Use Your Illusion: Creating Immersive Virtual Reality Worlds

[Music] morning everyone good morning everyone all right now we can have our talk hi this is us I'm Adam Dirk will Chris and we were happy to be here and talk to you guys about our experience creating immersive VR worlds we've got a little introduction and then each of us is going to do less than five minutes of micro talk and then we're just gonna have an open discussion and then we'll leave plenty of time at the end for for questions so let's jump right into it so I like to infuse music into my talks somehow all the time and if you hadn't picked it up it's in the title of this

talk use Your Illusion the the epic double album Guns and Roses released from 1991 so I thought I'd just give you guys a little Guns and Roses a trivia real quick both of those these albums were released on September 17th 1991 they both debuted at number two one sold 685,000 two sold 770,000 and interestingly enough the second album spawned all of the hits for this double album release you could be mine November rain and don't cry both of these albums represented a lyrical songwriting stylistic growth from the kind of previous turning point for the band the seminal Appetite for Destruction these albums had a more mature sound despite many of the songs originating back to the more raw Appetite for Destruction era despite the

global success of these albums and their tour the double albums ended up splintering and destroying the band specifically alienating guitarist Izzy Stradlin who was kind of the songwriting engine of the group and he left and it kind of just eroded the band their next album was a album of covers called the spaghetti incident that no one remembers and then well you know the rest I guess they're back now kind of so cautionary tale about double albums guys and XS maybe in videogames so that works so we're here today to talk about a kind of immersive worlds and how they're achievable in VR and for me and for these guys and probably for many of you out there with first time you put on a VR headset if it was a good experience

it really kind of changed how you look at things and we want to share our experience making VR worlds and what we've learned and kind of what we think works and what doesn't but you know I look at I look at something like this and it's kind of the possibility and I want to go to there so I'm Adam orth I'm the creative strategist at first contact entertainment I've been making video games for a long time and I'm starting my 18th year making games now and about five or six years ago maybe even a little bit earlier I started becoming really bored with the traditional way of making games and the kind of minimal medium progression between long development cycles and I was becoming

embittered and just hostile towards the whole thing and I just didn't want to do it anymore and I was just searching for whatever whatever the new thing was like how am I going to express myself in this interactive medium and I just didn't know what to do and I was just really kind of stuck in a rut and I started working on this game called the drift which is it's a VR game if you haven't heard of it look it up it's pretty sweet but I I kind of considered this moment of a career in life reset for me and it just started as a way for me to just try to do something new and different and I wanted to tell a really deeply personal story in a interactive experience but not you know through shooting someone in the face in a video game so around that time right

around that time the Kickstarter for oculus rift happened and my partner and I were backers were early backers and we had a very basic prototype for a drift and we got this DK 1 and we magically somehow set it up and it worked the first time which never happened again after that and so the first time I saw this this new generation of VR was with something that I was building and I just lost my mind it it like it changed everything for me and I realized that this was the thing that I was searching for and I instantly knew that I could tell the story that I wanted to tell with this new hardware and technology it was just kind of mind-blowing so we put those two mash them together and you know adrift was kind of a traditional

game experience up until that moment and we put it all together and then it just everything kind of fell together for us completely creatively reenergized just totally into exploring in the dark and peering around so that little prototype in the oculus rift became this but but in VR and it was just the perfect way to really express what we were what we were trying to get and we just had never experienced anything like that before adrift for at least for for us was the perfect setting for VRS it was this kind of seductive and universal power of space that kind of resonates with everyone because everyone knows what space is and they have their own idea and they're either excited by it or scared by it but everyone has kind of a foundation to build on and it really kind of everything kids kind of lined up right there and it's just it took me

someplace I could never go in real life and and that's when I really kind of saw the power of VR and I became one of those kind of early adopters and evangelists for the tech and we basically worked with oculus kind of from the beginning not in any kind of official capacity just we loved what they were doing and they loved what we were doing and you know he ended up becoming a featured oculus rift launch title and and that first wave with the vibe and it was just an awesome experience to be part of and currently I'm working at first contact entertainment we're a triple AVR studio in Santa Monica my role is creative strategist is to kind of guide the vision of all of our VR products and the creative vision anyway and ensure that that kind of strategy is moving forward safely in the future and then creating new new

experiences as well I'm focusing now on multiplayer VR adrift was very kind of solo closed-off experience and I want to take my passion of the virtual space and bring other people into it and do awesome things so that's what we're doing now Dirk hi everyone I'm Darren Wilden I'm from Belgium I'm the captain hats I illusions and we made this game called space partner and who has played space fighter before it's cool that's a lot of people so yeah i'm the founder and project leads on space fire trainer my illusions

was actually really doing work for hire for the entertainment industry and the communication industry so creating games for fairs and then we ended up creating our own IP like four years ago on Steam pretty early by that time we have some contacts that's at valve and we had a 5 pretty early my current role at dilutions is mostly gameplay programming I'm a interaction freak which is great for VR because there's a lot of interaction going on it's about subtleties and then movement and subtleties and way you grab things and so that make experiences better I've been a very early VR support so it's also a Becker for oculus but my problem was I played first thing I played on there was half life in VR and I'm super susceptible to motion sickness and I just love went went to bed for a couple of hours and actually said to myself I'm never going to create a VR game so that's something actually said two years after our two years afterwards

