How Do You Make VR for Everyone?

[Music] uh you are here for a panel called how do you make vr for everyone uh i hope that's why you're here um i'm doug northcook uh i'm a professor of immersive media at chatham university in pittsburgh um where we are starting a four-year undergraduate program specifically focused on immersive technology um and i also do various various other things um and with me today are the the best people that i know um i'll let them introduce themselves um my name is robin hunnicky i'm on the advisory board for brdc please fill out your uh forms after you see the session it's a great way to give feedback and please sign up your cell phone um and if you're going to ask questions use the mic so that we get it on the record i have to say those things because that's for gc um i'm a professor and also ceo and game designer

i run a program at uc santa cruz which is an undergraduate bachelor of the arts in games and playable media and also a master's program there which is in digital arts and new media both of which help lots of people from all walks of life get access to emerging technologies and make games for them and then i also am the ceo of phenomena which is local here in san francisco we're 30 people and we make weird games like wataum which is coming out on the playstation this summer um and luna which is also coming out on the playstation and psvr and will be at pax so that's what i've been doing lately i'm really glad to see all of you here thanks for coming uh hi new friends oh hello uh i'm sai uh i'm previously the studio director of alchemy labs we did uh jobs later rick and morty and i have left to start a super secret stealth new project and that's and that's basically where i'm at right now yes hi everybody um i'm kat harris i

previously on where kat harris was at microsoft doing awesome r d design development for now i can say like oh hololens2 is out yay and and cool like azure spatial anchors you should check it out because they're freaking awesome um but now currently i am a designer and prototyper at a company called magnopus who uh did coco vr and uh blade runner vr game and also does cool vr production stuff so that is where i am currently at yay okay great um so the today's panel comes out of a very uh a very special event that i was honored to host back in the fall uh which is called the convening which is an event uh that falling water which is pictured here which is an iconic frank lloyd wright designed house outside of pittsburgh where i live um and the the curators at fallingwater

and their directors were gracious enough to offer me the convening for 2018 which is a funded event to work on a difficult design problem and i was like i've got a lot of those so i invited a group of of designers developers people working in in vr specifically to ask the question that is this panel which is how do we make vr something that is for everybody um and that weekend was really great it was really productive and we've seen a lot of really interesting movement come out of those conversations and go back into the companies that were a part of that and so we wanted to come and share um some of those conversations and for us this is also a chance to continue some of those conversations with each other um and the thing that i'm maybe the most excited about is that uh right after that robin came back out to falling water and we worked with a an amazing zine artist in chicago named gage linston and fallingwater funded the

creation of a zine uh that we we actually have the first print run here today for all of you to take home with you hopefully we have enough if if we run out just follow me on twitter and i'll make sure that a copy gets to you digitally or otherwise and the zen is an imagining of the future in the year 2050 where students from all over the world go to high school together in vr and it is a an attempt to imagine a bright future where we are more global and more connected and more fun and it's really weird uh and it will be uh in the museum store at falling water which is a laugh so when we got up to to the convening uh where there's no internet and no cell phone service um we spent we spent our uh a part of our initial time going up to the studio space that's there taking a piece of butcher paper wrapping the entire studio in it and listing all of

our problems and i'll tell you there were many this is one section of one part of one wall with a with a list of problems uh ranging from problems with content problem with the ability of creators to share meaningful work um the inability of creators to work on broader use cases social problems ethical problems um people getting sick the first time they try vr and then never doing it again i mean this was it was hours and hours of just listing problems um but it felt so good it felt so good it was a really great moment of catharsis you needed to purge yeah you needed to purge and just put that out there so we could like touch it yeah like oh these are the problems it was also great to just see them because then you're like oh now we can like tackle them now that they're all out there yeah yeah you drink yeah punch and so after after just vomiting all of these problems onto the

wall uh we spent uh part of the next day kind of sifting through those problems and identifying for us what are the what were the themes that we were seeing and what were the things that all of our companies and institutions have identified as the most meaningful areas to move this forward which is not just how do we get more users into vr but how do we get more kinds of users into vr and so we're going to talk through a few of those pieces today and talk through some of the things that we're working on um and some of the things that we're seeing and also some of the things that we are hoping that you all will work on because there's only four of us and there's a lot of you so um and so the first thing that we that we worked on up there was talking about accessibility for users and that was a really broad reaching conversation going from access for people with a wider range of abilities access related to economics and finance and

so we're going to kind of start there and give each of us an opportunity to kind of talk about what we took away from that part of the conversation and ask each other some questions yeah i was going to say that i think that one of the best things about the convening was that it was people from all walks of the creative and uh sort of implementation pipeline of vr and ar and mixed reality so we had people there that work on tools we have people there that work on software we have people that were working on the hardware and then demo content for this new stuff that's coming out um but also people who are thinking more and more about the um the the harder longer term problems of living in a society where this is a reality where it's not like what if there's a market or what if there's adoption but just like five years from now or 10 years from now when it's a reality what is our experience going to be and i think that cat was really good at talking about accessibility issues from the perspective of trying to build like a second gen headset you know and so i was just curious to hear some of your thoughts about that stuff yeah so again i came from the microsoft side so

