VR Demos: Do's and Don'ts for Making a Great First Impression

This is VR events do's and don'ts for making a great first impression for making great first impressions. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Melissa Swanepoel, COO at FarBridge Incorporated. And I'm Patrick Curry. And together we run a studio in Austin, Texas called FarBridge. We're an interactive studio. We do a lot of work in virtual reality, augmented reality, and through that also a lot of events. We've put together a bunch of apps and we've realized that through doing this and showing them to people that we spend about the same amount of time showcasing and refining our showing off techniques as we have putting the apps together making sure they're polished and ready for eyes. And so one of those was Masterworks Journey Through History, which takes research fidelity data of climate climate impacted sites and makes it available to explore in VR by a field trips. We did something very similar called My Virtual Armenia for the Smithsonian Institute and their Folk Life Festival with our content partner SciArt. And we also created a very realistic,

scientifically accurate simulation of brains inserted into robotic jar bodies doing battle on the surface of the moon called Jar Wars. And it's a fun, silly, social multiplayer VR experience. We definitely did the research and this is definitely where we're headed as a society. So like get ready. Start training today. It's real. And we also created an augmented reality experience this called Sky Blitz. It's a AR football game that was shown off at a big, big sporting event last February in Atlanta, which we're not allowed to name for legal reasons. When we're not busy putting together apps and showing them to the public as branded experiences or special festival appearances, we run a little thing called VR Austin. That is a community of VR developers and enthusiasts enthusiasts in Austin, Texas. We have quarterly meetups where people show up to demo their latest and greatest experiments, experiences, and games, and

we throw big party, and basically let the public come in and try VR for the first time, and we staff it with volunteers. And then, we also do the VR Austin Jam, which is once a year, we get a whole bunch of developers together, and we give them a weekend to put together their newest ideas and have some fun, and at the end of it, we show it off to a very, very big party of people. And before this, we were prepping. We think we've helped give thousands of virtual reality demonstrations now, which is kind of crazy, but between the events uh that we've put on, the software we've made, showing that software at different events, um yeah, thousands of experiences. So, we have our process down. It's fairly honed. Um we're excited to share these tips with you. So, some of the events that that we've shown at is the Folk Life Festival with the Smithsonian, RTX and Fantastic Arcade in Austin, Texas, South by Southwest, also in Austin, and we premiered Master Works on the Oculus Go at F8. Yes. And so, through doing all of these experiences with lots of people, we've learned many of the

hard lessons, sometimes repeatedly, and now we're here to share what we found so that you don't have to do what we did. Mostly repeatedly. So, you know, one of our our big conclusions is that virtual reality is still really best experienced and shown in person, right? Uh it's not just one person at home playing a game alone. Um a lot of people have their first, their very first virtual reality experiences out in public. It could be in an event like this. It could be a showcase, an arcade. Um and you know, my my complaint and beef there is that VR is just still too expensive. And people come up to me and say, "Hey Patrick, I love virtual reality sounds awesome. How do I get into it?" It's like a half hour conversation about budgets and technologies and all of that about what to experience. Whereas, I can just be like, "Hey, go to this place, do this virtual reality here at this event." And so, all of us as an industry want that to be the best possible first experience, right? We don't want to turn people off from this medium, this technology, this industry. We want to invite as many people into it both as, you know, consumers, but more importantly as creators and

collaborators. And so, we think that these live events are the best place to do it. It's a social experience. You can share photos, memories, uh and also just have a laugh with people. And then, you know, that helps cement it as a positive experience with each other. Because it's such a far-reaching experience, you can no longer consider just one person the player at the end of the long development cycle. Like, ah yes, we must please this one person. You are thinking of multiple audiences, and you have to consider all of their needs, desires, and what what shows well to them. Um so, with a VR experience, your first concentric circle of the audience is the person who's playing it. Um the next one out, the next closest to that experience, are people who are standing in line. They've already opted into your experience. You've sold them. They're ready to wait and spend their time with you. Beyond that is the audience who's maybe walking past that line, and then they see this long line, and their their interest is piqued, and now they slow down, and they're watching, and you have want to make sure that you have something of interest for them. Um beyond the in-person audience, there are live streamers. If people are walking

around with their live stream camera going, or they're um digitally streaming a conference, you want to make sure that the content is accessible and attractive to those audiences. And then, beyond that even further is the digital footprint of this experience on the internet. Blogs, write-ups, photo galleries, clips, GIFs. You want to make sure that the things that you are putting out there are very easy for all of the basically amateur uh advertisements and the photographers that all of the audience with a phone is. Like, all of them. You want to make sure that it's easy for them to capture it and show off your best side. Yeah, our friend Wylie, who's put on uh fantastic arcade for many years, said something very astute. He said, uh if it's not on YouTube, it didn't happen. And so, we kind of think about that as being one of the end products of this virtual reality experience is a 2D video of people doing it uh that lives on the internet forever. So, with that in mind, there are these three sort of big facets of a show to design and particularly the app that you're bringing to that show. The very first part is the virtual reality software. This is what is happening

