about it right when my kids are at school they need to be talking with people about you know playing these same games or doing these same experiences that really are eye openening um I I really strongly hope that we're at like the start of the next console generation right like I remember playing like my NES in my house and like my parents being like how he's playing that game box thing right but I grew up with that and now like at my age everyone I know has a console in their home right it just it's very secondary and I think like that's what happens it starts with teens and young adults they really get in there they start talking about it whether it's playing socially in there with each other or just being social about the experiences that they're having in those worlds like that will help move the medium forward and that will help grow it yeah I guess to the um I guess the way that I've been kind of thinking about kind of the what is I think the

evolution of what an MPC um is is up till now we've essentially had two buckets right we've had you know we have an NPC that's got some games some pretty amazing like Ai and pathfinding and stuff like that but you can't really talk to them in limited interaction right they're kind of like these like what we'll look at is dumb NPCs right and then we have social or you have humans that are just like chaos factories and doing all this right and it's like well here's your options right and um that isn't great for a lot of different things right it's like as soon as you have a more social more complex environment which we've been finding in VR is really hard to do this traditional NPC in VR right a lot of things I play it feels like interacting with wax characters where this would be totally fine and a flat screen right it's like I just have different expectations right but then on the social side of things right there is like a lot like a lot a lot of young people really like social but all of a sudden you cut off a

certain age demographic where like I don't have fun with those experiences cuz I don't like kids yelling at me and running like I want something a little bit more stable and so I'm thinking that what will end up happening is like this will end up being something that can finally land in the middle that can like pull some stuff from the social side pull some stuff from the traditional NPC side and like be a thing it's also going to mean that like social things will be on top of that and single player things uh but it's kind of this new like you know layer across things that we just haven't had before so to that uh I would love for both of you to ruin all of our hopes and dreams and done done easy uh generative AI is all the excitement in all different types of ways and transformativeness and funding that and all the different things can you talk to me about how real or not is it going to be used in terms of

improving the fun um in games and maybe that stickiness of a game to get people want to keep coming back or is it going to be more like yeah it'll be a side thing for a long time here and then it'll ultimately kind of evolve like all Technologies into the background but you're trying to you know what do you call it uh square peg into a round pole round hole kind of the thing and doesn't quite fit and I know you both might have slight different approaches but Devon let's start with you what do you think so for generative a AI in the called XR VR AR Mr space um overhyped underhyped what do you think um so one big problem is that a vast majority of stuff that people have seen have been Tech demos by generally Tech Bros that like are really good at like engineering and stuff like that but like on the creative art side of things don't have as much of experience right and so they're like

look at this thing right and people in the creative space are like oh God why would we ever want that right and so right that's where we're in the zone where like that side of things that is all of a sudden going to be deployed and fix all of our problems and game development is going to be done by everybody instantly and you're going to think of this idea and have a game at the end of the day like that stuff is all completely off but I think that is actually weirdly then underhyped on particular facets of what we're doing I think that like some of the stuff within how NPCs are going to involved I think it's underhyped because people see bad examples there's C like yesterday there was another bad example went up they've seen all these things but they don't kind of understand where that is right and then there's things that like you don't think about like voice like we're pushing so hard on voice voice is not just NPCs it's a new interaction medium that is only now possible because of kind of the advancements in Ai and gen AI on responses and stuff like that and

so like that's going to all of a sudden change so many different things people are going to look at that it's like oh that works so therefore is not gen AI but it's like well no it still is right and so um there's like two sides of this equation right now and it's really hard I think for an average person or even somebody that's been in this space to kind of decouple the two yeah I think Sam you said something in there and Devon you hit on it too is like increasing the fun like that's the part I think that that uh gets missed right and it's all the stuff Devon talked about that is like sort of hyped up and talked about and it's maybe not a thing right but it's like what will the player implications be like how is this going to make it more fun for the player and I mean that's how great games are made we think about what's going to make it more fun for the player we think about what's going to make it more immersive for the player and then we go do those things like that's the stuff that that I'm excited about yeah what just to add like I it's important is that within gaming building games we have this long curve

of building games building games is very timec consuming particularly in things like you know traditional AAA and VR and stuff like that and so to get the really good stuff you need the technology that a lot of this things are running on getting mature enough and then two years um and so everything is constantly lagging behind and so people are showing Tech demos of things they're like look how magic this is and it's like well is that stable is it cost effective when could this actually come to Market plus two years right and so there we're on this like curve where you know everything is still being kind of figured out there so when you so to that point and like sticking on this fun this point for a second because I think that's like the that's the most beautiful thing about gaming you know a lot of times you'll get technologist that get come into the gaming space because they're like oh look most new technologies are created are pioneered by you know in gaming in in various ways but it's all still to make it more fun you know like to like there's a ton of