tools from hardware from trying especially nowadays microsoft is very open source and trying to create this open foundation for a lot of different types of uh realities to be developed for and so a lot of the accessibility is okay everyone especially with new facial tracking and new sensors we're all trying to rebuild our own systems from the ground up and there isn't a lot of sharing which is the exact opposite of accessibility and being able to get new people into the space and so a lot of what i have seen in the past and what a lot of developers now are are learning is that if we do have these walled gardens all of a sudden we have fragmentation everywhere yeah and um the whole the whole point of open source is to okay we have these protocols now where we have a design foundation

design foundation where okay if if i'm holding an object in vr now if psy wants to grab that object from me like and she has a different headset or a different set of controllers what does that look like how do we have that foundation of at least ideas of how that will work in for our phones we all know that pinching means zoom like that is in any phone and any sort of tablet we know that that's the functionality that is expected but we don't have any of that for vr because like no one's talking about it or some people are talking about it but we still haven't explored enough and it's still so new and we can't have these divides in our foundation for different hardwares if if we expect that whole like generation of adoption to be like hey everyone is using this now how do we get to that next step and so i think also just in terms of working together as a group you know one of the things that has come up in a lot

of these conversations is the fact that while there are these little pockets of funding and there are little ways in which you can engage with a particular hardware and that creators group inside that hardware and stuff like that we're a really small community like you could probably reach out and poke someone in the audience who's either working on something that's similar to what you're doing or is interested in a problem that you have and our ability to spend the weekend together talking about these problems it made it very clear to us that accessibility is a lot about how much we share in terms of our design language and our problems and like that idea of just putting the problems out there like this is not the first time people have made vr you know yeah i see you brenda [Laughter] like you know i mean these are not new questions but it it's significant that at every turn the way that the system is designed to have us make innovative capitalistic decisions that like make someone rich means that the actual research part of it is um it's not as open and so i think one of the

things that we talked about a lot of this at this beginning of the convening was just like let's talk to each other more and like let's be honest when we're not really solving the problem like pretending that you're solving the problem is kind of shitty for everyone and it it also it just reminded me it also reminded all of us that like which problems are actually problems and which ones that we think are problems but aren't actually like important to solve yet and just laying it all out and talking to all the different people it was like oh i'm working on this and it's like oh why are you working on that like why do you think this is a problem and and why should we tackle that one first because like you saw that butcher paper again it went all the way around the room some problems are very much dependent on other problems so it's like you have to figure out which ones we wanted to tackle first yeah and in which order you have yeah yeah well a big part of that the conversation about accessibility went not just to making making content and making tools more accessible to developers but also making content more accessible to a

wider range of users which i know is something aside that you've done many times a lot that's kind of my jam so i wonder if you can just speak to that part of the company yeah you know i think about that a lot in terms of like what's the widest like the the vr is for everyone like that is that is a deeply a deeply feeling thing in me i i deeply believe that vr is the most human technology we have period so you have to make it for as many humans as possible and really expand that definition of what of what human is which is you know not just me and what i would like to see and what i want to make so like a lot of what we did like especially with alchemy labs content is again try and make it for a wide range of human beings and this was both in terms of interest uh age and uh also like ability level so like so for example uh a lot of the things that we did is we thought about like uh in uh rick and morty we thought a lot about um making uh everything uh one-handed interactions because we had failed with that with one there was one interaction and job simulator that required two

hands it was just one it was just one and if we if we'd know that's not that's bad i mean but like the fact that you knew that it was just one and that like oh we fixed it next time yeah and we worked on that and that was another thing like you know um a lot of the games i like to make are the games that like you know are very i like to move around a lot right like i like to bend down and pick out and navigate with a space and walk around a space but we also had to make it you know a smaller space so you could have standing room only or sitting room only um we put in um uh in rick and morty which is we took a lot of lessons from jobs later and they went to rick and morty uh we did something where uh if something was on the ground we actually had it hover a little bit so you didn't have to bend over to pick it up as much because we found some users who had like some mobility issues like back issues whatever it just sort of helped them um and so that that was something that was really important for us to do in terms of our our game content um in addition to that like the actual game itself was made for as many humans as beings as possible we didn't want you to have to be say a gamer yeah to come in and play

this like vr is for everyone i want to be able to give it to a tiny child although i would never do that because vr is for people who are over the age of 13 only but we're a child to play it we're right like if you you know vr is an experiential sale right you don't you don't get into vr because you thought it would be cool and then you're gonna dump a bunch of money on a vr headset and a computer to run it or whatever it's the thing that you go and you try it and you experience it and we all know this it's something that we don't talk about a lot in the community but kids just get it they just like you put the headset on the kid they're immediately there they're doing what they don't they don't care about looking stupid yeah and and it's the same as with the wii you know like you would give the wii controller to someone and tell them to throw a ball on blue box and they would just go embarrassing but like our best audience is coming up now right they're they're technically not supposed to be in the headset because i don't know eyes grow or something or something