inside the headset to that person's brain. The second part is the physical space setup. This sort of straddles the inside outside headset divide because a lot of what your physical space is going to impact is going to change how that person can behave in the virtual reality experience or the AR XR MR experience and also how they're going to be impacted physically in the real world. And then the emotional experience happens primarily out of the headset. Once a person has waited in line and they've been set up to enjoy the experience, afterwards, what is their emotional takeaway? Because that lasts so much longer than the facts of the experience. So, first we'd like to talk about this notion of the the virtual experience and and how we design it. So, just like how I'm a big believer that in-person experiences are some of the best ways to experience VR, the opposite side of that experience is that almost everyone is new to VR. The people who are going to come to an event or wait in line especially are the people who are most hungry for virtual reality. And that often means that they have the least prior experience with it,

right? If If you're Daniel and you have six headsets at home, you're probably not going to wait in line. So, we try to think about the absolute broadest experience we can and make sure that our experiences are easy to use and also easy to make look good because you know, we're we're keeping in mind not just the player but also everyone else watching them. And so, we try to include ideas or mechanics that make it easy for them to have fun and also easy for them to show it off. Like, let's let's give them lots of guides and lots of helping hands within the VR experience so that they can show it off to other novices who are there at the event waiting to participate. Even if the player is not hitting your win case in the demo or the game itself, they should have fun while failing and still come back and be like, "You know what? I want to wait in line again. I want to try. This time I figured out what I should be doing." Or like, "Hey, I totally just flailed around. I've no idea what I was supposed to be doing, but I had fun doing it. I'm going to tell my friends about how cool VR is, how cool this app is." So, another way to make sure that you're going to be generating more and more good experiences from your showcase is

to keep it short and sweet. Uh we try to average less than 10 minutes. Um and that's not just time in the experience, that's including the getting people into VR and back out of it. So, our turnaround times are between 7 and 8 minutes at on show floors. Um the more physical your VR experience is or your AR experience, your XR, all of the Rs, the shorter your session should be. And that's because if you're out there and you're punching and fighting and jumping and dodging and all these things, like at the end of it, your muscles are sore, you're sweaty, you're out of breath. You want to make sure that people are leaving your experience energized and hyped and maybe a little bit out of breath, but that that you can like go on and talk to your friends about how cool it was and not need to go sit down for half an hour and maybe miss like the next cool thing that you wanted to see. Um look for instance Look for example to Beat Saber where most of the songs are under or at 3 minutes. That's a pretty ideal cutoff point for something that's hyper hyper physical. And another thing about shorter experiences is that the line keeps moving. So, hopefully you have a long line full of eager people ready to play your experience, try your

app, or even just see what it's about. The shorter the line or the faster the line is moving, the better. And you're moving more people through and you're giving the audience who's watching this line move really quickly chances to say yes to I do want to get into this experience. I'm not going to be in line for 45 minutes and I will have a good time coming out of it. And then finally, Yeah, so another phenomenon we we've seen with these experiences that um sometimes people have a bad time in virtual reality. Sometimes they're not comfortable standing for a long period of time. Sometimes they get motion sick or sometimes it's just a technical malfunction. Those things it it just happens. The the interesting phenomenon has been that no one tells us until after the demo is over. We say, "Oh, how was it?" They're like, "Oh, it it's horrible. I got super sick." We're like, "Why didn't you tell us?" And we just There's something about putting on the virtual reality headset and stepping into that world that I think people are less likely to complain or just opt out. So, if you have a nice, short, concise demo, you're minimizing how long a bad experience is, and people who really enjoy the experience are saying, "Hey, you know what? No sweat. Glad you

enjoyed it. You can get back in line and do it again." It's sort of just an interesting phenomenon about people just not complaining. I mean, it's cool that people love virtual reality so much. They're like, "Yeah, I got to try it. Totally sucked, but you know, I got to try it." So, again, keep your experiences short. Another way to make sure that as many people are going to enjoy your experience as possible is by designing for inclusivity. One of the easiest things that you can do to make your experience broadly accessible is by implementing ambidextrous controls. Just by making it so that a person only has to have the use of one hand to like explore the full functionality and creativity of your app means that you are opening that up to a broader slot of people. You also want to consider players of multiple sizes and heights. You want to make sure that you're not balancing balancing the game for somebody who's very short, and then tall people will be left with no cover, or somebody who's really tall can just look over everything. We have a We actually have a co-worker who's incredibly tall and will sometimes just go boop and then just get you. And it's like, okay, that has to be balanced for player

