How NOT to Build a VR Arcade Game

[Music] thank you all right my name's Mike Bridgeman I'm here to talk about how not to build a VR arcade game and the title of my talk is partly inspired by Thomas Edison famously saying he invented 99 ways how not to make a light bulb before he invented the best way to make a light bulb so I'm going to talk today a lot about the lessons we learned through a lot of trial and error um so let's get started who is Major Mega that is a company I co-founded in 2013 with Sean Hennessy this is our first official company photo my uh my mother questioned uh my professionalism when she saw this but I had to explain that if somebody does want to work with us after seeing this photo well then I sure as hell don't want to work with them so it's kind of a qualifier it works really

well our current mission is to create the arcade Machines of the future and so the arcade machine of the future has a tall task because with oculus Quest and home there are some incredibly immersive experiences you can have at home so you've got to do something much more Grand than you could ever experience at home along with other people so the hyper deck is our Flagship product it's got a full motion floor very intense wind heat turret controllers and then our current offering or our latest offering is the SpongeBob SquarePants VR dynamic duo game so let's go back in time I think this was around 2016 or 2017 on a project with Nat Geo about landing on Mars and from this era we're going to learn that g-forces can be simulated motion can be Amplified

and fast iteration is key I don't think I have a slide for this so I'm just going to say right now as much as I'd like to pretend I could tell you all the steps to eliminate motion sickness and make the perfect experience it really just comes down to trying something tweaking trying it again tweaking and it's a lot of just trial and error we're working on some tools that help with that but I'll talk about that next year maybe so this project was a six degrees of freedom cable coaster and by six degrees of freedom that basically means it can move in all directions so those cables lift you off the ground they can go up down left right forward back toss you all around and this was set up for a week in Manhattan and it was a really fun experience because we we really put a lot of our heart and soul into it and then we got to spend a week just watching people enjoy it um I don't have really great video of the more intense Parts uh but you can see here these guys are entering the atmosphere

they're just kind of getting jostled around and then there's some more uh intense parts that get good reactions so uh let's talk about this GeForce simulation during this project if you put somebody in VR on this thing and just let it be a one-to-one experience meaning the person is just letting the hmd do the work and getting tossed around with the ride a lot of people are getting motion sickness and what we discovered is uh it's because they weren't feeling the proper g-forces for what they were seeing visually um so like if you're sitting in one of these chairs in a virtual roller coaster chances are you'll get sick because your inner ear is not getting the signals it thinks it needs to feel like you're actually on that roller coaster so if you have two Riders here just sitting there with a one-to-one VR experience gravity's pulling straight down

but if we tilt you back suddenly you're sliding back in your seat right you're getting pushed against the back of your seat but if we take the VR image and we rotate your camera in the game engine to counteract that rotation suddenly you have this Middle Ground where the person in VR is not getting the visual stimulus of being rotated but they're actually feeling gravity pull from a different direction than straight above while this is not a perfect G-Force effect it is something like a real G-Force effect and it works really well it works well enough to prevent people from throwing up which is the most important thing in the out of home entertainment experience so then the inverse of that is true right so you can amplify motion so if we tilt you back and then virtually we tilt your camera even more we can create a sensation of you moving even more than you actually are so the real benefit to this is that we can keep you in a safe

motion profile but you actually think you're experiencing something much more dangerous oh and I should say you know a rough number we use is 400 or four times the amount the person's actually moving again it's just trial and error but we have I just think that number's important because it's really amazing what the brain makes up uh when they see something visually and feel enough of it to go the extra mile and be like nope this is really happening to me um so this was a huge multi-million dollar project uh it was never something that could be put in an arcade obviously and this is kind of what sparked our journey to create the arcade of the future so we wanted to step back and start from scratch and figure out what is the simplest thing we can do to create motion in VR without people getting sick so we started out by doing motion without Motion in real life so the lessons learned from this era are

that if you're not going to move the person in real life well virtually you can't accelerate or turn the more win the better and you can do vertical motion but it requires vibration and true randomness really really enhances the level of immersion and I'll get to more of that in a bit so we built this thing that we called the hyper room and it's a Home Depot inspired prototype you can see the the steel uh bars there and some box fans I'm going to show you a quick clip of this experience so you can see the person's rising up out of the truck wind kicks in when they when they clear the open air clear up to open air and then we just had a really simple mechanic of basically using a gravity gun to grab car parts and shoot them back at

the cars so because this person is never accelerating or decelerating he came out came up out of the truck was already going 55 it was a great experience and nobody really got sick um and so for that vertical vibration I'm assuming a lot of you are working in 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound in your games in a really really easy way to add accurate and realistic vibration is through a low frequency transducer and the Kleenex brand name of that is the butt kicker maybe you've heard of it they're popular in home theaters they shake your sofa but basically a low frequency transducer is a speaker without a speaker cone so all you have to do and in my company that all you have to do phrase is a trigger that means it's not actually as simple as you're saying