whatever i i just published this article with the oculus developer blog about universal design which is an architectural principle that basically says that if you design something for everyone you're designing something for yourself because at some point you will be someone else and i think i think that's something that a lot of developers and designers really miss is that they design for themselves in a specific moment this is a temporary situation yeah like many things are going to change over the years i get very rowdy i hurt myself you know my my my abilities change yeah rapidly and then there's the long term yeah i can guarantee at some point i will be uh my vision will change my hearing will change and my ability to uh play super hot and bend like all the way backwards into like balancing half moon will change i hope not right i believe in you um yeah but i think it you know it's it's a really easy thing to to miss and i think a lot of people think about

designing for other they're like oh well i don't that's not my user and it's like well it will be at some point at some point your users will change your users will age and we're trying to think about developing a platform and experiences that have longevity and that are adaptable and a perfect example one of my colleagues came to my office last week and he is in his late 50s and he loves vr he has a he has a rift at his house his kids think he's a weirdo um and he i was like well have you tried beat saber and he was like no he's like i had shoulder surgery last year so i can't raise my left arm above here so i didn't get it i was like well yeah there's actually one-handed mode yeah so much harder totally play and he went and got it and then he played it and he was like oh my gosh i had no idea thank you so much and i was like don't thank me thank you arislav and jan but i think uh their beat saber specifically is a great example of any you can play one-handed they actually are work they just released a video

where they're working with subpac to make a a def mode for beat saber where you play with a haptic vest and that kind of thinking where that's not just a really great experience for the deaf community and for deaf gamers but that's also a really great experience for people who have full range of hearing to be able to have haptic feedback on the plan so it's about you know creating the broadest range of experiences and adaptability when we started making newer technologies uh that are now no longer considered new like your phone or even the game console or the internet you know even television when we made these media a while back we were not that aware of the implicit bias in our design patterns and in the ways that we think about people um as a community of developers and designers back then and it this is the first time that we as a community have an opportunity to design for everybody in a way that really is awake and really is aware of the fact that as it becomes more accessible to

use a device to see the world differently whether you're holding it or wearing it and that the cost of goods goes down the the explosion in use cases and like what someone's environment is is huge right and it's really important to think about it now and to sort of to think about the bias that you have just even like it will be a living room with a couch in it is a bias right like some people don't sit on couches you know some people don't have that kind of furniture in their living space some people have sleeping mats that they roll up and then they sit on floors on the chair or chairs on the floor that are actually more like a mat you know like there's there's very different ways of living that it you know if you consider these things ahead of time and you get at your own conscious bias now before the explosion of adoption actually happens you're in a much better place to build stuff that's human well and this goes into making content too not everyone interacts with the world in the exact same way people have different expectations of how the world should work

i use an example a lot about making tea right um i make tea the correct way which is i heat up water no no that is literally you're a monster how could you but like no but this is the thing right there are so many ways to make d i put my like a civilized human i put my tea bag in a cup and then make my water in a kettle and then i pour the water over the t and then i put the milk in afterward after it steeps for four and a half minutes but like the thing is is that like there are other people who like put their tea bag in the kettle when they're like on the stove yeah i know monstrous some people put their milk in first and put the tea bag in the milk turning it into some trash fluid and then pour the hot water over it but the thing is is that like that the thing is is that these are the expectations people have right they they have expectations with their world and when you're making content you have to understand the myriad of human beings you're going to interact with it because then it stops being a world then it starts becoming kind of like a tech or a

game right like it's it's not it's you lose that magic so i'm an aggressive demo-er like i i do i do demos at every conference and not just gaming conferences i actually go to like museums like i did um tribeca once like you know i try and go places where not necessarily all gamers because i want the people who don't have a ready understanding of like controllers for example and i watch them very very closely i'm i'm the i'm the one that people um when i talk about how i test and how i get feedback people like oh well that's just completely unfeasible and i'm like yes that's what i want i want to hear people's tiny size of disappointment they won't remember it afterward when you ask them about it right when you ask them like oh do you remember when you signed in disappointment they're like no i can't remember that one that one thing because then they got distracted by something else and was throwing something and put their face in a wall or whatever it was but i have to look for that and i have to because that's that's where the world breaks right and and that's where i haven't thought about everything that every human might possibly do

we have a unique skill set to design the next way that people see reality where we can decide what physics is like and what time is like and what presence means and that that's a huge amount of power like you just have a lot more power in that situation than you realize and it doesn't sound like genius the stuff we're talking about but it was really really good to sit down and just to really hammer on like what does it really mean to build accessible content what does it really mean to think about you know this becoming the way people live and i think that's a great segue into our next section which is a big a big part of the the problem sets that we identified is both the lack of more diverse creators and also more diverse content which gets back to this issue of there's so many ways to make tea which is that if you're making a an experience that is about making tea and everyone on your team makes tea the same way your experience is broken and i think that uh that was a big point of of the discussion for us was really

talking about the value of diverse teams um because of this need for a variety of perspectives um and that conversation went a lot of different ways so we can kind of jump yeah i was going to say that i think that this is this community i've been making games for 20 plus years and i've seen this community in particular gdc like i came first came to gdc in 1999. so i've seen this community completely transform in the last 10 years you know but i mean it's just been it's a it's an asymptotic curve right like the more difference you get the more difference you support the more difference you see the more it becomes comfortable and pretty soon like this room is incredibly diverse compared to what like an experimental gameplay workshop room would look like in 1999 you know or 2001. so like there is an there is already we have a leg up in this case that we already have more female creators we have more creators of color we have more international creators in this community than any other community that has made games before and has made interactive content before like now it's