height so that everybody is on a more even playing field and it's successful for folks of different sizes and heights. Um another easy easy win is standing and seated play options. Making this available to people will encourage others to opt into your experience at show floors, particularly if you're tired, it's the end of the day, you just want to sit down, but you still want to see the thing, but maybe you don't feel like ducking and jumping and like turning around a bunch of times. Make seated play an option. And then of course, swipe to turn is an alternative to room scale is important particularly if you have seated play because then you are not forcing people to do this multiple times during game play and that is a really painful maneuver to do with a sore back from loading in and out show floor events and also if you have any spinal column trauma. So another favorite accessibility feature of ours is reach assist. So uh what we implemented in Jar Wars and have since taken to our other experiences is that we don't make the player move within arms reach to grab something. Basically, if you can see it

and you hold your hand out towards it and you press the grab button, you're going to grab the object. And we we do that in the fiction of Jar Wars with you have an extendo like Inspector Gadget robotic arm that zooms out and grabs something and pulls it back. Um but it has tons of great side effects. Players aren't busy fiddling with movement trying to get close enough to something but not too close. Um also as a developer I appreciate it cuz I don't have to actually bend down all the way over to pick up objects, you know, physics objects off the floor in virtual reality all the time. Um and it's very intuitive for players. Players understand, they hold their hand towards something, it lights up, they're going to they're going to grab it. And there's lots of ways to explain that in your fiction. It could be, you know, like Magneto from X-Men or the Force in Star Wars or Accio broom from Harry Potter. And so whatever type of experience you're creating, you can explain it. And we find if it's an app, like not a game but just an app, people get it. I'm aiming at something, I click on it, I get it. And it just works. It doesn't take a ton of explanation. Consumers understand it when you're trying to make it easier from for them to use your app and like interact with the items in it. The next part to consider is physical

design and that is the space and setup in general of all the technology that you're going to use to support this experience. VR has pretty unique space needs but so does AR depending on the app, MR depending on the app again. So there's just tons of little things that you have to keep in mind as you're putting together your package of gear to take with to a venue. Um it's very nice to have a 10 by 10 cube to put people in and and they can flail their arms and run around their hearts content. Um, but venues and sometimes show floors are very reticent to give you 40 by 10 square feet just for player space and that's going to impact their branding. It's going to impact the number of vendors, the number of showcases that they can allow into their event. So, through a lot of repetitious uh trying and going to different venues and being told, "Hey, we told you you could have this much space, but we've uh changed it at the last minute." We found that we can get away with a 20 by 6-ft track space and put four players uh uh concurrently tracked within that. And that helps us keep our footprint down

and that keeps venues pretty happy. Yeah, and that's in a single VIVE lighthouse track space. Uh which is is pretty convenient. So, also it's important to remember that every venue has different physical setups and so you're going to have to set up your tracking in different ways. Um and and this is true whether you're using lighthouses, inside-out cameras, um you know, outside-in cameras. Um windows, reflective surfaces, sunlight glare, all of these things can interfere with your tracking. Um as can things anything that emits uh infrared. So, uh one of our co-workers had a Roomba in his house and he didn't realize it, but it was ruining his tracking uh while he was trying to play virtual reality. So, he had to, you know, put the Roomba on timeout while he was playing VR. So, Cuz it would just sort of sneak in and ruin the experience and he'd come out of it and real- it would be gone by then. It's like, "What happened? What has occurred?" And it's just this stealthy Roomba ruining things. And then of course um for any event venue, particularly if you've never been

there before, you want to arrive early. If you're coming from out of state or out of city, you want to arrive at least a day early and get into the space. Try to test your gear and test your app at the time of day. If you're going to have lots of crowds moving around, you may want to have a bunch of people walk back and forth and see like some MR experiences are very good if the audience is sitting very still, but if there's a whole bunch of people milling back and forth, it can ruin the tracking. Uh and Um for AR experiences, we had a situation where we tested it during the day and it was great. It was a rooftop balcony overlooking the city and it was lovely and it's I think it's aliens that you're shooting. Um and then at night when we were showing it, it still looked beautiful. It was still visible. It was great. Um but the traffic lights would change and the cars which emit bright lights which just move and the app would just be like, "That's my anchor." and drive down the street with folks. And so there was a tracking consideration we hadn't come across before. So there's plenty of things to find that might mess you up and it helps you build a better app and a better

showcase experience if you keep a list of those and you're like, "Have we considered this? Have we considered this? Have we considered this? We're good to go." Next time we'll just cordon off the street and no traffic. Oh yeah, very easy to do that. Cities love it. So also, you want to design for for spectators uh in your physical space, right? So um we found that the best way to do that is lots of screens, the largest possible screens you can get. Um here that's that photo is the Google Fiber Space in Austin, Texas. Lovely video wall um on the back of a stage made for perfect VR demonstrations. Um and also we we connected a uh spectator view where it's a unique view uh of the action. Um you don't always want to put a first-person view on a giant screen. That can be kind of motion-sickness inducing on its own. And so by putting a third-person camera on a separate very large screen, it's very easy for the audience to understand what's going on. But then you also want to design space in your physical layout for people to be able to watch it and see the screen um and also room for your