Technologies you can just kind of throw in there and that later on I do want to pick your brain on some other things that you know is now the time for other cool things that we've heard about a lot but maybe haven't hit mainstream adoption but when it comes to the funest you know there's obviously NPCs and games and Devon you're kind of living and breathing what that could look like there could be kind of more storytelling aspects um within these games and what is that going to look like um and I think the one part that I'm intrigued about and and I don't know if now is a good time for you both to pop the bubble on it but is uh making these games a lot more personalized to me and so do you two see that there is going to be between those say three areas if we were to look at so if we say hey smart NPCs if we say General kind of Storytelling or if it's just more personalized which of those do you think would you be more bullish on more bearish on is it yes all of the things all in those certain you know kind of

time continuum or is it like one of those or two of those no it's totally all smoke the tech either isn't going to work or it's actually not going to add that much funest to the games I uh I've always loved the idea and I think playing games as a kid too that your your actions impact the the future decisions and outcomes in the game right we've all played like great AAA story games our whole lives and like you played it a certain way but that didn't affect the next ending or there were two ending options you could get um I love the idea that there could be possibilities where like you know I I log on with Devon the next day and we're both playing the same game and I talk about it and his experience is vastly different and like oh but how did you do this and it's based on the way that I interact as a player like those are cool dreams and I those are things I hope that start happening yeah and I I I agree I think the the thing that gets lost here is people are like I

don't want a garbage generated story and I also don't want that right and so part of this like development thing is like learning what the technology is good at it is going to end up being the folks that are like okay how do we spend like right now we're working with NPCs and people are like oh it's just generating the dialogue and it's like sure but like you have no idea the amount of work that we have had to pour in to getting these characters to do the things that we want them to do right it's way more work it's not like a replacement for for any of this work and so trying to figure out how in a case of Storytelling like how do you craft a great story and then you use the technology to adapt it to move it to flow it to make it feel natural for the user um because games particularly on the story side of things you're just such limited access to like what actually is going on and it's understandably so um is that going to

mean that there's not going to be like these very linear story games going for it of course there is like we are now like 30 years past where everybody said only multiplayer games are going to exist and I still play a lot of awesome single player multiplayer singleplayer non- multiplayer games and so that's like a big thing that people just need to kind of grapple with is like it's going to take some time for things to be figured out there's going to be bad examples but I'm super excited for the team that like understands what makes all the technology tick and on the creative side what makes good story I love that you pointed out Deon how much effort you're putting in to making this possibility like how much work there is right like uh I think of it when we we've all seen movies or TV shows that that have different qualities of writing right and the amount of effort that goes into that craft and Devon's like yeah this isn't like a switch I turn on and characters just do things or NPCs just do things like I'm putting in the effort behind the scenes yep see I I love that it makes me it makes me wonder like

um well when you're when you're putting together these games and these stories is part of the joy knowing that you got to the same end point you know the that everybody else is getting to but faster or better gear or whatever happens to be or do you think the idea of like these games is going to evolve a little bit like where is there a world where you know the um the the granny that was always like oh you're going to lose yourself in that video game you know you'll never come out you'll never get do anything this but we're like oh okay the granny might have been a little bit ahead of her time didn't make sense before but like now like if you have like smarter NPCs then one is like a friend another was like a coach or a professor and you can go on all these other Journeys like you can start to argue would there be a path even as we're seeing with generative AI now will people use these smart AIS as therapy ists or as friends or in for humor where