I got notice like I got the wife and tried it on I was blown away because I wasn't getting motion sick mainly because of the positional tracking so this is one of the screenshots of 1.0 space fighters over creating actually environments around the current environment there's some more stuff coming which 1.0 which is going to release in next month so it started out as a room scale demos we've actually made space fighter trainer 4 or 5 and for a room scale it was a free demo it was released on the forums like in December before the 5 key max and just because it was some there was nothing like a shooter even so yeah one demo with a bow and that was it we just tried to create something new and back then the way shooter was actually something new that no one had done and there's a lot of Wiebe shooters now I think space fighter

was one of the first ones so was space by trainer a success well it's sold more than hundred fifty thousand units so we can be only a tree of a team of three people so actually for us it was also a commercial success next to being just great to work on one of the reasons why it became a success is probably because it's very pick-up-and-play like you get most of the stuff immediately you can just start it's super easy we just have the shielding our bag that people will show you someone like Dan Kaminsky on Twitter said my favorite part of speech patterns that you get access to everything immediately so you couldn't actually if you create a game for just desktop PCs you can't imagine a game where you get everything instantly normally you should unlock things and stuff like that but I believe like in this first wave now we had a VR entertainment it was a good decision now we just unlocked everything for everyone so people could just show stuff amber trying to keep that swaggy

41.0 as well and that's very difficult because if you give everything at the same time it gets kind of overwhelming but yeah that's something you have to figure out one of the reasons why it's very popular in VR arcades is also the same thing you get everything immediately and people don't have to unlock stuff this is another screenshots of for one point of it shows a bus fight with the bus bigger than the platform it's pretty crazy in VR and not so much in 2d but yeah so that's upcoming mitr and mid-october so about environments so one of the decisions we made is we have one environment right so it's very open the thing is you want to create an environment that people want to look at constantly but like if you have a corridor and there's something at the corner people would actually love to check it out if you don't have any luck motion system like people are rings in the same place and running out in the

same square meters you have to create stuff that's interesting and that's something that you have to look first like you you have to make sure that people aren't feeling that they're missing out stuff that's happening around that world so we've tried to move the action around the player also like with the other screenshot that you saw we actually move a spaceship or a big spaceship around a whole platform so it feels like a totally different environment just by checking and changing and the stuff I you didn't you have to use like a motion so that's one of the things we did also the reason why and the fun side of space bartering is pretty empty just a city with some skylights it's it's mostly a distraction issue like if you have too many spaceship flying around or if you have too much detail you actually can see the little droids flying towards you so you have to be careful if if you're adding too much content to the thing you have to focus on things get distracted quite easily also there is object interaction it was pretty important for us so yeah people love to interact with stuff and if

everything is at a certain distance and you can't use a locomotion you have to find some solutions so we had a vault on its kind of a device where you can grab droids weights and you actually pull them towards you we're going to even leave one point over using it for powering up turrets and stuff so we're actually adding interaction which objected are actually far away so what's one of the solutions and then the final point is so you have actually space powertrain is only using 210 degrees of action so most of the action is going out in front of you and that wasn't always the case like in the first prototypes it was just the droids flying around you and you would go nuts because it just can't remember all the droids and where they are and how are you flying around so we that was a design decision that people felt so much secure and so much more secure if everything was happening in front of them so that's one of it's probably one of the better decisions we made for space powertrain because people at that are in VR for the

first time you just don't want to overload them they can look around and you can see the environment but the action should be like in front so I think that's most of stuff I had to say by space fry trainer I'm just going to give her to me hi everybody I'm Obama I'm Will Smith I'm the founder and CEO of whoo VR and before that I I ran we make the food show among other things so the foo show was an early prototype that we built to show how our animation technology works what we do is actually animate believable human avatars using the three points of data that you get from a VR headset and hand controller it's like vibe and the two hand controllers with oculus touch or any of the upcoming headsets the foo show is something where we take people and put them inside videogames with the people who make the

game so we can talk about making games from inside the games it's kind of spins off of what I did it tested before we started foo everybody watched this on YouTube it turns out we had like a hundred thousand downloads across all the platforms but the YouTube views that some guy captured off of a headset with full head Bob got a order of magnitude more traffic so I guess I think there's an important lesson about nascent platforms there but I don't know what it is this more to this early in the morning I'm Will Smith I think I got in a little bit different order I'm not this one I'm actually this guy this is from my time at tested attested with the thing that we did the thing that was really compelling was we went out and found people who made amazing things on all sorts of scales from a guy in his garage making wall-e robots that actually drove around and were fully articulated to you know cooking for the International Space Station with Chris Hadfield to just testing goofy stuff in the office in San Francisco we talked to the people who made these things in a

way that was very relatable to other people who make things and people who are aspirational the challenge with it was it was only really good for tangible things video is great if I can point at something I could say oh why did you make Wally's head work this way why did why does this juicer have a feed like this if we wanted to talk to people who make games or other intangible 3d you know digital assets you know it's kind of boring like like hackers kind of did this thing but really nobody wants to watch a video of somebody sitting in front of a computer typing ever it's really boring so that was kind of the impetus for the foo show I wanted to be able to take these intangible assets that people created for games and science and all these other mediums and and have those same kind of conversations with the creator's inside those spaces and that's what we do we make these intangible places feel like they're real with virtual reality so what what have we learned so far for human Animation believable it's much much more important you know we're never gonna get one-to-one tracking with three points of data right the thing that we