better than it ever has been and that is a huge that's a huge benefit and because i think we're used to not necessarily being represented we're much more open and sharing so i think this community already has a leg up in that space but this idea that content can be made by anyone is also possible now the ecosystem has changed so dramatically for tools and sort of pipelines that it's just it's a completely different realm if you looked at the international women's day page you know oculus had five games by female ceos and five games by female leads that's 10 games showcased on international women's day like that wasn't an accident that happened because facebook oculus has consistently worked to promote and support and pay for the work of women in vr and like that storefront is a testament to the fact that they made that a priority in their funding structures and that's the kind of stuff that i think we started talking about is like okay how are we

you know we're all kind of at the cusp of being you know connected and and we're relatively around the same age but there's an entire group of people coming up behind us how do we make sure they get connected get access yeah and just coming from the opposite side of things in like the enterprise world they are not gamers so they're they all look exactly the same they they're all back end developers some are fun and develop like even at microsoft it was funny to see like oh there's so many more like people with tattoos and colored hair everywhere and piercings everywhere when i when i first started as an evangelist it was funny because like we were like okay no can't can't dye our hair i can't and then satya got hired and we were like cool we're all dyeing our hair purple and we went to a hackathon and the students came up and they're like oh can we can you tell us who the microsoft people are and the person was like oh anyone with purple hair and piercings go find them they know all about azure cloud development and gaming as well and

it was just like what what and it was it's very interesting because now you see all these enterprise companies having to have to change because this is not their world and it is very difficult for very old systems to incorporate new cultures new ideas of oh you need a a game designer like you have to have someone who can actually figure out the problems of interaction and figure out how this enterprise application is going to be interesting and fun and useful for people yeah and and so again the the problem is well then these enterprise people don't know who to hire because they're like i don't i don't know who is a game exactly and so then they start coming to gdc and interacting and it starts to evolve and change but it's slow and hard and so it's like very

encouraging when you see all these big companies like oh okay i have to hire like a game studio that makes sense to make my corporate internal training application because now it is a game like now it is a game it could have a 2d component it can have a virtual component uh ar component and it's like cool we're gonna we're gonna start doing it it's an actual hire it's not diversity salad like i've said this before publicly and i'll say it again like i've eaten a whole load of diversity salad you know like let's get together and have a salad and talk about women in gaming like let's not yep like like shmoney you know what i mean like i i don't really need any more salad but my studio needs to be funded and people that work for me need jobs and like if you're in the position to fund in vr fund diverse people just do it right um and fund content that isn't all the same stuff that people think will work that kind of doesn't scale and doesn't engage

abroad i mean like how many people were just like whoa tilt brush what an idea being creative in a virtual space with glowy stuff who knew you know what i mean it's like that's just tilt brush is the best though this is what i'm saying like a lot of people were like wow i had no idea that virtual painting would be a thing yeah and that was that's amazing to me like how could you how could you possibly not right but this is the thing if you're if you're in the space and you're doing this stuff like you make a concrete difference by being available to design but you also make a difference by being the one that puts the money on the table for that diverse creator yeah and that was a big part of our conversation and a takeaway for a lot of us was a commitment from everyone in our group to help move that bar as far as we're able to within our own companies and institutions and um taking the responsibility of being advocates for just better content made by more different kinds of people yeah we all

sort of said could we eat each like this year could we each try to focus on at least one person who's coming up in the industry that needs a mentor that we can connect either with funding or some kind of a partnership that we think could do good work in this space right and if we all just committed to just helping one person and then that person as a result was successful and then they could commit to helping one person that would grow you know it's basically the rising tide that floats all those right and and we think about this sort of stuff a lot the vr community especially like in the very early days was very very communicative and very like supportive of each other we all talked to each other we're on the same like slack channels and skype channels and talking constantly and sharing information and constantly talking but it is that sort of thing where we're trying to sort of reproduce that culture and you have to think about the culture we're reproducing i am planting a flag here for like weird interesting awesome content that is not content that i would make and not content that would see and i'm like highly highly committed to that and the way we do that is sort of building this community of vr developers

and say well this is this is what we're going to do and we're going to support each other and we're going to lift each other up and you do that by acting out yourself right you you the the change you want to see in the world being aware of the the culture you want to reproduce and like putting that out and if you don't know how to do that if you are like i would like to help do that i would like to mentor some or fund someone if you're like i don't know what how to get started you just ask us and we will tell you so and part of you know this this is an invitation i think to the whole community to really think about you know building the future of what it means to be a person and exist in digital space and physical space and that is an incredible responsibility and if if you don't like feel a little bit of that you gotta you gotta like open your eyes a little wider um because it's it's happening and we're building we're building something really insane right now so yeah yeah people will look back and remember this time and some of the paradigms like the pinch are going to be invented in the next few years

