Patrick O'Luanaigh on nDreams' VR epiphany

right um my name is patrick o'learnig uh i've been in the games industry about 18 years now my background sort of making before i started in dreams worked as some fairly traditional games publishers codemasters sci eidos was creative director there and started engines about eight years ago um last year we had a vr epiphany we got hold of an early oculus dk1 we got hold of an early look at the sony morpheus headset and really uh decided that vr was something very special indeed um what makes vr so special really is one word the sense of presence um and presence is the feeling of actually being there if when vr is done well you actually feel like you're not in the room anymore you feel like you've been teleported to another location you really feel like you're you're somewhere else and that makes vr very very powerful uh when it's done right real world presence scales emotions so you know we see people playing horror games for example and the fear you get the sense of excitement the sense of

drama you get from vr when it's done well is much more powerful than watching a tv screen and that's why i'm so excited about vr and that's why we're doing so much work in vr and we have been since the middle of last year so most people talked about vr in terms of oculus rift and sony morpheus and that's all very exciting and you know they're very good headsets but actually the first consumer vr headset that's available is mobile it's samsung's gear vr which have developed with oculus and in fact we've got our first vr game going live today on the gear vr store it's a big featured game this week and i'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute so how do you navigate the mobile vr market which headsets which platforms do you aim for it's a minefield out there there's a ton of mobile headsets uh if you go search kickstarter for mobile headsets you'll see a whole load of different things out there which ones do you support you certainly can't support all of them um my favorite bad industrial design is this one

oh you wouldn't want to be seen dead wearing that what a gorgeous piece of design um so what do you what do you focus on and i think our recommendation is that you think about three headsets uh by far and away the best mobile headset in terms of quality in terms of the experience in terms of everything is the gear vr uh created by samsung they're selling the hardware oculus are responsible for the store they've got the oculus home store launched now only works with free and demo apps at the moment but will come on with paid apps in the next month or two it runs on the samsung note 4 so you take your note 4 vr note 4 mobile phone plug it in the front of the headset and it works beautifully it's a really really nice device i'll talk about the challenges in a second but it's it's the best mobile vr experience at the moment the other two that we're working on we're doing some work on other zeiss vr1 which uses the s5 or the iphone 6. it's got a little tray you put your phone in the slot in the tray you slide it into the front of the vr1 um and it's the optics are fantastic

it's not quite the same quality as the gear vr in terms of the when you start moving around but it's nice and then at the budget end of the scale we've got the google cardboard and dodo case which is uh a company who've taken the kind of google cardboard design added in a magnet and an nfc sticker and it works people who want to play around with vr cheaply can download apps from google play for a range of different phones on that and it works it's not great but it it works they are currently the only three mobile vr headsets i would suggest you spend time on but obviously this market is evolving quickly and i think you'll see apple and other companies come into it over the course of the year so let's talk about the samsung gear vr because that's the one that's out at the moment it's launched in the us it'll launch in europe uh we believe some point this month um and it's a really really nice vr headset one big thing you have to think about if you're going from mobile gaming into gear into vr or you're coming from console gaming into vr is fidelity it's

the detail one of the biggest challenges you've got is your game has got to run at 2560 by 1440 resolution that's high you've got to run at 60 frames a second and it draws everything twice because you're seeing stuff from two different camera views this is not easy this is not something you can just chuck high quality graphics at you have to think really carefully about how much you draw about your draw calls about what you can get out of the device it's very different to a 720p 30 frames per second game with one camera view you really do need to think about that frame rate is super super super super important in vr and you need to design your game design your graphics design what you're going to show on screen with that in mind audio is really important with vr it was great to see something else talking about papa sangre earlier these those guys are the masters of audio and in vr um all of the major vr headset manufacturers are providing 3d audio interfaces so you can actually have 3d audio through a pair of headphones and i believe there are solutions on

there for the gear vr as well audio is really important you have to put a lot more effort and a lot more budget into audio in vr than you do in any other game particularly coming from mobile games where audio is often really unimportant it's it's not the most most key thing audio is much much more important in vr if you want to get good immersion a good sense of presence in terms of engines we use both unity and unreal 4 in the studio in fact for our gear vr games we're using unity at the moment it works brilliantly it's fantastic for mobile really really nice for our console and our pc games we're using unreal four so we're trying both engines they've both got their strengths and weaknesses that's what i would suggest you look at and unity is a fantastic starting point for for mobile vr and obviously it's very easy to run across different platforms and to port very fast things that you should consider if you're designing a vr game really obvious stuff cut scenes switching cameras all that kind of stuff doesn't work nicely in vr um one interesting thing that people don't necessarily get is that it doesn't have to be first person vr games do not need

to be you looking out from you know from the eyes of the character um there's a lot of different options third-person cameras work really nicely static spline based cameras work really well um there's play around experiment but don't imagine you have to be seeing out of the eyes of your body in vr that's absolutely not the case controls are super important both of our first two gear vr games don't use the controller don't use the touchpad you just use your head that's it so you can look at an item of interest and if you stay there for more than a second a little bar appears and the circle fills in and then you select it so the entire navigation the entire navigation of menus all the gameplay is done just using head movement with nothing else now that's a really simple starting point but it is possible to make controls really simple and really intuitive with the gear vr you've got a touch pad on the side that can register presses and swipes you've got a separate button as well and also you've got a controller most of the most of the packages come with a bluetooth wireless controller that you can use for doing more traditional gameplay but it's nice