videographers and and photographers. So that's both the real-life people walking around taking photos and video, as well as in this case we had a virtual camera person. So we had to like find a nook. It's like over hidden behind the stage for them to sit so they could actually pilot the the spectator camera. I think they ended up calling that the corner of shame just cuz it was so tucked away. I think it's where like normally set up like refuse and detritus ends up and it was just like, "Nope, that's where our fifth computer is with our person just slotted away." Uh so, to talk a little bit about the gear that we bring to events. So, we've learned the hard way we always have to bring our own gear to to events. So, that starts with our own computers and headsets, um upgrading the laptops from desktop PCs. As you can imagine, a huge win lots less gear to carry, fewer things to lose or break. Um and the other thing we always bring is tons and tons of electrical gear and network gear. So, we've worked on a lot of multiplayer experiences or networked experiences and we always try to design a fallback for when the internet goes out cuz every

venue, every event we've done, at some point the internet goes out and so we build our own LAN, we bring our own switches, our own ethernet cables, our own power for all of that. Um so, we have an elegant fallback so that when the internet fall goes out, uh we're not completely dead in the water. And I will say that no venue is going to admit that this will happen to you. Um they will tell you that they have wonderful Wi-Fi, that they have hundreds of people using it during their events and it's totally fine. It will support you. But, they've never had very very tech and internet-heavy, thirsty setups before with their hundreds of people at the same time. And those competing needs will just they'll create drops or lags and if your experience is dependent on a smooth internet experience don't trust it, build your own. Exactly. You are also going to need a bunch of non-technical gear. Congratulations on your new moving company because if you are moving events into and out of spaces, you have basically the same needs as any moving service out there.

From the very basic like clear plastic bins that you can easily label and look at it without opening and digging in them and be like, "Oh yeah, there are definitely four laptops in there. That's not a missing laptop box. We can load that already to a ladder and fixtures that you can mount to the ceiling for your tracking solutions, tripods so that you can not have access to the ceiling if that's unavailable, dolly so that you're saving your back, and of course a van because a four-passenger car is not going to cut it for the amount of technology and gear that you will be bringing to and from these locations. Yeah, good good thing I have a van. Convenient. There's also some life-saving gear that's just it's not very special looking, but it just it comes in in the clinch and you're just like, "I'm so glad we had 30 differently colored zip ties that one time." Or, "Hey, we had seven different colors of gaff tape. Wow, what a coincidence we needed six. Great." And I'm gaff tape is just a huge thing to be aware of. If you're talking to different venues, they'll be like, "What are you using for a trip hazard?"

And if you say duct tape, they will sometimes tell you that you're not allowed to show there. Or they will hit you with a a renovation fee afterwards because duct tape will strip up um flooring uh treatments and also like sometimes it will just put dents um little chips in sheet rock. So, gaffing tape's the way to go there. And then post-it notes. If you've got an MR thing that needs a blank wall and maybe some tracking spots, there a lot of little little solutions that you can find for maybe 17 bucks at a Walgreens. Totally. And so, we're uh very big on keeping our equipment clean, right? You're talking about devices and hardware that sometimes get warm on people's faces, right? Like at least six people's faces an hour. And so, uh we set up an assembly line of uh cleaning the equipment. So, we always bring a couple removable face masks uh for each VR headset. We wipe them down after every use. We wipe down the controllers and the earphones. Uh and then give the masks time to dry.

Um we use the not the pleather ones, but the kind of fabric you uh VR Cover brand masks. They're they're very nice. And not hiding the cleaning process is something we're also pretty uh passionate about because we want people to see that we're keeping things clean and it gives them a reason to not say no to trying our um our VR demo or our show floor demo. We've actually had pretty high-end clients come by before and be like, "Oh, I see you're showing the thing. That's real nice. I don't want to try it though because of conference cooties." And then they'll watch us go through a couple of sessions where there's a diligent assembly line that's just sanitation putting these things clean and ready for the next uh load of people to use and they're like, "Oh, now actually I will get in." And then they try it at the like the event floor and that's pretty major. Um and so we're actually really happy to see that XRDC is doing that and it's just very nice to see out in the wild because for a while there in the very beginning of VR demos, people were just like, "Yeah, try it. Try it. Put it on your face. Try it." And it's just like, No. So, but this is great. Finally, this brings us to emotional