learned incredibly early is that if you hold your hand out the hand orientation we can get but if your forearm in VR doesn't line up with your forearm in the real real world a lot of people get really really discomforted by that and it's something to be avoided avatar is actually work the the when we first when we recorded the first episode with the Firewatch creators Shawn vanaman and Jake Watkyn from Campo Santo I didn't know if he would be able to interview somebody with avatars we literally put the headset on for the first time and we've used the technology a lot in house but we'd all spent hours and hours and hours testing this and we were familiar with the avatars we were used to their body language we were comfortable with them in the first five or six minutes of the Firewatch recording we it was unclear if we were gonna have the kind of human interaction that we have when we're looking each other in the eye and you kind of read the body language that that comes across when you're having a conversation with somebody um that's the other interesting thing is that the body language actually does come across even with only three points of data so when I shrug I get that reads much better in VR

than it does even on a Skype call or something like that if I'm tilting my head like I want more of a question yeah I want to I want more more detail on the thing that the other person is talking about in a conversation they can pick up on that and they'll give me that if I'm moving my hand as if I want to interrupt they'll see that too and all these things get lost in in video but they're present in VR and when you're doing interviewing somebody when you're talking to someone whatever it all transfers when you're building these VR worlds I think we'll talk about this more in a minute but but being deliberate about what you make real and what you make magical is super super important you want the real stuff to behave very predictably and follow a set of rules that are they don't be set in stone but they they need to be get internally consistent with the rest of the thing that you're building and then on top of that we layer some VR magic so we do what we call diegetic UI is there there basically it's a pop-up menu that's a device that lives in the world and and instead of you know blasting up a big 2d pane with you X on it or UI on it

we give people a thing that they can interact with it's a basically physical widgets and it's important to kind of use that stuff sparingly when you're doing a social thing like our recording studio if you want them to follow the rules of the real world you know not invading people's personal space not you know not zooming around recklessly while you're having a conversation with them you need to your world needs to behave enough like the real world that their reptile brain says oh yeah I know how to do this I I stand here and I look at this person and I nod when they say something that I agree with and I shake my head when they don't and then the other thing that we learned relatively early on is that the VR audience at least in the first year so wasn't big enough to pay the bills even for a small three-person studio so we started doing some other stuff we used our animation tech to make a live weekly television show or it's it's digital but it's essentially a 30-minute sports call-in show that features Carl from Aqua Teen

Hunger Force he takes your Skype calls every Wednesday night at 7:00 and he talks about football he loves the Giants and hates everyone else basically we've also done some commercial work and we've done a couple of other pilots that I can't really talk about but but it turns out building a virtual reality animation studio that works like a live television studio it empowers the people who make traditional animation in really interesting new ways and then I have what's next so we're continuing to work on the animation it turns out taking three points of data and turning that into a believably animated human is challenging and difficult we get a little bit better every version I think we run like the tenth or twelfth version of our core software now the 2d content pays the bills that it turns out it's nice to have food in the house but still believe in the future vr despite the fact that we're making using VR to make 2d video I think that the upcoming wave of hardware that's coming the price reductions we've seen earlier this year and the standalone headsets that we'll

see next year are making you know VR AR Mr whatever you want to call it it's it's all it's all still a super relevant thing and really exciting and the place that we want to be in the stuff that we're doing for 2d actually will spill over into into the VR adjacent stuff and and we really believe that the current gen desktop hardware our dev kits for the future right I think that the standalone headsets are gonna be huge in two years and that's that's pretty much it the last thing I'll say is that the don't get hung up on labels just make stuff that you think is cool so VR MRA or whatever it doesn't matter just make make cool games and things I don't hand over to Kris hello good morning I have a policy about slides with text that I don't like them and I made these slides and I sent them

over to Adam about a week ago and I'm like hey what you think the slides and he said yeah yeah the fine as we kind and then you know a couple days ago he's like wow you know I'm having some trouble fitting him into the template because we have a really impressive slide template here and then last night we had dinner because my template didn't last night we had dinner and he's like I gotta tell you something I had to rewrite your slides his text and that's like so I'm gonna bring to you these slides that that I drew with a pen that I forced Adam at gunpoint to reinsert into this deck last night at about 11 p.m. so I hope that you enjoy them so my name is Chris Pruitt I am an employee at oculus my job there is working with folks like yourself third-party developers I run an engineering team that helps folks like yourself you know optimize your code or design your games

I do whatever it is you need to do to make your content really good under the cover of night I'm also a game developer I founded the studio called robot invader in 2011 that studio continues to run and my role these days is sort of paw through the code at night and introduce plugs robot invader produced a game called dead secret which I was the designer for this shipped in its very first version shipped on gear VR in 2015 and I'm gonna talk about it a lot today but it's essentially a murder mystery horror game takes place in 1965 so here's the slide about that secret and the important part of this slide is you should see it you should go to Ted secure comm to find out about the next game which is called Ted Secret Circle which is currently development okay so what the reason I'm interested in VR worlds is that I actually want to scare you I'm interested in making all of you quake in your boots and the reason that I'm interested in horror games is really long and complicated and I'm gonna get as much of as I can in like the 30 seconds I have left