like you could be the person that invents that you could literally save the wrist muscles and hand trauma of thousands of people an hour right like by inventing stuff that's more actually physically feasible for everyone you could be you could actually be making a huge impact when i first started working in games i i left a phd to work on the sims so i got recruited out of grad school um because i didn't want to make drones and i wanted to work on games instead so i was working on the sims and there was an editor for the sims called edith and we called it the crippler because it was like it had a bunch of clicky interface stuff in it and like little sliders and i developed severe carpal tunnel within six months of working on it and had to get like the ergo lady to come to my desk i mean it was like a physically painful thing to use this editor um and it was just because some people just designed it thinking like we just need some some sliders and some check boxes right like we're way beyond that now but what we're talking about now is programming the whole body right and so when you have a

body that's different or you sit differently in your living room you're bringing that aspect into this design conversation that is diversity in action and it's really important and and i think about this a lot because and i hope this isn't an unpopular opinion at the game developers conference but when we bring these um concepts from games into vr right like we have these these paradigms that we sort of have expectations for and we bring them from games you know a lot of the clicking you know a lot of the the button mashing and the the abstractions right between yourself and how to interact with this virtual world it's kind of doing a bit of a disservice to vr it is a beautiful wonderful technology of its own and and so what we need right now is so much experimentation and then so much sharing so like things like this are so important especially for vr just in terms of trying new things and then talking about it or yelling on twitter i mean twitter is another amazing forum for screaming about the things that you experiment but it is this like we won't find any of these these new what what's the new pension vr

for example i'm still up with the edible menu system by the way like picking up menu items and eating them again i think that's going somewhere i feel deeply about it well what i love about you specifically i just fan girl over psy all the time is that you talk about all the random you try and that failed and why but with love but with love but we can move love because it's interesting because again uh you're saying literally outside like we're all smart and we might actually be doing the exact same problem like running into the exact same design issues that someone else already ran into and already proved out and spent hours and time and money and resources that we like they already knew they just didn't share their failures they shared what they did right and so you have all these people redoing experiments that it's like no we've already we already did those experiments try it with like a different graphics card try it with a different headset like change

it slightly but because we aren't talking it it gets rehashed and rehashed and rehashed and it's like okay we've we've solidified this it's good let's maybe try something new and why like or or change the experiment we're all very smart i will i will make the exact same mistake that you made like it's it's not it's not like oh no i was dumb i made this dumb mistake no no i will make the exact same mistake so i love things like failure workshops you're talking about like here is a garbage thing that i made and like putting it out and talking about it and why it failed and why it didn't feel oh my god if you could actually i've thought about like compiling like experiments of like just things that feel terrible but like everyone but everyone else would do it like you know content warning bad right but like and then putting that out like here let's let's experience these bad things and we can talk about why it doesn't work and that's okay also okay we've learned yeah so what i what it was interesting is i also went to i forget this was probably like a year ago and um for these this developer created locomotion and uh they were experimenting and they

were like oh yeah if you move your arms you're just gonna like parallax slide everywhere and it's because all of the games that they had played used really good teleportation and really good locomotion that they were like oh well we want to try something different and it's like oh honey that has been tried it's just the games that you have played that are popular don't use it exactly and it's like again um we need to have more of that celebrating like hey remember when we all used to puke because of this thing because new people that are coming into this this new industry don't have that background yet oh my god speaking of what the next generation it's like we talked about this beforehand yeah but you have an eye on it i think i think what you're bringing up is really important and you know what um what robin and i both do at the university level is trying to think think through a lot of these things and think through how can you solidify things that aren't solidified and how

can you teach students how to do things in a way that's meaningful and applicable um yeah teach them how to take risks i mean i think one of the things that's great terrible about being like a vr developer or an ar developer or a mixed reality developer right now is that there's not a lot of money to be made like it's not a huge industry right now you're not like the number of sort of huge hits like grand theft auto style installs you know that you're gonna get like it's virtually zero so like you don't have to be in this industry pretending that you're the one that's going to make all the money because suddenly you're going to discover something that blows it out of the water you know the install bases are what they are right so that that takes one of the layers of like faking it till you make it out and then you can just really be faking it and being like maybe be cool to like slice through music i don't know i'll give it a shot you know and i tell this to my students all the time like you're definitely not going to make any money with what you make unless it's a you know just it'll be a black swan as they say if you do so

hey do the thing that feels exceptionally interesting and strange to work on that you wouldn't ever be able to do if you worked at a company and had to pay people and now like the time just do it yeah you got three four years where you could do anything you want you could smoke a lot of weed and watch game of thrones or you could make beat saber you know you choose yeah you know maybe you could do both yeah you know working on this yeah yeah i remember being at a fireside chat that you did at oculus connect this year and i remember a student came up and asked like this exact question they were like i'm working on this game how do i make money and you were just like you don't don't try to make money you're a student do something that you're really passionate about and if if you're really passionate about it that will something cool might come out of it and if you have the privilege to be a student in one of these programs which is like it's a huge amount of privilege like you're already in a situation where you're developing skills you're creating

relationships you're you're experimenting you're learning your own throughput like that in and of itself is such a privilege right like i i am i listened to a uh recently uh on being which is one of my favorite podcasts listen to the interview with teju cole who's like a fantastic um photographer and poet and he said something really interesting to me which i think is relevant he said that if you're a person living today and you're like awake you know you're experiencing kind of a level of constant rage just by how how shitty everything is and like the reason that taejoo does the work that he does is because he can it's because he has the privilege to have hope was the way that he put it and i thought that was amazing like the privilege to have hope this room is filled with people with the privilege to imagine a hopeful future for vr to imagine an accessible future and to educate the next generation with that capability which is like