design or the lasting emotional impact, the big feelings take away that people have from your experience and the experience is tangential to trying your app. One way to make sure that people are going to have a better long-term capsule of this memory is to make the line a feature. Lines can be pretty boring. It can feel like a chore to stand in one. Like nothing nothing interesting is happening. You've already made your decision that you're going to do this cool thing and now you got to wait. That sucks. But lines grab attention from the audience that's passing by. So, how do you make the line something that's fun for the people already in it? Use the time wisely. Um here at RTX, we had our screens turned so that all the people standing in line along the right side of the screen there um could see the player perspectives and learn their strategies and see what people were doing to form alliances, uh do sneak attacks, all sorts of things like that. It also, you can see at the very front, somebody is signing a waiver. We always provide waivers for particularly for our physical games, which lets people know

you're about to do something very physical. Um Like, there's some inherent risk with that because we're blindfolding you from this reality with another reality, and we're encouraging you to flail around in space. So, that lets them know what they're opting into. Uh we also do a mailing list opt-in that lets us connect with folks who want us to and share updates and news as it comes out of that experience. Yeah, and you can see here there's a happy little accident uh at the end of the line. We had four extra chairs, they just perfectly fit at the end of our booth, and we said, "Hey, okay, we're going to make this the on-deck area." And so, that let the players sort out, "Okay, who's going to be on the red team versus the blue team?" You know, which friends are playing together. Um yeah, it it it was a really nice nice side effect, and we've we've replicated that since. So, one of the things we are just super super adamant, verging on religious, about is having one human person assisting each person taking a demo in VR. And so, we we named them squires, right? Like a squire helps a knight in and out of their armor and onto their

their trusty steed. So, our VR squires are people we work with, either developers or people in the community, who we hired to work with us, and we put them through a training course, not just about what the software does, but how the VR equipment works, how to adjust it for comfort, um just so they can give a really good personalized demonstration to to the people at all of our events. Um we find it very comforting. Uh as Melissa said, you know, VR can feel like you're getting a blindfold on, and knowing that there's someone there who has your back, who's not going to let you like bump heads into someone else or run into a wall at full speed, is very comforting. And so, um we've been doing this for a while now, we're huge fans of it, we can't recommend it en- enough. Um it does take a bit of coordination and extra effort to schedule all these people, um but it it's a it's a big big win. It's very worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We've had um player feedback. Sometimes we have an extra person take um like if we have extra squires, and it's like, "Oh, we're actually full, but we'd love it if you would talk to players as they exit the demo. Just find out what their what their most favorite part was or if

anything went wrong. Um many of them are like, "I'm so glad there was somebody there explaining stuff to me and it felt good. It felt like I had a friend in there." Um so the best way that you can make any of this happen is by taking care of your staff. Uh the way that we do that is we recruit and pay rad people to work our events with us. Uh we want to make sure that we are respecting and valuing the time and effort and energy that they're putting into showing our work to the world and it just makes for a much better experience all around. Um when we schedule, we schedule overlap for breaks. Those are very hard-won lesson where the first time that we did one of these big demos and we were like, "Oh, it's you know, five of us and we know the thing inside and out and that'll be fun and easy." And six hours later, like the dregs of our souls were just scraped into a corner and in like the room cuz it was so exhausting and we're like, "Cool. Next time." And then we had Taco Bell. And then we had Taco Bell. Uh next time what we have to do is make sure that there is productive redundancy. Enough

people in place so that people can take breaks. If somebody has an emergency come up that they can leave and it won't just it won't hinder the entire demo. Um another thing that you want to do is rotate the roles. If you have many different staffing areas like squire, line management, someone to drive the spectator PC view, you want to rotate people in so that they're not completely burned out on one role because it's a lot of energy and effort of um people communication to do line management. It's a little bit less intense to do squire. It's even less intense to do the uh the spectator PC, but there are more different types of decisions to make in that position. So you want to rotate people into roles that they click with and also give them breaks. Lots of water bottles as well is very important and also standing comfort aids. So like insoles, pads. We've all been in a conference for several hours and felt what it feels like to have your basically your heels are liquefying the whole time and it just becomes pain at the end of the day. You want to protect your staff from this. And then you also want to keep them informed. We do that with a document that we call the run of

show document, which has all of the information. It's hefty. There's an online version and then there's a couple of physical versions at the place in case the internet goes down. And this this is a theme. That's right. Um and it has all the information and emergency contact numbers and protocols and even some light troubleshooting for the squires if somebody has to leave and step away for a second. Yeah, it super super valuable. Uh and then you know, something that we've been working on more uh the last couple of years is what what do we do after the demonstration, right? It's you know, if you're very focused on turnaround time and trying to get as many people through the experience as possible, it's easy to be like, "Hey, thanks a whole lot, you know, take the VR gear off. Get out of here." Um so lately what we've been doing is almost like a receiving station when someone leaves. So sometimes there's swag, it could be stickers or posters or t-shirts. Um a couple setups we've done have had automated photos and videos where you can um give people a you know, digital momento of their experience. Um and also we we learn to, you know, tell people what the hashtag is because often again, this is going to