but all you have to do is Hook the sub Channel up to this transducer and then when you send an explosion or gunfire or an elevator sound or whatever you're doing your floor will vibrate exactly how it sounds so it's a really easy way to recycle the assets you're already using and then I want to talk about random uh you know when we first did this uh experience we wanted to add Road bumps so you start out with just a very basic just like you're driving down the highway but when the pattern is perfect your brain kind of starts ignoring it right it gets used to it and you don't even realize it's there so then we started making just using basically math.random the simplest way we could do it and mixing it up a little but it still didn't feel very organic and we found that uh using a purlin noise function maybe some of you have used it it's a 2d visualization on the right here it's a really great way to get organic

noise that's very popular in terrain generation and things like that so we found that using purlin noise for environmental effects and haptic feelings it's a really great way to add that next level of immersion so let's take it a step further and add Motion in real life with Motion in VR so Lessons Learned From Here are wind direction is not always important mostly it's not important uh motion and heat do require visual indicators to be truly effective and the Fishbowl effect is real players are self-conscious when you essentially blindfold them in public with a VR headset and haptics require a 240 frames a second or greater resolution to be effective so for our platform we went with three degrees of freedom which basically means you can roll left and right you can

pitch forward and back and you can heave straight up and down and we tried all kinds of stuff with airbags and springs and some other weird stuff but electric linear actuators are The Sweet Spot of price low maintenance they're very uh affordable and uh you can see here they're they're pretty compact package so then we built a safety deck around the motion platform and we ended up creating what I call the VR speakeasy this was set up in the storage closet of a sandwich shop I swear to God you had to suck in your chest to get past the garbage bins to get into the door and uh every Friday night we would invite people out bring a bunch of beer and just put people through this VR experience they had no idea what to expect and we just studied whenever they felt sick or didn't want to play and we just kept iterating iterating iterating until nobody got motion sick whatsoever

um so you can see here we we took this thing to an open source conference um and this is before we had fully realized that but you can see that um the wind is placed directly above him but what we came to realize is that if you're blasting someone with a lot of air uh and then you turn that air off and then you put a helicopter above them you can put that air back on it really doesn't matter what direction it's coming from they are convinced that helicopter is what's generating that air and it's coming down on top of them so we actually removed ceiling fans from all our designs because for our application where the the player is standing in the same spot it was almost 100 reliant on the visual indicators of where that source of air was coming from uh we use infrared heaters for instant effect infrared is really neat because it heats the water in your skin with

microwaves which sounds really scary but it's not um and so that's really nice for interactive applications where you're passing by lava or you have an explosion next to you you can really feel that heat instantaneously this is a screenshot from one of our first titles called hair um there's two things going on here uh the villain is shooting lasers at Your Vessel and uh at first we didn't have any kind of ambient light but we turned on the heat to to represent those lasers cooking uh ahead above you and people thought it was cool some people didn't even notice the heat but as soon as we put ambient red light glowing all around you it was just crazy heat became the star of the show and it was always the first thing people said when they got off the ride they said and that heat was just insane and it was just all we changed was a visual indicator that they should be feeling hot

and then the other thing to notice here is that you'll see these spring coils on all four sides and we found that there's a lot of a lot of subtle movement happening and when you don't have a frame of reference like a building going by you or trees or anything within proximity to really highlight the fact that you're moving those Springs give peripheral vision give indicators that the floor is actually moving and doing stuff and really helps highlight the fact that you are moving um you have to promise my wife I didn't use this photo I told her I wouldn't but I had my fingers crossed behind my back so um this is just a great example of the fact that she would never ever play this VR game when people were around but as soon as people left the room she would strike a pose she played the game and she loved it but it was only when it was just her and I

so this is a really tough nut to crack because at an arcade you're just surrounded by random people it's very hard to escape that so our solution was to basically enclose the player in a in a somewhat private space so you're kind of going into the experience and closed off from the outside world this ended up being very effective and then the last thing is this is a video of our motion test we've got 800 pounds of sandbags um testing our motion floor and the really interesting thing here is that um we started by just updating the position of the actuators in our game update Loop which for like a console 60 frames a second for VR it's hopefully 90 frames a second but I could feel the motor stepping right I could feel the resolution of that motion and so we started increasing it increasing increasing it wasn't until around 240 frames a second that it did