that's that's pretty awesome you know so it's not like you're just saying here's the vr learn how to do it i think what our program's trying to do is hey wouldn't it be cool if you were an ethical integrated intersectional creator who was thinking about this as a human problem right which is i guess it's a little woo but whatever no that's funny i i do sort of the similar thing um but with jokes and posting so i do it's true i do a panel at pax um which is sort of like the different another way of doing it it's called uvr or v art um which is uh uh it's great it's it's a this thing that andy moore was caught saying in a roundtable interview for steam so but anyway so i took that um and basically the whole idea is like pitch the worst vr ideas to each other um and it sounds really posting awful but but it's actually supposedly it's it's a it's um basically we all pitch our worst ideas to each other and then we riff on it until they're truly garbage and then what we start doing is we invite the audience and i always do

these at consumer shows it's usually packs and they come up and they give us their terrible vr ideas and then we riff on it with them what this does is kind of in this weird sort of subversive way it's like trying to onboard people into like vr ideas and welcoming them into the joke and well welcoming them in to have this conversation with us about like what works and what doesn't i i uh early vr i'm sure we all heard this what i really want oh um what's that can i use a different one no i can't would i really want to skyrim in vr uh and i tried to tell them i don't think you want that i think i think you want something and i know you're looking for like a larger immersive world but what you're looking for is not necessarily this skyrim is very empty it's made for games right it's it's made for games it's long walking distance like there's a lot of stuff to change here and then you get into the like you don't know what i want you can't tell me what i want you know and then and then it's like because that's you talking down to people in some ways but like trying to bring them in and educating them and bringing people into this thought process about vr and then they can riff

on it and it's always a ton of fun um and by the end they have sort of a greater understanding about vr and what works and this but it's not just it's cheap to get started you can just get some assets and put them in a room and then put the headset on and walk around in it and like then you're in vr like everybody's sad is a game that came out of my program and it's a game where you walk around a room and all the objects in it are sad i'm like thank you it's really like you open a drawer and there's like a sad toothbrush and you're like you know just like it's about being sad right but like it's funny you know it's just interesting and i when they were like we're going to make a game of virtual objects that are all really depressed i was like sounds awesome yeah yeah give it a shot the the other thing that i'll say about this about education specifically and this is something we talked about a lot at the convening is and and for us working at the university level is that education related to immersive technology or even just computer programming game engines

3d is something that almost no one gets to touch until they arrive at a university unless you're in a very very privileged community that has dedicated government funding to buy computers there's a public high school in in my region that has a unity lab wow that's amazing it's amazing yeah it's like the best place i've ever been i was like i want to come here the tools early so they know that that's a tool that they can use yeah it's inspirational it's aspirational but those are really rare uh those are really rare uh moments but i think uh this kind of hits on all of this is you know there are opportunities for all of us to be involved in those processes so i go twice a year to that high school and review student review student projects mentor a student give a talk and that is not something that is recorded or publicized it's not i mean i'm talking about it right now but it's it's not like a glamorous thing it's not i'm on the stage at vrdc at gdc it's like no do it i'm at a high school in the suburbs talking to a bunch of really weird kids

done it for like small like day camps and stuff like yeah for various population girl scouts it was great i was just like i can't wait to talk about game development for girl scouts this panel is mostly a list of things that we're doing that we're like don't you want to do these things too but i mean seriously i i can guarantee that in most of the areas where you live there is a high school program that would really love to hear from you as someone doing this work and that that's where really meaningful change happens at a systematic large-scale level with a lot of people involved in very small places it's funny because like you know you can use technology to fix lots of problems i have a friend whose child had really intense early onset diabetes and they developed a bunch of technologies that work with the apple watch so they can monitor their child's blood sugar level at all times and that's created a community of people that are working you know at being parents and having lives around children

that are really at risk like um those kinds of ideas happen when you're faced with a challenge in your life and then you engage and like if you have the idea that you can just hack something and fix a problem you can make a huge impact on the world right and like this is a place now where you can you can get a store asset for free you can put it in a world and put the headset on and see it like as long as you have access like it's that simple in some ways you can there's they're really easy ways to do this and it's just as simple as reaching out to a high school locally and saying like can i bring my psvr by and show them beat saber or like show them this unity thing that i made like it's not that hard to do and they will love you like you will change their lives yeah literally oh yeah introducing them also to like github and being like oh by the way this is literally repository upon repository upon repository of free code and like with some of them nice documentation usually not please write better documentation please

i'm begging everyone in this room i'm like hey addison remember when i used to tell everyone to write documentation hey back at microsoft because i was like it was insane i was just like we should be writing documentation all the time and sharing it with each other internally as well as externally but it's it's very fun because i'm like i'll go on github and be like oh this is great how do i use it no no so it's like cool and but the great thing about github too is that you can say oh i figured out how to use this thing that had no documentation do a pull request that is just documentation to that thing and be like hey dude i wrote up how to do this with a cool example please please integrate thanks but like that will help kids be like oh it's free i can just drag this into unity the free assets like the asset store great resource just like going online and being like royalty free asset the other education thing is is when you do demo in locations that are not they're not normally going to see these things you know like take it to a party a