go live on the internet forever and we want to be able to find the content that people are posting about the experience. So telling them, "Hey, this is the official hashtag of this event or this game is really helped. Um something else that we've we've seen is that um high scoreboards have this really interesting sort of viral elements to them just like a you know, a classic arcade game where some players are going to play the game experience and enjoy it and be like, "Okay, that was cool." And then other people are going to leave and just say, "Well, how did I do?" And so for those players to have a a high scoreboard that's posted on a on a side screen um can can really be a win because they might want to come back and just Well, can I do better? Can I get a better score? Or you know, also very likely they're going to go recruit their friends and say, "Hey, here's my score. You should come back and try to beat this one." So So we've we're you know, pulling in these old ideas of classic arcade games uh I'm them new again with VR. And then of course, you want to have your mailing list again. If somebody didn't opt in before they knew what the experience was, maybe now that they've played it, they're like, "No, I definitely want to know when this hits the market. I've got four buddies I want to play with. I'm ready." And so you want to have that available for them and

you want to make that very low friction to just be like, "Okay, yes, email me all of the things. Make Make this easy for me to wish list it." And then follow up interviews again. Like you want to have somebody that's there to answer questions like, "Hey, when can I play this again? Where are you showing next?" And sometimes we have that answer and that information for some of our like our installs and we're like, "Yes, you can see us here." And then sometimes this is like, "No, the best way to do this is to follow us on social media to connect with us." And you just want to build that web of interconnectivity. Last but not least, safety. When you're doing any event, you're creating a micro community. And frequently when you create a micro community, you've created the potential for a longer lasting evergreen community. Any community, any group of people brought together by common likes, passions, goals, and drives needs a rule of interaction and a base of like responsibility and behavior that's acceptable. Codes of conduct are the way to pave that way forward and make sure that the community that you are growing, the event that you are nurturing is supported and kept safe and that it's

clear to everybody what's acceptable and not. Um so having one of those from the get-go is really important. If the event that you're showing at or the showcase that you're part of doesn't have one, you can still put one together for your team and have everybody basically opt in to, "Yes, I understand what's expected of me and how to behave and I've agreed to it and I signed it." So we frequently do that with our events and our um showcases as well. Another important thing to include is the emergency contacts for your staff. Somebody has an accident or if you need to get a hold of somebody, that's an important piece of information to have. You also want to have first aid kits because it's boo-boos. They do happen. You're up a ladder, you scrape an elbow, you get a paper cut. You want to be able to band-aid that and not have that be something that puts a crimp in your style. And then finally, you want to make sure your staff knows how to react in a particular situation and how to report incidents. We frequently have sort of like just very beginning orientation setups for our new staff members and we'll also do a PSA of like, "Hey, we want to hear what's up. We want to hear if there's anything that you have questions about. If somebody's

doing something and it's causing doubt for you, we'd rather hear about it than not and then we can help coach that situation, the response and also just make sure that we're keeping everybody safe and supported." Absolutely. Just how we said that often times people doing a VR demo don't want to complain, we've also found that new squires who are working with us for the first time, they don't know if they're supposed to complain. You know, we really have to tell them, "Hey, this is the type of behavior that's out of bounds. We need to know about it." And really model that for them up front. So, that orientation really pays big dividends and it helps foster a healthier community. Yes. All right, we've got some key takeaways from you to Well, do you want to take the next Sure, yeah. I mean, my my big takeaway is I'm I'm a lifelong software developer and since I've been working in VR 5 6 years now, I've just done an increasing amount of event work and community work. So, if you're in virtual reality and you're making or selling VR, get ready to show it off a whole lot. Think about and take events very seriously. Um also, a big shift a mental shift is

you're no longer designing for this one theoretical player who's going to play the game by themselves at home alone. You're you're designing for this entire demonstration experience and I think that these lessons are very applicable to other elements in the game industry going on like Twitch stream streaming, let's play videos, you know, video games are a spectator sport. VR and AR are absolutely a spectator sport as well. And when you're at an event, be flexible. goes wrong, breaks, roll with it. It does occasionally also hit the fan. So, yeah, just roll with it. Know that that will happen. Try to arrive early and you know, uh have have uh yeah, have a backup plan. Speaking of backup plan, always bring your own gear and bring extras. Again, never trust the internet. You want to make sure that you are bringing all of the things that will allow you to be as self-reliant as possible. And then bring extra because if something does go wrong or something extra goes wrong, you want to have some contingency set aside for that. And if the heavens align and the sun like comes through the clouds