I started studying Horrigan about 15 years ago these were not vr games he's just you know regular for games and my theory at the time was that horror games are interesting and they're different than other types of titles because they are going for emotional manipulation if you're building a horror game you have a very very specific goal and that is to make your players feel a very very specific thing which is generally stress or tension and that's more specific than most other types of games no other types of games like oh I feel great I'm having a good time like the adrenaline is running I'm a you know I'm a space ninja or whatever it is but horror games are like - no I'm gonna make you concerned about what's behind that door right at this moment and that's a very specific type of design and I was really interested in that that concept I spent a long time working on it I don't really care when I say horror games about like jump scares and monster closets what I care about is an environment that over the course of experiencing that environment you are worried about you become unsettled by and actually what I'm going for is what horror game

designers have been calling sense of presence for a lot longer than we've had VR the idea of presence in VR I think is very well understood you're in the world you believe you're in the world the world is self-consistent you you you know accept that you're there and in outside of your horror game designers work really really really super hard to produce that and in VR it's almost automatic and that means that a carry game or a game even if it's not scary that's built on the same principles as a horror game in VR has the ability to speak intimately at a emotional level with its player really really easily in a way that other other types of experience is not and that is super fascinating to me my goal is to get you to stop thinking about the game as a collection of mechanics when I play a video game I played a lot of video games and I kind of can see through the mechanics a lot of the times and I'm like oh you know like the health pack gives me three health points back but if I take a hit then I only take one point so I can take two hits before I so use a

health pack and I got to ration the health pack because you know I have to do three more guys for I get to the boss and he's gonna hurt me harder and I'm that's like solving a Rubik's Cube and that's fun and I enjoy it because Rubik's cubes are pretty good but when you're playing a horror game what I want you to think about is you know what is the significance of that symbol that I just saw in the wall I'm pretty sure I've seen that symbol somewhere before maybe the killer left that signal I want you to think about the context I want you think about the story and the environment and that is entirely built out of what I call contextual thinking rather than systemic thinking which is normal for a regular interview that's kind of what I want to talk about today and I'm gonna cut it off there cuz Adam said he'd kill me if I go more than five minutes butBut that's my piece thank you son okay thanks guys so when I put this the idea of this panel together I'm I was going through a period where I was just like working on a new thing and the

environment was not working in VR it was it was something that was kind of set in the real world that you can actually go to an experience in real life and I just found it wasn't clicking for me and I started thinking a lot about environments and I wanted to talk about it I wanted to talk about it specifically with these guys because they're my friends but I also really respect what they've done in VR so I wanted to have just even though they're kind of wrote at this point but the the idea of transportation not locomotion but being transported somewhere presence and immersion those those things have been talked about to death but the kind of interesting thing here is I want to

talk about those things from through the lens of these guys experience you know I made a very narrative driven environmental VR experience and I want to kind of hear how these guys and have you guys here these guys think about those three words from making an arcade game or a VR TV show or our game or and especially in Chris's point from point of view as an employee at arguably the best you know VR headset out there something somebody disagree with I'm an oculus fanboy because I think I think it's interesting I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be said there's think especially from Chris's point of view from you know what does oculus look for in these things so I just want to open up I'll start out by

saying you know when I was working on a drift I researched a lot of of you know what did these what what do people who go up into space how does it make them feel how does it feel to be able to look down on all of humanity and they all had a really different experience and they're all very changed and they came back but the one the one commonality was that that they they had a sense of presence in the in the universe and in space that made them feel like it changed them forever and I wanted to kind of use VR to capture that in a in a narrative game so space was like an obvious choice for me and like I mentioned her just a couple minutes ago I've I've done some things recently where I haven't been so successful with the environment because it's not magical

enough right and we'll brought that up a little bit and well you can either be really real or really magical right you don't have to be both but but but yeah so we take with the fish that we take from video games and and there were two things that we learned really quickly one is that we have we have this opening segment that's like two and a half minutes long where we introduce the developers and it's in a studio where you can teleport around a little bit but there's literally nothing else to do but watch us talk and then watch the clip that we play on the other the other side of that we go into the actual environment from the game we made all of the props that were in the in this fire watch Watchtower in active she can pick you up you could look at them we talked about them we picked them up you can grab the things that we're talking about and the feedback we we analytics the hell out of it which I recommend everybody do on there on there especially when you're experimenting with stuff so you can see what people are touching what they're spending time with the feedback we got after we did playtesting was the opening part was about ten minutes too long it