feel buttery smooth where I could not feel the the motion stepping and what's really interesting about this notion is that I was researching online how to manage threads and unity that are updating a lot faster than the main core Loop and I came across a guy who had solved it I looked up his username and I dug deeper and and here he was making a VR controller with haptics built into it so you could feel like when you had a sword battle it would feel like the controller was bending or you toss a whip you could feel like it was recoiling and he came to the same exact conclusion that you needed a little over 200 frames a second for that to feel smooth so our experiences so far have been on Rails um and it's really easy to not get players motion sickness when they're not controlling the motion but when you give them control it becomes a lot more difficult to ensure they're not doing anything that's going to cause either the rider or the

passenger to get sick so the Lessons Learned here are that you need to get out of the building which I'll explain in a minute the safest path to no motion sickness is no y'all and that just basically means you can't Twist on your y-axis if you do want y'all you're going to need guard rails assuming it's not an open world exploration game you're going to need some kind of guard rails to keep them on the path and finally do not rely on real physics so we had this prototype product called the hyperdrive and the front player there would lean left and right to steer the vehicle we just measured your head your hmds offset from Center to lean it like a motorcycle and then the back player had a turret gun much like the hyperdeck and the get out of the building lesson is something I learned in early on in software development that I did not listen to here but

when you're behind a computer all day working away you're feeling productive you're making a lot of choices and making a lot of assumptions that you know what your users want and you're building the perfect solution for them and so get out of the building means you need to get off your computer you need to get out and talk to your customers right you've got to interface with them and get their feedback and so with this product we spent a lot of time talking about where we're going to put the TV and the TV serves as a way for the spectators to see what's happening with the players in VR and so we thought we had this genius idea that it would be on the front here and there's transparent sides uh on each side of the TV so you can kind of see through the players playing but then I kind of have a portal right into what they're they're playing so we took it to the trade show I kid you not every single freaking person came up and said hey why'd you put the TV on the back

and we were like what are you talking about that's the front they're like oh no no I'm pushing that up against the wall and so we didn't realize we didn't show our design to an operator and said you know how would you prefer to configure this in your space um and so that was a really really hard lesson learned uh then covet happened we won't talk about any of that but um so know y'all an easy way to think about this is like Spy Hunter right it's a straight road and you're letting the person turn but they're just basically sliding left and right to change lanes it's going to be really fun game concept or game mechanic but it's also pretty limiting if you want to add y'all you've got to create guard rails that keep them on the course because not everybody has their driver's license yet that's going to play your game so as you'll see here this is before we had implemented some safety measures and this is what happens when a bad driver and slam slam

slam slam and I think you can imagine that the rear player especially is probably ready to barf so this is just a great example of of an early test and us getting out of the building or bringing people to our building to test out these mechanics um I don't have a diagram for this but the easiest way to explain the solution that we arrived at for this is that if you hit the guard rail at a very soft impact or a small Vector we'll just bounce you back off right it's it's a pretty low impact but if you come in at a really hard angle we will let you go through the guardrail Fade to Black and then reset you to the middle of the track this way there's no harsh impact you're penalized for doing it and nobody gets sick but the angle of that vector and the speed of that Vector is up to you to iterate on and see what works best for your application um and then finally uh don't rely on

real physics so you can see here this guy's about to take a series of jumps and on the last jump he corrects himself I realize it's pretty small but he's veering off the road and he slams back on just in time and a fun way to to look at that is going back to Super Mario the original Mario Brothers game um Mario jumps really fast and he falls really slow but while he's falling you can actually move him left and right and that's obviously not realistic at all but it's important to give that player level of that give players that level of control so they can self-correct so originally with this game once you ramped we were just relying on physics to let you fly through the air and people are ultimately getting very sick because you can't project where you're going to go once you hit a ramp

and so all these things came together we launched SpongeBob SquarePants dynamic duo last fall in Orlando at the iapa Expo [Music] foreign [Music] so it wasn't obvious in that video but the player in the back is actually delivering uh Krabby Patties it's inspired by uh The Paperboy game where

you're shooting at Windows other cars launching them in the driveways so uh I'm a little early of course the dry runs were a lot longer but uh I hope you learned something today uh I guess I can open it up to some questions if anybody has them uh first off this is a really fantastic talk I feel like I learned so much um really specific good um so who is doing most of the motion sickness testing um well I'm a great litmus test because I get sick super easy um but really it was always internal and then we just invited beta beta testers out awesome hi uh great talk thank you for taking the time and energy to tell us about this and put this together um so I'm curious from an accessibility standpoint I've worked in museum places and things like Ada guidelines and things like those are usually pretty concrete and set so I'm curious about