birthday party whatever like give normal people muggles you know access to this technology because you have it if you have it at home like how many of you have a vr set headset at home that you could take somewhere else yeah see that's like that's a lot of you already right i know that's not everybody but it's still how many of you have grandparents that live in retirement communities it's like a handful of people right there are so many places where if you took some really cool new exciting technology and showed it to people who've never seen it before when i when i had my grandfather who at the time was 94 tried tilt brush it was like the first time in my life that i've seen him like completely just not no there was like no stone it was just he was just like a little boy drawing oh yeah in light it is that is worth everything like if you if you don't want to do it for the good just do it to like see the like bright eyes on people's faces and the screaming like the the wonder and the joy and the delight like oh my gosh i vicariously lived through every single person who i put in vr for

the first time i'm like i remember this moment i remember that i remember having that moment i've had so many people that i put in i love demoing because they come out and they just look at me especially first-time users they're like could did you see what i was doing and i go yes i saw what you were doing and then they were like it was like real like it's not real but it was real and i'm like here's a couch let's sit down let's talk about this let's unpack um it's it's really magical and like every time every time you get the opportunity to do that like that's just a personal like just hobby it's a good hobby well we could rant all day is it fiona great yeah so we're we're gonna we're gonna stop there and uh leave some time for for questions if you have a question you can come up to the like up to the microphone and we'll we'll stick around and do that for a little bit and make sure to get your zine on the way out there's some red shirted people with zines for you so go ahead

hi hi humans uh my name is katie i lead the alt space team uh so i'm wondering what would you give advice to for people working on social communities you talked a lot about how people interact in a vr environment but what about when you interact with people yeah so the question is how do you what advice do we have for interacting in social spaces yes in vr yes we talked a lot about the fact that having standards across all these platforms would really help and specifically like being able to sort of enforce boundaries a lot of what i think about nbr spaces and this kind of social engagement also because i work on a social game is the fact that you really want to be able to sort of say yes or no to someone you want to be able to say like i appear to you this way and you want that to be safe and i think timoney was really great at representing this stuff i think a lot of the work that she's been doing at unity is related to this notion that you should have ownership over your data and your profile and you should be able to control how it's used by different applications and just the basics of

setting boundaries and sharing space is something that a lot of people are going to need to do a lot of work on until we come up with the right solutions so that's like you know square one just like it's really important to be able to feel safe in that space yeah i'll just say really quickly i think the biggest thing for me with with most social vr is that it is it's a really difficult space to curate and to moderate and as the as the uh the user base has grown in the last couple years especially with psvr and more uh affordable windows headsets that get a lot of like young boys running wild in social vr and it's a pretty scary place like i i get terrified of just there's just like a group of 13 year old boys just like chasing me around and i'm just like i'm just like i'm done i'm done where did all these come from also real quick um south by southwest we i also had a talk with a bunch of people and one of them was from high fidelity liv erickson she's great um working at mozilla now but she was like

consent based tools like bake it into any interaction with multiplayer if you bake it into the beginning toolset of what you're creating then it's not like a oh we have all of these issues and we don't have a system to easily integrate or modify or or build upon in the future it's like if you have the system in the gameplay system already embedded into whatever else you're doing it's so easy then to be like oh we have a mute button oh we have a bubble button oh now we have like block oh you can use this hand gesture so like build the tool set and then share it with people yeah yeah yeah rob coster gave a really good talk last year about all these issues as well looking back at mmos and early social design and mmos and how it's all really relevant now it's a great topic oh yeah okay thank you okay we'll take one from over here hello i uh i show what buildings look like before they get built using vr yeah yeah heck yes very cool i get to do a lot of demos and i also get to a lot of watching vr noobs like try vr for the first time um so

it's like really awesome but also i i found that you know d gamifying things has been a big challenge and also coming at it from that game designer perspective so i wanted to see what your thoughts are and like sort of where you think the industry is moving towards for like the best experiences for people both you know that can walk around a room and that you know are paralyzed so what do you think is the best like technologies coming up and how would you design using them i'm really excited about the quest because it has no cables you know and um on the projects that we work on with oculus both for the both for the quest and also for um the rift we spent a lot of time thinking about seated versus standing and one-handed and all that stuff um i'll be honest with you a lot of people are leaning into the same stuff like a lot of people are leaning into the sort of the super hot style experience which is you know or beat saber you know which which are high action and high aggression as a result like the very first time i showed luna to a woman over 50

um she was awesome she played the game for like two hours straight basically and at a frame rate that was not great um and i was like what's what's your thing she's like well vr and then she stopped and she said actually i can't say that she said i've only only had one other vr experience so i shouldn't characterize all vr by it i said which one was it and she was like the one where the music attacks your face wow and i was like oh yeah that one's really popular so i think that chill experiences like brie and myself i think there are several lady designers that are interested in tend to be friend games and like collection and growing stuff and like chilling out luna's a chill game like um there are people that are working in that space but i wish there were more of you to be totally yeah the the thing so you said how to de-gamify it and i just want to be very clear about one thing in particular is that like actually game developers are really great for vr because we we look at interactions a lot and and vr is all interactions so that's why we're kind of really good at this whole thing and like why we're going into vr and why we're so