was two and a half minutes the second part could have been twice as long and it was 17 and a half minutes so you know we had a twenty minute total experience the part that was two minutes and we thought was as short as we could possibly make it was too boring and like one of the things that you did with a drift you did two things that I loved in a drift one was the first time you went outside the space station I felt like an astronaut for the first time in my life you know since since then you're you're floating in space you're looking at the whole world you can see the entirety of the world below you and you I understood a little bit more about the things that I've read in all the memoirs of the astronauts I've read over the years it's something that connected with me very personally Google Earth does the similar thing like when you're in space looking at Google Earth you get that same kind of feeling but but you also gave the people lots of stuff to interact with in the world which i think is really important the thing that I carries about is with your game Dirk like you basically your interaction is you can shoot stuff or grab it and and your game is much more like I spent way more time in your game that I have in mind so you

know I'm curious yeah like is shooting just a core use we just have to shoot as people is that a quick we have to shoot his people do you mean like this is Micah okay yeah so you know actually you don't have to shoot but yeah if I'm if I mean is it a core imperative of the human experience we have to shoot other things I guess one of the funny things is with one point one I'm going to spoil it you can actually finish space bacteria 1.0 and you do it by just not shooting the first Roy because the first Roy doesn't shoot you so if you just hold it and caress it for a couple of minutes you unlock the you finish the game so it just it just flies away if you ever want to like it don't tell your friends there

go mad that you finish the game and so you don't have to shoot as a human it's because you really wanted to do that you I you start the aggression so that's when they start shooting at you that's why the first droids not shooting at you people were wondering why that was it's all so easy the first Roy's just not shooting about interaction part with the vault and we saw that in virtual environments people tend to try everything or try to interact with everything you saw it like a job simulator in a lot of games they try to do random stuff and the best way to figure out what people will be doing is just to play test your environment think the guys from alchemy labs they they just put people in there and they start throwing stuff or shaking the bottle and they said that maybe it should like actually spray or something if you shake it too much so you can actually you have to predict what people will do but you can't predict everything and we had the same thing for example with a vault on like you could actually interact with objects that were far away from you and people are trying to use it on

everything around you like they were trying to use it for the ship to move it around or you could actually use it on the grenade for example you could pull them back and so one of my the new tanks Witsel it was creating more interaction around you in your world and by creating more interactivity it also makes it more believable I guess and you spent a lot of times on details that people will probably not see but it just makes all of it I'm more believable that's a good segue for Chris because I spent a lot of time in that house yeah I think there's a lot of I mean one of the nice things about VRS you alluded to Adams that there's it's new and there's no real rules and nobody really knows what the rules should be particularly you know if we're talking about core video games you know if you're making a first-person shooter in this day and age and it's a core video game like you don't have a lot of choices when it comes to like how the character is gonna move or what the action button is gonna be like those things are baked as precedent you can't

mess with them or players don't understand how to play your game but in VR like you know all bets are off nobody knows how to like shoot a robot maybe maybe you should grab it with a you know gravity thing first like like the grammar is unwritten and in particular you have an opportunity with each new world to write your own grammar I think the trick is that once you define that like this is what the interaction grammar this is the rules of your world they have to remain consistent so the thing that is great about space by our trainer is that you can do all that stuff you know you can use the objects in a way that you didn't expect people to use it's also true of of job simulator they're saying I'm gonna give you a very high fidelity interaction here we have a lot of its hands we've got a lot of physics interactions and then all the stuff that you might think to do is gonna totally work because we've coated it to work you like you want to put your head in the in the cobbler coffee machine we thought of that there's something I'd like so when we did that secret you know this was pretty early we didn't have I don't have

motion controllers we were building originally if you know although it ended up shipping everywhere building originally for a mobile device so you know we had like a trackpad and a click we don't really have very high fidelity input so we went the other direction we actually kept the interaction SuperDuper simple because I didn't want the the rules or the believability of the world to be broken by sort of an inconsistent rule set if I say you know what you can pick up that object but you can't pick up that object or you can throw that one but not that one because we couldn't figure out how do you should throw that one then you will feel like a system again I don't want to feel like a system I won't feel like a scary house once we got killed so so when you talked about earlier talked about oh you know the symbol on the wall right when you first go into that house it's so well put together in terms of that like it feels like a character that's the place felt like a character so what we're like the like point out just a couple things I'm for

those who played a dead secret that were really key into making that magic there the carrot yeah the house I mean is the character and very specifically its the character of the guy who's died so the the setup is that you know you're investigating this this murder that's occurred and nobody believes it's murder except for you and you got like you're gonna break in there and find the evidence and blow it wide open right and you kind of get into the house and figure out that it's you know significantly more complicated than you might have imagined the very first scene is that you step into the sort of foyer and there's a mirror and you could see yourself in the mirror and this was like a pain-in-the-ass engineering-wise to do properly because it's hard to render viewers you render end up rendering the scene four times right wants to reach higher and then once reach reflection and I'm running us on a mobile device in 2015 so like I've worked a ton to make that freakin mirror work but it was important everyone should give Chris a round of applause for that cuz that's really hard to do I mean I spent like the Norden amount of engineering time on

that stupid mirror but the reason was you had to be able to see who your character was and once you step into this space you're gonna be immersed in this other dudes life that's what it is that's what his house is it's a record of his life and he had a weird a messed up life and I very very few opportunities to tell you about your character and your character and in my game is not you it's not an everyman it's a very specific person and she has very specific traits and some of them I'm never gonna tell you about like she's got a broken arm and I'm not gonna tell you why but you need to see that she has a broken arm so you know something about her and so I you know it was really important for me to design the house such that I could do that very early on once you get past that for your point you are into sort of the house itself and what we did is we we went for a small a physically small space I mean the whole game takes place in one house that is high-density in terms of detail so there's a bazillion documents to read there's you know you can look under the covers or you can you can pull up the