how you approach this from an accessibility perspective and what those uh play tests might have looked like that's a great question so the hyperdeck was built with accessibility in mind in that the hyperdeck comes with a portable ramp that you can bring out and lay down and there's enough room to put a wheelchair on and if you lock the wheels it is playable nice um the SpongeBob game is not as accessible but in our industry ultimately a lot of the accessibility falls on the operator so we will do our our best to create a ride that's accessible to all but the nature of motion especially sometimes it's impossible great question thank you yeah thanks yeah I work in VR so that's an important topic but something that shouldn't be uh you know you shouldn't be afraid of it asking this question so I appreciate you taking the time to even dive into it I'm sure you thought about it well we'll I'll say this something I didn't talk about but um when we first launched the

hyperdeck I thought for sure everybody's first question was going to be how much does this thing cost yeah but it wasn't the first question everybody asked was how big is this thing because they don't care how much it costs if it doesn't fit into their facility and the hyper deck is a really big product uh and so wheelchair ramps take up a lot of space so ultimately that flexibility is left to the operator to figure out how it best Works in their facility so we've actually had some places build a permanent ramp that goes out and then twists around the side of the hyperdeck because that's just the way it needed to work for their their facility that's all thank you yeah anything else all right well thank you very much oh we got one we got one but you mentioned uh 240 frames a second for the the haptic feedback was that just the feedback it was that the rate for uh ramping values or is that the

sort of the speed of the phrases you know so you were talking about a tick so you have to have something that's continuous at 240 FPS but what was the fastest speed that you rendered sort of haptic phrases at um I'm not sure I totally understand the question but I can say that with our actuators we're sending absolute positions so much like an MP3 file compresses a perfect sine wave into stair steps yeah that's what we have to do okay so you're sending something smaller and smaller stair steps the faster our iteration is and in terms of hitting new targets uh you like how what sort of speeds were you using in our industry you don't want to go over one G-Force so the speed that you do and there's tools you can use to measure the g-force if you go over 1G f24 get guidelines by ASTM require a restraint so that's kind of our our limit is 1g cool I hope that answers your question

hey thanks for the talk um I'm wondering uh when you're designing games for arcades obviously you're going to be encountering a lot of first-time VR players so how do you strike the right balance between fun gameplay and EC's pickup yeah easy to learn hard to master right it's our ultimate Mantra um it's tough some something like the SpongeBob game is great because um it's really intuitive to just lean like you're on a motorcycle and we have a very very brief tutorial uh in the beginning that just shows up on screen there's no way to skip it but we do try our best to make it at minimal and in cases like hair that game I showed you earlier we actually have a tutorial that only pops up if you fail to start playing it the way we anticipate so people that repeat the game never actually see any GUI overlays but the people that just sit there and don't pull the triggers to fire their weapon they'll have indicators coming out of what you should

do so that's just kind of a way we try to eliminate for those that have come back to play again cool thanks yep uh you're moving floor is that moving in response to the user's input or is it all scripted in on Rails so the hyperdeck is on Rails meaning um we create the script that moves it it's the same every time uh now that that said when you when the players fire their weapons there is haptic feedback in the floor that responds to that but it's not a lot it's just enough to feel like a gunshot with the SpongeBob game it's the driver in the front leaning left and right that ultimately dictates the motion I have often wondered how you'd be able to simulate that have you ever experimented with something like a vehicle where you want to the player accelerates and then you can actually do the tilting and yeah making it feel so one thing we do that I would say is different than our competition is that we use six inch stroke meaning actuators can move six inches most people use inch and a half or three inches but the

interesting thing about the G4 simulation that I talked about is that if somebody's rolled to the right as far as they can go well then there's really no resolution left because the actuators are maxed out so with our six inch actuators we actually only dedicate three or four inches to the player motion that still leaves a buffer for us to add effects and do those GeForce kind of tricks and and not max out the actuators if that makes sense yeah thank you yeah I'm curious is there a Target duration that you go for at what point does the experience becomes too much that's a really really great question and one that has changed a lot over time has anybody ever heard of zero latency it's like a free roam Warehouse scale experience you know they were pretty early to the scene and somebody we looked up to and they were doing zombie games it took like 45 freaking minutes and people uh VR gurus out there were saying the longer you're immersed the

better the more money they'll pay and uh so early on with the hyperdeck we were targeting 15-minute games and as soon as we started putting it out there people didn't like that at all because there's a lot of standing around waiting uh they felt like they weren't making as much money with a faster throughput so we ultimately lowered the hyperdeck games to eight minutes and even that is a struggle and we're releasing a new title soon that's going to have a short five minute option the SpongeBob is actually adaptable from three to six minutes and I would say most operators prefer around five minutes so it really just depends your throughput what you can charge you know the cost per minute but giving your operators flexibility is really the ultimate way to do it all right well thank you so much appreciate [Music]