and it's just a beautiful choir chorus that hits this perfect note and nothing goes wrong with your demo on this day, your neighbor will have technical issues and one of their adapters won't work and their headset will have cracked because a player dropped it and you'll be able to be like, "Here, friends. I will assist you." Like this community and this creatorship is still new enough that every first experience that somebody has sort of colors the entire playing field even if the experiences are very different. So, if I have a bad first experience in somebody else's VR setup because the base station was wobbly or not tracking properly, I'm not necessarily going to get into the next person's VR and now you've lost that potential customer who would have been wowed and talked to their 30,000 online followers. So, you want to make sure that you're making it as easy as possible for people to have a good good time not just in your experiences but in everybody's experiences because this is a team effort. Um part of that is also cleaning your gear often and in front of the audience like we said before, you want to remove barriers to saying yes and part of that is when you're in a group of people you're like, "But who here is

patient zero?" And you want to make sure that you are not contributing to the zombie apocalypse. It's important. And then finally, code of conduct. Even in the zombie apocalypse, we will need one. You will need one. Any VR meetup, any XR party, any AR showcase, any MR event. Get on it and make sure that you are clearly stating what's acceptable, what the outcomes of different behaviors are, and how to keep people safe and supported. Well put. Well, thank you very much for coming to our session. We did it. We made it through the last session of the day. I think we have a little time for questions. Um Yeah. There's a microphone there for questions. Uh in the meantime, you can find us online at farbridge.com or via austin.org. Also on the Twitters. Our next VR Jam is in 1 month and looking at the date and realizing it's exactly a month away is giving me some palpitations, but also excitement. Um so, come join jam with us in VR uh VR

Austin's Jam in Austin, Texas. Thanks, y'all. Oh, hello. Yes, hi. Step right up. Yep. So, I do agree with the whole thing of carrying everything together with you, right? I mean, I think every time I have missed out on a power strip, it's just totally sucks. So, now what I have is is like a standard kit from Pelican, you know, those guys make these very nice rugged boxes. It has a wheels. Space for everything, right? And totally totally something I would recommend to anybody else. Um Do you have uh So, so I see that you guys doing a lot of trade shows and and events. Any best practices or experiences when you are like the one person flying down and and to give a demo to somebody? Right? And uh Going it solo? Yeah. That is rough. If you don't have any backup that's going to meet you there, you don't have a friend to go with you. Um Customer side? Yeah, I I think it's

really important then to talk to the vendor or the venue that you're going to be at and figure out if they have a volunteer to spare that will be able to step in when you need a bathroom break or if you can shut down for a portion of the day. Uh frequently when we have group events, one of the things that we need to do is to like, "Hey, um during lunchtime, we're not going to have uh any sessions for an hour because things get hot and we need them to cool down. Um maybe a computer tries to update during a play session. So you know, we'll let that happen like you want to make sure that you have breaks built in, particularly if you're going it solo. Treat yourself the way you would want to treat other people as like a resource and you don't want to burn yourself out. So talk to the vendor, talk to the person who is on the other end and be like, "Hey, to do the best job of showcasing this app by myself, these are the things that I can do. So I'll do sessions or you need to assign me a buddy." Okay. Yeah. Cool. If you have anything to add to I was also just going to add um being able to request a specific type of room,

right? If you're going to a large company to give them demonstrations of a piece of software, ask them like, "Hey, do you have a spare conference room with blinds that close and a high ceiling, right?" Yeah. Something as simple as that uh could go a long way towards a, you know, a much smoother demonstration. One comment regarding the the whole third-person view though is is I realized that a lot of people were were kind of nervous trying out the VR the first time. And and I think just having um like a screen view of what they were seeing was actually very helpful for me to be able to see that, "Oh, this guy's totally lost. Let me help him out with Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, user interfaces are not perfect, so Yeah, so um I still prefer to demonstrate on a laptop with a tethered headset. So on the laptop I can see what they see and that the laptop view doesn't have to be what the entire crowd is seeing. That's there for us as a debugging tool. Right. Um but then investing in a spectator camera for everyone else's view, that that's paid off dividends. So yeah, I agree on one both and for, you know, standalone headsets it's

semi-unsolved problem in terms of how do we make that really foolproof where I know what you're seeing and I can actually help you. Yeah. One other thing I have noticed um now I don't know if you have the same experience, but certain people who are nervous in getting into VR, there's a good chance that they'll come out with a bad experience. And and I'm just always thinking that I should just not even encourage them to do that because they kind of go back with this negative thing and then everybody else kind of feels like oh, you know, it might not work for like, you know, more people. So, it kind of destroys the you know, I don't know, just something that I don't know if you have experience with An approach I've used with people who are you can see that they want to get in but they're very nervous. Maybe they've tried VR before and it made them nauseous or it made them scared or somebody jump scared them for their first VR experience. They're like, "Haha, got you." And it's like, "Cool. You've given this person the same anxiety about trying this new creative medium again." Um what I do with folks like that I'm like, "Hey, I totally get that maybe you don't want to jump into a multiplayer experience right now. Come back in like half an hour when we're