you will actually want to invest more in those relationships not just even in the content but the relationships then you do outside and is that a good thing or a bad thing because I could also argue maybe that's a good thing actually big thing like when I'm working on a problem this is same with like VR um I love games I love comedy that's like thing that I like Dy but a big driver for me as someone that kind of loves the advancement of technology is what can we enable going forward right because of this like as you mentioned earlier simp like gaming often drives technology forward right when we finish job simulator and I was like at events and I had like you know people from like Boeing coming up to me and being like we make every new employee in our um R&D division play your game so that they understand how like the future of VR and XR is going to work right and it's like oh that was not my use case but I know

that we can kind of push things forward and a big thing that I want to try to do with the work that we currently doing on NPCs is push forward that like what would interacting with a uh a character that is not just inside games end up feeling like and stuff like that and there's so many things that you can do in games that are far safer from like a user perspective than a lot of these other things that could would have negative uh really bad negative effects right and it's like gaming can be the one that we kind of like learn some of these things in a much safer um environment um before we end up kind of continuing that path forward what do you think Ed you ready Lose Yourself to not Eminem style but like you're ready to lose yourself I like Lose Yourself make way more friends you ever could in the in the virtual space yeah I mean I I'm ready to to hang out with Evan smart NPCs and I I totally agree

like I would we this technology needs to work itself through smart NPCs and games before it's like AI therapy right like that's a scary world right like uh and I want there to be like these really great ways for kids to have uh that service provided to them but it's so early that I'd rather have that smart MPC work out in the context of taking you on a journey in a game that you get lost in so we're all thinking GTA with smart NPCs is going to happen before therapy uh uh yeah I I think the therapy thing is already happening though right that's so yeah that's the that's that's one of the the challenges a lot of people are running a lot of these Technologies to the conclusion before you do all the intermediate steps of how this stuff works right uh we were talking about that earlier like what the

steps through this process and when it comes to this there is a hell of a lot of steps right there's steps on the technology side of trying to figure things out there's steps on the consumer side of things like people don't know what these things mean what they do and all that stuff right there's that side of the equation we kind of like have to walk all of this stuff through and games are just a great onboarding thing because by definition if you're building them right they're fun experiences that people can can do for a little bit kind of learn where the technology is what their expectations are um before things kind of continue forward and just like we talked about you know job s and I expect your die earlier I think like the great games doing this are going to be designed and built within the constraints of what works now um a lot of that early VR if you if you remember playing it were were things that were like oh this can't work now but I bet in five years this will be really cool so like you put it on you're like yeah but it doesn't it doesn't work now right and that that helped both of us stand out right because we were we

were designing things that worked right now and they they were great for it yeah and like to add that you were talking about like GTA with smart NPCs and stuff like that I think one of the things that people kind of lose in this and it's the same thing with VR is they take what they're used to right for vrs flat screen games and they're like now in my head I'm GNA add VR and it's gon to be epic and aw right and it wasn't it fundamentally wasn't um because it took the game that were like you know as Ed is mentioning like that from right from the start it's like what is good with this technology how do we build something super specific for that and if you look at VR like the games that were successful were the ones that were like you can only do this in VR this is super special it is super tailored to what this is and like smart apcs be the exact same way right people like want to drop them into Skyrim there's mods all the time it's like but do I really want to talk to every peasant what am I going to say that's interesting right if might be a temporarily novel thing um so it is

going to be a different type of game experience it isn't going to be this super plug andplay thing that is going to be built specifically for this technology I look at uh you mentioned about like cramming flat screen games with VR on top of it like we did that right we built Among Us VR uh but the pitch for that was not how do we take this flat screen and just jam it into a headset it's like oh like the idea of Among Us VR like social deduction games like we've played those at parties like we played those on playgrounds and like the idea of hearing footsteps behind you and turning around like that's a that changes the game into something different like we want to try that uh so I remember like those first meetings where we were talking to them about it and explaining like that's our that's what we think this game is and it's almost like that's a different game with the same same sort of brand over top of it uh so it was a fun approach to it too like we didn't go in and think like oh yeah we just slap this game in a headset and we make it fine it's was like we had to start over yeah and yeah and you had to build on all of