we're so good is because we think about how people interact with the technology now that said i'm like also very very excited about quest but i also wanted to mention i was on a panel at oc5 this year with josh straub with the dagger system who does a lot of accessibility and he actually um has one a really valid point which is that the controller systems that we've been using and like the touch controls and things they make your hand conform to these controllers so while the quest is is fantastic in terms of the lack of wires and you know we can we can do a lot of things in terms of content we do need hardware developers to also pay attention to people of various ways of interacting physically with these these controllers and systems and the more we focus on like games and high action and and the hardware developers are building controllers and hardware for that like it it does come with its own back yeah even just the very first oculus like if you had black hair you just couldn't get the thing on your head oh yeah you know like i had two developers on my team that would like have to like do all the stuff just to get the thing big enough you know to go over their hair and it's

like the stuff like that you know like there we have problems on a fundamental level with some of the heartbeats yeah yeah i mean and just a quick note too and there's been a little bit of talk about this if you already see in general but as uh legislation starts to change like it has for the web where if you have if you run a certain type of organization you have accessibility standards that you must meet you are obligated to do that by the government or you can be sued um and i think as vr moves more towards a mass adopted public scale application i think we'll see standards at least for certain kinds of applications become uh stricter i actually like looking a lot of the ada compliance stuff for like though that's great things just to sort of like give me an idea of like how i'm making a space and what so much research has gone into space designed for people with like you know various abilities and i can i can learn from that i don't have to do all my own new research there's a lot of research but it's like especially in vr beaches yeah architecture has been around for

thousands of years you guys we need to hire more architects into this space because they literally thousands of years of learnings and designs of how to make spaces for people to work together to just like to be in spaces to look beautiful all right kat mentioned that there were some ideas that my cat that there were some ideas or some problems that we shouldn't be solving right now and that we should be prioritizing other things i was curious if each of you have different perspectives on you know what are those visible problems that aren't important to be addressing and where should we be shifting our focus to to address the things that are urgent uh i have a somewhat unpopular opinion i'm totally happy um a lot of people are talking to like and ask me they're like oh we have to put in best practices um and they're trying to do that now and so this is so we're talking about like the pinch thing like the pinch the pinch gesture um and and yes we want to get that but to try and put together best practices right now is is a mistake um we are not done experimenting and especially when we're talking about all of these new people coming in behind us if we put out best

practices docs this is how you teleport and they're like okay that is the way you tell and then and then it does become not the best practice but the only practice people stop experimenting and looking so i'm very much like not best practices yeah i think for i think for me i was in a a panel yesterday maybe and this is just me i'll disagree with somebody at gdc that's cool um but uh the the idea that we need triple a content to to move towards mass adoption and triple a games i'm just like it's just i i in my opinion that those are not the killer apps of immersive technology the killer applications are social they're creative and they're weird um because being a human is really weird and this is a really human technology traditional gaming is not a human technology it is a sedentary isolated uh endeavor where you control things like this that's not like what it means to be out and engaged and engaged i mean i

play a lot of games so don't you know don't don't take that but i think this idea that we need aaa games to to make vr work i'm just like i don't know i don't think so yeah i mean if you think about the adoption profile of something like a phone like what was it that made people want to buy an iphone right it was that you could have a better mp3 player kind of right like the thing that i always talk about is like i would really love it if i had a pair of glasses that showed me where to go like i just don't know where i'm going all the time like just this week i mean i'm sure you can all imagine what my calendar looks like it's like just even figuring out where my next meeting is from here is going to be a pain in my ass right like if i could just pop on a pair of glasses and it told me where to walk i would do it i'm not saying that the technology doesn't have its problems and that there aren't massive volumes of science fiction written about the world that that that becomes but we better solve it rather than just letting apple implement it you know what i'm saying like this is one of the things that will happen is that if we don't have active conversations about non-best practices and all the stuff

we're talking about is one company will just sit on the one thing and then suddenly we'll all have itunes in your face you know and like i'm not i'm not that's not that's totally just on itunes but like you know what i'm saying like like like some little cabal of designers should not be designing the future of the world right and so i think that like there the things that you don't want to engage in are like this is going to blow up the market or this is going to blow up the market what you really want to be doing is thinking about whatever you're building whatever weird thing that is what are the two or three things in it that make it interesting and easy to use because that's going to revolutionize the way things go so it's not like areas so much as your focus should be really really about making the best thing you can make right now yeah one of the problems specifically is like people are like what robin said earlier i want to make money it's like that's not a problem you should be solving right now we have other problems like making money is dependent on like us getting a foundation us eventually figuring out how to build worlds well and it's a lost

leading industry so it's like that that other problem of oh now that we have all that what is the killer app how do we make money okay that comes after but it's also like okay not how do we make money but then how do we fund other people like so shifting from this question to that question yeah okay i think we're gonna have to cut questions there we'll oh we'll stick around for a couple minutes make sure you get a zine on your way out and thanks everybody thanks for coming so much [Applause]