about to shut down and I'll put you in the lobby, their like waiting area and you can just see what it feels like to move around. No other players will be there. Like, I'll try to find little pockets of like opportunity for this one person to have a redo of their first experience and I'll be like, "I'm not even going to clip your headphones on the hallway. I'll leave one open and I'll be the voice in your ear. I'll be your Navi." And I'll just be there and be like, "Hey, you want to go to the right? Okay, look over there. Like, yeah, that's the tool that you can do. You want to click this button." And like basically give them this very bespoke first walk through. Cuz I think it's important and anytime I see somebody not having fun with something that I know is so capable of being enjoy like just so full of enjoyment. I'm like, "I want to fix this for you. I want to give you a good shot at finding your feet in VR." So, I think it's really just about taking that personal person-to-person moment if you can. It's not always available because of the rush of VR conferences, but it's worth finding when you can. Do you think that there are people who are actually nervous because they they feel like they're going to look bad in a in front of the people? I mean, how many of us would want to be blindfolded right now in front of everyone else here? Yeah. That's not a

like natural, "Oh, yeah, let's definitely do that." sensation for a lot of people. Um also, I think there's just a lot of reasons that someone might not want to do VR in a public space. They might wear glasses and not be comfortable taking them off or they might not like the way they look without glasses on. Or they might have a very expensive hairdo that they don't want to mess up. And like those there's just lots of factors there. So, yeah, we we're big on consent and we're we're almost never going to talk someone or pressure someone into trying it. Have you actually tried to carry like hairbrushes for people? Cuz cuz I'm always thinking about that and I know I know like I don't know if it's stupid to ask this question. No, but I think that that's an interesting idea. Yeah, I mean I think people people just always like I do that like in my office like because I'm sometimes in a suit, right? And and my engineers give me a headset to try on and I'm doing that and after that I'm like you know, how do I look? We do the opposite. We have skull caps at the office. Like like weird like balaclavas. Oh, no, they're so stylish. Everyone run out and buy one right now.

They're not attractive looking at all, but when you're passing headsets around like an office of a bunch of people and you know, cooties can get around. So, Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons people might not want to try it. I could I could see a future where it's like, oh, cool. I just went through this amazing VR experience. It's like this right and it's amazing and my hair is just And then like at the end of it it's like here's a disposable comb and a little face wipe and everything like in a little baggy to like let you feel like a human again. I could totally see that. I don't think we're quite there yet, but I would actually kind of love to stick out what that kit would need and how much it would cost at scale because that's my brain. I I like your idea of of um you know, giving some kind of a What is the word you used? Like a takeaway. Like a takeaway, right? And I think specially a picture of somebody interacting with that whole thing. Maybe like a video clip would be a nice thing to do. We feel We feel like we have players ask the squires if they might would mind like filming them on their phone. Yeah. And I like that because that person is in control and they have total consent and like power over what happens to these images

and those videos. And then they have a little momento and they can put it on their social media. We've also like we'll go up to people and be like, "Hey, we caught a really cool clip of you doing this thing. Here it is. Are you cool with us posting this? Because again, we want everybody to feel as safe as possible in this very new, very weird space. Particularly if you're not technologically inclined at all. Yeah. I I mean, I think it it gives the sales guys like a good reason to follow up, right? Hey, I have to send you your picture. Why don't you give me your email address and I'll put you on the mailing list. Yeah. Just say quickly, give me those digits. Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much. Great questions. Thank you. As far as the spectator cam, is that like are you using like a a a another object in the game space or is it as low-tech as just like five players in a four-player game and they're just walking around with the keyboard? pretty low-tech. It's a fifth player, but they're not in VR. So, it's a non-VR view. they're just on the screen. They're WASDing, flying around.

Flying around the camera. And in some of the game modes, we've just made the camera visible and that way like people can see it and wave. Like climbing and like how climbing is We shot a trailer for Jar Wars and they like quickly modded out this really clunky retro camera and like we were all like goofing for it. We're so like that's a feature, too, then, because if you've got this thing floating around and you see your players are like, "Oh, hey, now we got to do the really cool thing because the camera can see us. Woohoo!" So, it's Fortnite dances. Exactly. Uh yeah, no, that In the trailer, I do the flossing dance, but in VR with no legs, so it looks very strange. wiggling. Uh yeah, no, it's just like like that. But, um like there all of these things are like, "Oh, we have to do this thing." On the other side it was like, "Oh, this is a feature. There's a really fun interaction available there." Like, "Oh, now we can make cool little movie clips." Like Right. Yeah. Always a way to turn it around. Thanks. Thank you. Cool thing. Is that it? All right. Thanks, you all. Safe travels home.