your previous experience like I don't like I don't think you could have built Among Us VR as your first thing before I expect you die would have been a disaster because it was like all of those things you have to kind of learn and build up to get to that point yeah we had to look at like what's fun in there what do people actually like to do in there what are things that make people feel okay in those SP well so to that point and you guys did such a great job reimagining how that could be how that game could work in VR uh if you think about now Hardware can you guys talk a little bit about I don't know if it's the challenge of the opportunity of not knowing exactly what Hardware is going to look like in even a few years out like we come you know if you take like consoles or mobile like really awesome there's going to continue to be really interesting Innovation frankly there probably going to be even a lot more than we can anticipate because those are all just getting so much more powerful um and so things that we always thought oh that would never work on a phone oh could Now work on a phone when you look at like VR or Mr you

have all different types of form factors and some that are fully flushed out some I'm sure are heavily under ND and kind of working but that sort of gets to your point Ed of like but what works today yet you guys have to build in much longer development Cycles than what's today and even what the headset of not like the distant future but like what does that head-mounted display look like is it somewhere between these Rayband stories and the quest is it something radically different is it an avpv version 2.0 or what you know Google's kind of cooking up and there's a lot of big players here how do you can you guys talk a little about the challenge of developing for this space especially right now where you have even with the same device it could be a VR experience or an MR experience as an example yeah I think that's what makes this space really fun to be a part of right like it's a wild ride it's it's a

roller coaster we know things are going to be changing really fast that's really fun and there they're definitely people in game development that I'm sure Devon you've come across Sam you've come across that like this isn't for them right they they they want like a long cycle of I know what's coming next uh I think there are some of us that Thrive and like oh that's exciting that's a new problem to solve that's something cool how could we work with that sort of tech how could we make that really fun um so I I find it very lucky that like this is the area we're in because that that's sort of how my brain works and I get excited about uh but you do like you constantly talk to other people with the studio or other Studios you start thinking about what's next and you start imagining like how you would solve those problems a little bit and then you're almost ready for them as they come because you've thought about it a lot um but yeah it's exciting like I want the tech to keep pushing forward I want it to keep getting better I want it to introduce remove constraints but introduce new ones because there's

exciting new tech out there yeah yeah for I'm I'm also in the same bucket like every once while I'm like if only I was doing something in traditional games I would just look at another game and we would just do the same things we would have to figure this out like this so stressful um but also like I'm just I just love that being on the edge of things and pushing things forward because I think I don't like in like games I think that's like one of the awesomest place to like be pushing the edges of what's possible so that everybody that comes after can look at that like what jobs I was like telling people all the time we released a demo before that game even came out was like I'm like take stuff take stuff learn go like this is the only way we're all successful is if we can pull enough stuff up because if any one Studio needs to solve all of the problems like we're we're in a very very bad place and so that is like always super important to me and one thing I do about uh all the time which is like talking about this like when is a tech that you're going to be ready like what is that kind of thing

I have this thing that I did at Alchemy and I continue to do where I like spin up an R&D thing team a really small team like two or three people that I'm on and I create a checklist of why a technology won't work and I did this with VR and then more recently I did Alchemy I did this on hand tracking I made this whole list why hand tracking wouldn't work and we're like let's go and the way we're going to go is use what currently exists in a current game and just try to figure it out and we worked on that for for 3 months and we're like we could do this like this is doable now right and so we ran ahead and like Alchemy now is like big Pioneers in that we've got dimensional double shift um recently came out which is only hand tracked and it's a multiplayer game that's Bonkers town right but it allows the industry to move forward because everybody can look at it and go wow this is what's currently possible and this this is super true so like super shout out to Devon and then the the Alchemy team that's there now for the work in hands right like Devin said like not one