the futon or the the couch pillows and look underneath them you know that we tried to make sure that there was a reason to investigate every little area because if you do that again I think you're gonna be thinking about this and thinking in context rather than thinking about a system but also you're gonna be focused and you're me a really close reader and if my goal is to scare you then once you are once your focus I have a lot of opportunities to do that so Dirk one of the one of the things I love about space pirate trainers the first time I played it I grew up in the 80s so you know arcade games and all that and it really felt like a natural evolution to that and I just remember like feeling like it was a real place like not just like an arcade experience like looking out the vistas and like the blade

runner-esque kind of ads and stuff up top like like how did you how did you decide to go to that place because I think that for me that that sells the the virtual environment and it makes space pirate trainer better and more unique than everyone else who copied it that's actually the look that's actually the look we were going for because I just remember its when I was first playing VR games I just remember it's the times that I wasn't at an arcade and playing those games and I just wanted to have that same kind of feeling thing the coloring in the in the space pirate area like the broken red and stuff it's one of the reasons why it feels a bit 80s the first time actually imports the whole model of the building into space by chair we thought looked great on my computer and in the level designer but when we saw it in real life in VR you actually notice that there's a lack of detail like sometimes if you create something for the first time and

and you look at things in a different way for example the ground floor under you it could look nice in your level editor but you're so close to the ground that it needs extra detail so we spend most of the times most of the time detailing everything that's very close to you so first thing people do when they're in VR and they're holding an object like for example in the earth in or in space by Colonel Gumm they actually look at that and it's very closely so we spend a lot of time just mulling the gun because it just gives you a seal of quality if something in your hands that you're looking up close is high quality so the closer things get to your to your face the more time you spend should spend them I'm making something that's high fidelity in terms of quality same with for example the floor and make sure there's a detailed texturing and stuff in there it's just tiny details that that makes feel more realistic I don't know how many of you guys have played the lone echo for example it's very triple-a it's probably

one of next to atoms one and Robo recoil it's one of the big triple eight tiles and you can see if you just take a look at the way they did the locomotion the hands like it actually grabs around stuff and the detail they put into their hands it just gives you an immersion immediately think having stuff with high quality very close to you and stuff with best quality a bit further away it just makes the whole experience better you just have to the first the most things you do in VR it just needs like it just needs first time you put an environment in VR you always feel it needs some work needs more detail in my opinion and of course will with the food show like he's got the best of all worlds no pun intended because he gets to go into all these other worlds and and have an experience in them that they weren't created for yeah so I really liked going to the fire Watchtower and familiar with

it and I think that the setup was that you're talking to the developers of the game and they're talking about how they modeled the assets and you're looking at them but also kind of turned the world into a set right how did you feel about that like it because once you can pick the things up and they have you know oh look it has no back or it has no weight you know there's no attempt to make the realistic you're showing them we're showing props we're showing about what it's like to go on Warner's back lot basically yeah how does that it was that intentional how do you feel about it um I'd like to say it was intentional but it really we recorded that episode I think on March 3rd and we released it the let's see came out on the vibe on launch day and came out an oculus the Friday after launch so like that was maybe three weeks of development basically from the time we've recorded like we recorded as a test to see if we could if we could do the recordings right and then we shared it around to some friends I sent it to some folks all over and people looked at him like this is you should release this this is really good we really both it's like it's like 10 days until them

headsets are out I don't know if we can like you know you should really really sweet sweet we hunkered down and a lot of the decisions we made that were not intentional right so things like do we give the physically we knew that we wanted everybody to look at the same object at the same time without having to huddle around each other because then we knew it would feel cramped so we we let them spawn clones but if we let them spawn clones and conceivably somebody could just make a million clones at the same object and fill the tower with garbage and chunk their performance and make them and feel nauseous so like the most of our decisions at that point were around making it a pleasant experience for the viewer and making it letting you access the things that maybe you couldn't reach if you are in an oculus with a gamepad at the time and didn't have room scale so we we had like a force pole thing where you could grab stuff from across the room which which works surprisingly well our teleport system was very rudimentary all of that stuff was rough but but the benefit we had is that we drafted on you know something that a really talented team of like eight people had spent two and a half years making it turns out that

bringing assets from other engines into unity is a little more challenging than we initially anticipated but but yeah we the other benefit that we've had is we can go places that don't exist in the real world this is this is one of the important things is like if you're gonna like everybody loads up that that 360 video of the top of Mount Everest once and it's like oh man this is the top of Mount Everest this is cool for literally 45 seconds and then you're like it's kind of low resolution I'm done I'm good and you never load that up again we wanted to build something that people would want to come back to over and over again so like one of the episodes it's in production right now is I talked to a biochemist who makes nano machines out of DNA and we literally start out in his lab which he's recreated for reasons I'm not gonna get into here because he's awesome and a little bit crazy and then we we do have powers of 10 thing we go inside the equipment in the lab and then we go into a microscopic scale world and then eventually we end up when we finished the episode standing between the lipid layers of an e coli cell and that's the

thing you can't do in the real world like like you just you can't see it we can see the constructs we can see the way that he builds the nano machines with these phage viruses and and you can handle the phages and you can see how the stuff chunks together and that's something you can't do in any other medium that I'm aware of which is what we're trying to do so that's coming out soon so do you guys agree I want you to agree because it's something like I said I've been having issues with it like like when you make a place in VR like it can't just be a normal place it has to have these some kind of magical quality in it I mean it could be a place that doesn't it could be a place that's inaccessible like I would love to spend some time in the Oval Office and kind of like walk around and see see what it's like or in the missile silo or places that aren't places that are you know but International Space Station that but coolest thing was amazing but the the