not to have to use that and just to use the fact that you can look around walking around in vr isn't as easy as it sounds both of our first two titles actually have you static you staying in a place which sounds really dull but you can create some great experiences just with that as a starting point moving around walking around in vr is is is a challenge on all devices the better the hardware the easier it is but there are lots of different options for doing that don't think that you have to walk around don't think you have to have three free 3d movements there's other options you know looking at movement points on the ground and suddenly moving over to that point to jump around environments is a nice way of doing it movement walking around can work well but it can also be quite disorientating particularly on mobile devices where you can't draw an awful lot experiment don't assume we've spent the last 12 months experimenting in vr well nine months experimenting in vr and you've got to try stuff out you've got to mess around with things you've got to try and learn your own lessons because we're all learning it's a very new area and as i mentioned earlier you've got to

keep track of your frame rate you've got to keep track of your number of draw calls the biggest single challenge for mobile vr is getting that 60 frames a second at the moment and that's that's hard it will get easier and easier as the new mobile devices come out i think you'll see the gear vr supporting future samsung phones the s6 the note 5 all of the new samsung phones will get better and better and better at drawing but at the moment the biggest challenge is drawing some really nice stuff uh at 60 frames a second uh i'll just quickly touch on the two games we've done so i can tell you why we've made some of the decisions uh this is gunner which is out today on the gear vr store um we went for a cell shaded style it's very cartoony mainly because we couldn't we didn't have a budget to do photo realism photorealistic models uh just were doing too many draw calls so we've got a nice fun bright cartoony style that works really nicely and allows us to get that 60 frames a second and allows us to you know to really focus on getting a fast frame rate you stay it's like the um it's like star wars in the

millennium falcon turret you're in the gun turret you're moving around there's a whole load of different enemy types mother ships different planets you can go to lots of narrative lots of dialogue in there lots of different gameplay modes but it's a really fun simple shooter that just relies on moving your head and the other game that we'll be launching soon is called perfect beach now this isn't really a game and i think this is a nice illustration of what makes vr so different this is the kind of product that wouldn't work on anything other than vr so the idea is you've had a stressful day you've been in a commute your boss has been giving you grief you're tired you're irritable you put the headset on and you're taken away to the most beautiful beach in the world you can listen to music you can listen to a meditation track it tells you to breathe and relax and look at the waves or you can listen to your audio book and just chill and relax but it takes you away from the real world and because you're in there and you can look around and you're on a beach and you can see the waves rolling in and you can see the birds flying around it's a really relaxing chilled space place to be this kind of thing wouldn't work on tv this wouldn't work on console this wouldn't work on on a pc monitor but in vr it works really nicely and we call it it's

an experience and it's a very different way of doing things so they're the two uh titles that we've got coming up immediately we've got a lot of other stuff in development but let me talk a little bit about the future and where we see mobile vr because this really is the beginning in many ways the gear vr although it's the best mobile vr experience at the moment is also the worst mobile vr experience that you'll ever get because the devices are only going to get better the gear vr is only going to get better the hardware is only going to get better mobile vr at the moment is really nice and you can come and experience actually if you haven't tried the gear vr we've got to stand up in the um the sort of expo area there's an end dream stand and you can come have a go on the gear vr and try the games out and see what you think but they give you guys a great piece of hardware but it's only going to get better it's going to get more powerful and much much better as we move forward over the next few years so you'll see better technology you'll see more power to allow us to do more detail to do more detailed environments to do more detail games um you'll see positional tracking coming to mobile headsets one of the limitations with all of the mobile headsets is they do rotation brilliantly

in all the axes really nicely particularly on gear vr but they don't do positional tracking and when you're when you're sat there playing the game you inherently kind of slouch a bit or move forward or move backwards and if that doesn't if that doesn't happen in what you're seeing it's a disconnect there which makes you feel a little bit oh that's that's odd positional tracking is such a big improvement to vr all kindest and morphers have it mobile doesn't at the moment but i think you'll see that coming to gear vr over the next year or two and some of the other headsets that i think will come out you'll see them getting smaller and lighter in terms of form factor ultimately i really hope and expect we'll get to the size of a pair of ray-bans which is the dream when vr i think can become really mass-market you'll see samsung pushing gear vr across all their phones i think they're in it for the long haul i think you'll see gear vr not just as a one-off launch piece of hardware that's come out now but i think you'll see it go on and on and on over the next few years as it grows and expands i think you'll see apple arriving into mobile vr there's a lot of talk about what apple are doing and i think i'd be amazed if you don't see mobile video coming from apple at some point

this year and better control solutions control is a really big challenge in vr as i said with the gear vr you've got a little controller that you can use you've got a touchpad that works nicely but ultimately i think you'll see gesture control i think you'll see cameras looking down at the hands and actually allowing you to if you ever if you ever tried vr if you ever watch someone using vr for the first time they reach out they want to touch stuff they look around and they try and touch the walls and the desks that's the most natural interface of all and i think you'll see their mobile headsets develop hand tracking so you can either see your hands in vr or at very least you can reach out and grab stuff that's where i think the control systems will go so there super quick 14 minutes um if you've got any questions or anything you want to know let us know i'm always happy to answer stuff over email as well we're doing a lot of stuff in different vr areas it's a really exciting new new area there's a lot we don't know a lot of people are exploring this in many many different ways and but it's a really exciting area i think you're going to see it get very very exciting by the end of this year so that's it thank you