Studio can push forward all of these things so like I'm calling Andrew an Alchemy and I'm like hey so about hands right like what what have you learned in the last five years I'll tell you stuff that I've learned right like uh uh so it's it's it's a fun Community to get to talk to people and know like yeah Devon and team are like they're solving this hand thing and then we can talk about it because that is how we're all going to push this forward so on that note let's just let me just double click into the hand piece I feel like um hands hand tracking how that works whether it's in like a gaming environment within you know a headset or if it's separate it's more kind of functional moving moving things around you know whether you're tapping you're grabbing things um I know for a while there the issues with some of the handpiece was the tracking of it and getting it exact and kind of working each time have are you two feeling do you two feel bullish or like little bearish in terms of the

future of hand tracking without controllers in games for you know in the XR space I am Ultra bullish um and a lot of people are like oh because you think that hands are going to be able to do everything the controllers can and I'm going to tell you 10 reasons that's not the case and I'm like I'm sorry but that's actually irrelevant right I think a lot about when moobile when I iPhone launched and they were like here's a touchscreen and then Microsoft was up there talking about all the reasons why a touchcreen couldn't do what a keyboard could do and I'm like yeah sure dude but like it doesn't matter this is what people are going to want to interact with right this is the thing that is going to drive that forward and it's going to mean things are different it doesn't mean that like all of a sudden there's going to be no VR games with controllers right you need some good tracking if you want to do a gorilla tag like experience that's always going to exist right but I think that as the primary input in VR XR AR all the things

it's obvious to me that the primary input is going to be hand tracking and then you're going to use different types of controllers for more specific experiences yeah I uh it's funny I see a lot of people and they think that Devin is saying that controllers are going to get thrown into the sun right and I I think that's not what he's saying right there's going to be a use case for controller games but there's going to be use case for hands games too and maybe hands interactions for your menus and things like that the touchcreen is a really great example of like that was never going to work and then it worked and now everybody has one in their pocket right um and hand tracking just like uh you talk Sam we talked a lot about tech as it gets better like the tracking of your hand in these experiences from the displays or the headmount displays it's just getting much better uh so the things that you learn the constraints that you're in is slowly those constraints sort of widen out uh this just Bec much more natural to use and and back to the conversation

about building for the tech like early stuff that we did with vacation Simulator for hand tracking vacation simulor wasn't built for hand tracking there's so many bad things in that game from a design standpoint when it comes to using hand tracking that I would never do if we were doing hand tracking in the start right but meanwhile um alony finishing up dimensional double ship right that game was built right from the start for hand tracking so like they could weave and stuff through the some challenging areas but then on the other side it's like wow this is way better than with controllers these particular interactions and so there's always that lag time right that like couple year lag time as the technology gets better and then the games kind of figure out how to adopt to it it is amazing too watching people use hand tracking and the experiences that you make and like uh you know like right now this is a gesture that works really well in hand tracking games right there are very few things in your life you pick up this way right so uh don't give me a sledge chamber and tell me to pick it up with my hands when I have to do it this way like that that's going to break the

user's brain instantly right give them something that they they want to pick up this way uh and that's that constraint that we both talked about earlier is like yeah I I want them to do this thing but it's not quite there yet so like I'm going to come up with this other version I'm going to design around that constraint and when you do that it does feel really good it feels pretty magical yeah yeah like things you just don't expect like when we were starting to work on a dimensional double shift like we had a rule at alchemy that we tried not to use the trigger and the grip like at the same time and it's not that people couldn't figure that out we just figured the mainstream couldn't figure it out when we were doing demos it's was like hold the thing and then do the thing right it was just too complicated and we kind of had that as a rule right it was like where are the buttons and then we expected that not to work in hand tring because why would that be better and we built like a a simple thing like a water SC and people were just like they grabbed it and went like this and they were like and were like oh we don't have to teach that it's just whole life exactly right it's

like and I think like also the segue into like the stuff like I was talking about with voice is like voice is I this weird thing where in gaming and Technology it just hasn't worked and it hasn't been like voice isn't a good input voice is a fantastic input this is how this whole thing is currently happening it's a fantastic way of communicating but the technology wasn't there yet and so now the technolog is there it's like let's rethink stuff and I'm super excited like what we're building right now is hand track and its voice and the onboarding is just super easy because everybody has talked and use their hands and they just get it and they can go yeah it is really weird like uh games for a long time have wanted to use voice right and it's just like it it was not at a spot where it felt comfortable you weren't talking like the way we're talking right now you were talking in a very different way that you had to be taught to talk again it was like picking up the sledgehammer like this it's the same thing so to that coming back circling back on one topic