Oval Office is kind of like space though it's not a place you can normally go right right so that I mean that's magical in that sense I guess right right because I made a gas station and it was really terrible it's like like do you get it do you do like the kids that are going off to Chris's house like roll up in the RV and they're like hey guys what's your the grumpy old man that has to send them on their way to their dad I mean like well I I just wanted to feel what it would be like to go to someplace in VR that I could just walk down the street and go to how just I can see how that wouldn't yeah it just didn't work but I had to do it and you know now I know now everyone knows if you create stuff that people already know you see a lot more detail because you know how it should look and how we should feel like it's the same thing if you're visiting stuff like a certain charge that they photogrammetry for example it's great because if you've never been there you can actually see then you go maybe you can go to places that aren't available for public but if you actually been there and you will murder the smell

and the sound of it there's just something different that you feel like you're losing it's like a shits that's why you have to show stuff that like that you haven't experienced the environment I mean the same thing applies like we realized that early on with the avatars too if you try to make you like our avatars the animation is pretty janky but if you put it in a cel shaded context so you put it in a low poly context the people's brains forgive a lot of the the errors that come with doing procedural animation live it turns out there's a fair number and it's a challenging thing we had the same thing with for example the spacebar in our guns they don't have hands I have a lot of comments about that and the reason why I didn't put hands and it is because it's very hard to to know next to that do the arm thing it's very hard to know where the fingers are and if you're it just breaks the illusion if it's not like correct and there's probably there are ways to handle this with the new controllers because you're actually there checking what you're holding but it's stuff like them breaks you it's still just inferred from other data it's not measuring one to one which is kind

of what you want for that all right this is a good time for us to open up for Q&A anyone oh yeah yeah so we're talking about all visual stuff now about environment but there's I believe there's a lot more for example don't underestimate stuff like first feedback and an audio audio is super important like those two things actually spend a lot of time on all the first feedback in space criteria it's one of the reasons why it feels good because we every every type of gun is its own kind of first feedback curve and so people actually feel with the gun they're shooting even if they're shooting blindly without sound same thing without it if you even even space factor if there's music and older still this environmental sound just dips you in the hall environment it's super important that that's the thing combined makes makes the whole experience and it makes the whole environment looks too much better just because of this extra impulses I'm gonna go on record and say I think for a

believable environment audio is more important than your visuals properly on audio with spatialization and in a good you know with the user having headphones so you know with with no friction there you could you can sell an environment with a black screen yeah nor no argument there for sure if you close your eyes and just have some audio of forest which actually are there already and under visuals come next we show totally on the fire watch episode alright I don't have any questions there's a I guess there's a mic there other people can hear would you liked it there's a yes microphone yeah I have a question for Will Smith this maintains your particular interest of mind I'm wondering if you're working with her thought of working with embryologists so so that we could relive our journey from conception to birth inside the womb so have that be very very real for us um I

haven't but if you know anybody who has 3d assets that they built and connect me and I'll talk to them because it sounds like it that would be fun hey this question is for Chris we heard from the others about their thoughts on you know representations of the mundane world and you know with all your kind of ideas about language and you know a language of VR and you know stuff like that I was wondering you were the only one that didn't answer that I was wondering what what your take on the role of the representations of the mundane would be I think that Adams assessment is correct which is that to me to be a reason for the environment to be interesting I mean we could week it's true for write a book if I write it like a very you know well well if I was to write something that's you know a great description of a gas station you may still not want to read it it has to have something there's has

to be a reason for it to exist you know my game is probably in terms of locale the most mundane of the folks we have up here it's just a farmhouse in Kansas but it tried to make it interesting by having things that happened in it are the objects didn't be out of place or have objects or things about it that that the viewer can't immediately understand so that there's a there's a story that's waiting there it's like a thread that they're gonna have to pull out and it's actually okay that the environment is itself is sort of a relatable place in fact it's important to me too for that particular game for you to be able to believe that this could happen to you we chose a non realistic art style it's not super cartoony but we didn't realism wasn't a something we've corrected for because I actually think if the sound is right and if the sort of the world is consist even if the location is is sort of generally mundane if there's something there I think that's what Adams talking about nice is magic if there's something there a reason for you to be there a

reason for you to explore that world then that is that's why you're there and all the world really has to do is reinforce how to be consistent Thanks hi there I'm Dave Cox I'm a journalist about 30 years ago Jaron Lane II used to hold fantastic VR classes at the universities around town and the technology was very modest it was low-end max usually Mac classics running simple you know 3d packages but they were VR classes and a lot of the point he was raising in his lectures and workshops had to do with a kind of attempt to identify you know he what he what he was looking for was a kind of universal language of communication within VR akin to what he called a body music a kind of you know body language communicated through simple gestures

over a distance you know a little bit like HTML and the web were an attempt to universalize text over a distance right and you know because Universal ways of communication were the common thread in the early 90s and VR looked to be at that time another branch of that attempt to universalize communication at a distance except the ontology was one of continuous movement right so with VR you have this 360 experience but also the gestures of the person right there seems to be a tension now between an attempt to standardize this stuff because the technology is standardized and the delivery mechanisms mechanisms have increasingly commercialized and standardized what are your views on that kind of legacy of the language of VRS a 30 40 50 year set of research inquiries

can you know in relation to now well I'll just say one quick thing about that is we shouldn't be standardizing anything right now it's too early it's I mean we're we're essentially in like 1905 with film right now right yeah I don't think I think that the pace at which the technology related er is gonna continue to dramatically change is pretty fast I mean we are a year and a half out from the very first commercial headsets let the you know oculus touch controller ship less than a year ago we there's a lot of sort of obvious technology that doesn't exist in a commercialized level today like maybe we should track your face what do we new your expressions or what if we knew where your shoulders are doing maybe we could render you know where you're looking in the headset yeah I mean like I feel like there are a number of sort of we'll call them low-hanging fruit but clearly achievable

in the next couple of years sort of technologies that could significantly change the way that we express ourselves in a virtual space and the fidelity of those expressions so I think that probably the things that we see today are only very vague footsteps and that in the direction towards what you're talking about the thing I'd say is that the the standard is going to be what you can do with your human body not what Facebook says we can do or what valve says we can do or what whatever thank you well thanks there's a few virtual worlds popping up that are based on user-generated content and I was wondering what mistakes you think a user might make when they're building an environment and what tools do you think users need to make virtual environments that don't suck I mean they'll make the same mistakes we made right you just you just try stuff and you put your friends in it and they tell you that this makes them feel bad or they like this and you just keep iterating until you find something that works

these guys have smarter answers well no I manicure I mean the tricky thing about comfort is that we can we can meet a certain level of comfort for large percentage of people just by having good hardware we have a lot of good hardware now that's actually not enough to make all experiences comfortable in fact there's a huge swath experiences like half-life for example that even on good Hardware is gonna make everybody sick so what you don't see in the final product is that all the things that you know we tried in the production and then made people sick we cut because I don't want people say so there are and there's just like super fascinating differences between the way that people feel discomfort I had a person tell me an early development of secret that they were not uncomfortable because I placed them too close to a wall and they felt that they were you know their shoulder should be touching the wall but they couldn't feel it that made them feel bad yeah I mean like I think that users who have building this stuff for for the first time will just go through that

same learning curve and you'll have a lot of content that you cannot guarantee is it's comfortable and the folks are consuming that have to be sort of okay with that if you're not susceptible to motion sickness it's really good to have somebody on your team like Dirk who is yeah I mean I mean I think will will was on point by saying you can make all the mistakes like we built and deleted adrift three times before we finished ahead like it just it did work because it was new so it's amazing to have all the tools and it's amazing that people are out there making VR but they're just gonna have to suck it up and make mistakes because that's how you find the good stuff peering around the dark and then accidentally figuring something out and that's what's awesome about VR I think user-generated content you're limiting your actually what they're probably the most common use is just creating levels and stuff for creating but most of the interactivity or the the

core thing is already programmed so I think even for believing a realistic world it's all about these small interactive things and the way you push a button and stuff so that's already done by the developer so we already made those mistakes if you are creating user generated contact they're just going to create some mistakes concerning environments but not the other direction design because that's what's already done by developers sweating it's like it's just part of the mistakes that's the developer made yes we got time for one final question thank you that was a good question hello this question aroused when down quark Canyon was speaking Bane we could answer it you respect your time about how you have to change the view of action and going on in front of you and behind you when is it appropriate or what type of games would it be appropriate to have actually why not behind you I guess my question yeah if your it depends on how overwhelming something is if you put someone in a game and they and you use a

lot of audio cues for example where the user should look at four then you can try to implement some 360 the problem is people you don't know where people will be looking at so even when I put people into space by ternary they can't find the menu because sometimes it's behind them so that you have to direct the user where they're looking at and if you're creating you could do 360 experiences of course but you have to show the peel show the user where to look at and then we do it for example in when we're opening up the angle for an enemies for example like at first we just come in a like in the 60 degrees of field angle but if they open up throughout the wave psyche they get further and further away and so one of the problems were if you weren't using audio and it wasn't loud enough so you actually weren't looking ATS where the Droid was shooting from and so we implemented a system that was fleshing the right side of your HMD so you have glow there and then we actually felt like oh there's something happening that part and you look around so these

are all cues that can be helpful for creating experiences that are more like a 360 about 180 so it's about I do visual cues most of the time all right I want to thank you everyone for coming I want to thank Dirk and Will and Chris for agreeing to do this with me thank you don't forget to fill out your evaluations and have fun in VR