we touched base on but just let me ask one last question on it um back on the smart NPC front this idea of voice enhance You could argue that sums up not all of communication but it's a lot of it right they always say you know a lot of it's non-verbal well now if you can kind of get head gestures you know kind of tilting there you can be speaking with your hands obviously you can pitching stuff you can point you can kind of pick up on those types of things and obviously you have your voice What type of game plays do you think emerge first under those Technologies being more advanced than hoptics or you know may maybe some of these other kind of ones Devon what do you think and then end I'm curious yeah that has been my last almost two years um because I had some theories um but I knew I needed to test them like I didn't go and like this is the game bu building building that because I knew I didn't know enough right I didn't know

which problems were going to be easy and which ones were going to be impossible and just like VR I found in the early days they were flipped um I was like oh that's no way to do that it was like in afternoon it's was like I soled it and then it's like this should be trivial and it's just like no that's just impossible within this medium um and so we're kind of working through things there um one of my Engineers joke that we're kind of building conversation as a game and it's like what is that mean right and so it's like all of these ways of input are now kind of flipped and what we're trying to do is make something that is more human right more like what you are used to as a human we're building a lot of work we're doing a lot of innovative work right now in seated things um because I spent most of my career doing standing stuff and I'm like okay I want to spend some time on sitting because people spend most their time sitting if you look at people talking they're generally seated right or they're leaning on something right and I'm like well why are we fighting against these things like I'm not like

running around and talking to somebody I'm running around and talking to somebody that doesn't seem quite the way to we kind of go about things so I'm trying to pull things from the way people normally do things so that we have that anchor and then how do I put twists on them and unique game things on them um that make them feel very unique yeah I mean this this is Devon's world right like this is a question gear for well this is my this is my pitch to Devon to like I just want average intelligence NPCs not smart NPCs right like I don't I don't want them to be intimidating me he no too much funny we had a thing a couple weeks ago um where we were working on something and then um uh we had to like help the NPC solve a problem and then the NBC just ended up getting too too smart and just worked through and then the user was like yeah sure what do you think what do you think what and then like and I was like uh oh we made an NPC play the game and I'm like we have to change that because the goal is for the human to play the game not the NPC play the game yeah that's got to be a wild world right like it's

like you asked this NPC with unlimited intelligence like what would you do and it just tells you the AL the answers y exactly what I would do is go forward and turn left I'm not sure why but you would want to open the door it's a different oral yeah I love that I have there's all types of fun examples of people that are trying to build like this game but for this platform and kind of rethink it and sometimes the tweaks are make to improve it and make it more efficient kill all the fun you know so if you're playing a social game that's about guessing something that you're kind of trying to enact with your hands or something and you get hints that they start telling you or they perfect your movements a little bit it's like well you just killed all the fun of it actually I imagine the smart NPC in Among Us VR just telling everybody who the impostor is she it's red like ah what how do you know it's like it's red oh this game is is not fun anymore ter well by

I okay um so then to just wrap this with is I wanted to do a little bit of what call Rapid Fire but if you think going out putting on your real future you guys live in the future anyways putting on that those future facing hats um so uh let's see couple things one is I'll rattle off a few of these which of these do you think will become real and which of these are just totally Vapor not ever really going to be a thing okay so if I talk about haptic vests um smell and uh let's say something that's more audio visual but you drive the audio visuals everywhere that you're kind of going in this virtual space and good You' been good uh yeah I'm goingon to go with smell uh because I will say like if you guys remember the void I did the the Star Wars and the Wreck-It Ralph

my favorite moment of the Wreck-It Ralph experience is like you come around this corner it smells like vanilla it's amazing right and it does feel really great you're in this world uh the Star Wars one smells like sulfur and it's it's less fun like it's like oh it smells bad here um but yeah I I don't want like to be walking in the room or my kids are playing a game and I don't want to smell what they're they're playing right like I that to that's not a version of immersion that I want right now uh but you can tell me I'm wrong like I remember like uh the early video game controllers with the rumble pack and I was like it just it makes my hands numb like I don't want this like it's just shaking all the time violently uh but guess what it got better and now it's like playing a controller that doesn't have haptics is a little weird so Tre out okay so you are bullish on smelling the right way pleasant smell them par has have been doing the smell thing for years right like they they pump out that smell to get you to go like to the ice cream stand or the

funnel C uh yeah I I am in this unique spot where um in the early days of VR every company that was trying to make Hardware would contact us and give us a demo and it was like Bonkers time because like so much is being done but like 99.9% of it was really not going to ever work um and so definitely got some smell demos some haptic demos and stuff like that um smell will not work uh in my lifetime um in in an average user's case the physics just isn't gonna work and smells are one of those things that trigger way too low on the brain um and people don't like certain things you can't just close your eyes to smells and so like that one just even if you could Solve It Nasty um haptic haptic best stuff is like there's always going to be groups of people that are just going to love that stuff but like there isn't it

isn't like I was thinking about the value tradeoff right like it's the same thing with like hands and controllers right controllers are going to continue to exist they're awesome for certain things but for the mainstream I think that the value proposition isn't there right it's like well I use the controller and it doesn't get me anything and now it has a level of complexity a level of additional thing and stuff like that so I think the other one was like kind of like being able to like customize stuff through like yeah like that stuff that stuff is going to be going to be big um it's just going to take a while it's not going to be magic um it is literally going to be people doing a lot of really hard smart work yeah I wanted Devon to like rip his shirt open and wearing a haptic vest right now hatic vest that would have been the I should have G you some heads I feel every word you're telling mea okay last last one on um this kind of real future facing stuff um but like I said I kind of want to take advantage opport because I know where I'm going to get two people who know this space as

deeply as you two do and have actually had to as we start off with like first principles think about what is the nature of what this Beast is Hardware software social you know KN all the rest um then computer interfaces um is there a world where you know could that help people socialize um more deeply in these immersive spaces is there a hi mind of sort with gaming like is that um going to be a thing or is that purely SciFi and like no no no that there's no real strong need or desire or good fit there with that kind of technology I have one brain and it's a lot to handle right like I a hive mind of what other people are thinking out there um I do see things like man I watched the uh a connect this year there was the live translation to I look at that and I think oh it' be so useful like I grew up across the street

from my grandparents my grandmother uh migrated to America after World War II she spoke French right uh she spoke great English whenever I was born uh but her her sister so like my great a uncle would visit every other summer and they didn't speak English so at the beginning of Summer I didn't understand them at all at the end of summer like we could communicate with each other and they would come every other summer so in it you know after I adapt a summer I couldn't talk to them again right like I I lost all of that and like how crazy like I had a great relationship with them I loved them a lot like but how great would that relationship have been if the barrier was so small that I was like oh instantly I know all their stories and I know like all these stuff all this stuff that they're having going so like there is stuff that is going to like change the way that like our kids and our kids kids interact with each other and just process information and that sounds really exciting uh yeah but I a group think hive mind brain scarce me me I don't want that it's uh people misunderstand it

because it's an output device not an input device um and so um you have to be thinking about it from that perspective right it's like I it's not a two-way street um at least anywhere in the near uh near term and so there's definitely things but I think that there's might be Paths of least resistance on you know what they like meta is working on some stuff with like you know you twitch muscles and stuff like that and that's much more analog to how we have interacted with other things and I think there's other ways that we can kind of deal with some of these output things um going forward but you know it's it's always really hard to tell uh I was talking to my wife yesterday about how uh when we were kids we were trying to explain things to our children that we did and it was like hard and I'm like ah wow I've got old but then I was like what things are my kids doing today that they're going to explain to their kids and I'm like I don't know I like that's

really hard for me to take a guess of what things are going to consider super super silly it's crazy Ask a kid to do the gesture for talking on a phone like they don't do this yeah that's so funny they do you do this right like it's just very different well you know I will say uh this was awesome I'm I am convinced that as long as this future of humans and machines in gaming look and the singularity looks much more like the robots and job simulator and you know the kind of interactions of ways of dying and I expect you to die if that's what that future looks like then we are headed to a great amazing exciting future everything else terrifies me uh Ed thank you so much Devin thank you so much this was a uh this is our first episode of the navig gaming podcast I'm Sam dtoo and I hope you all enjoyed

it if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu number one games industry newsletter novic digest or contact us to learn about our wide- ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]