As Wikipedia says:

Go is played on a grid of black lines (usually 19×19). Game pieces, called stones, are played on the line intersections. (…) As of mid-2008, there were well over 40 million Go players worldwide, the overwhelming majority of them living in East Asia.

Anyway, this year we decided to create a VR realtime strategy game – I named that VRTS – like Starcraft or R.U.S.E.
It is a networked game so you can play against a friend!

Believe it or not,  everything including 3D models, textures, sounds and music were created in 48h!

Here is the result:

We had of course a lot more ideas to go deeper and add some surprises, but we only got 48h!
It’s already a miracle we managed to finish a networked VR game with this level of quality in such a short time

It was carefully designed so that it could be used:
– with most good HMDs (Oculus Rift DK2, Playstation’s Morpheus, maybe Samsung’s GearVR with rendering optimizations),
– with any interaction device: wands like Razer Hydra, Sixense Stem, but also with “bare” hands with a glove, Leap Motion or a Kinect.

It would also work on Technical Illusion’s CastAR or Microsoft’s HoloLens.

Depending on time and interest we may release a playable version, so let me know!

And of course thanks to our amazing team:

3D Artists: Xavier Renou, Guillaume Bertinet, Charles Kaing

Sound designers: Florian Costes, Clément Anelli

VR coders: Xavier Le Coroller, Christophe Gouet, Sébastien ‘Cb†Kuntz

If you want to checkout the games I previously worked on during a GGJ:
– VR Lemmings
– VR Lux
– InSnaketion
– VR Escape

We had great fun doing it and it seems people also enjoyed it

You can download the demo here.

If you have any issue with the demo, my e-mail is written in the top-left corner of the blog!

A huge thanks to the great team:

Thomas Klein         – Game desin
Judith Guez          – Game design / VR
Pauline Gosselin     – GFX 3D
Sarah Menager        – GFX 3D
Florian Costes       – Sound design

Introduction: presence

Through my career I have tested many different VR systems, from entry level to high-end, with systems costing several million euros. I have developed a feeling of what VR represents for me. This feeling of being present in the virtual world is very strong. I have already defined “presence” at length in this article. To summarize, you have cognitive immersion (like in video games, stories, books..) and perceptive immersion (fooling the senses), which is the part that makes VR distinctive.

For me, there seem to be two options:
– your brain thinks the simulation is a regular video game with just a fancy display (3D and/or 360). You will not feel very involved with the simulation. This is not VR, even if you have a very expensive system.
– your brain accepts this simulation as reality and will react as such: natural reactions, natural interactions, natural emotions. You will have fear of heights, you will try to catch an object thrown at you, you will fear for your life! You feel present. This is VR, even if the system is cheap.

A perfect VR experience should make you feel present for the whole time. Recreating a reality that can fool your brain is hard to achieve, so VR game designers should at least try to minimise the breaks in presence.
What makes you feel present and what breaks it is still a big research topic. As we are working with the human brain this feeling of presence is also highly personal. People who have never tried VR can be overwhelmed quite easily. The same happened a century ago: one of the first movies was showing a train entering a train station and people in the cinema ran away thinking this was really happening.

Current VR games

The Oculus Rift is the first low-cost VR system to provide this presence feeling “easily”. I have been lucky to test it before the famous Kickstarter, back when it was all duct taped and presented in a shoe box. I tested Doom 3: the immersion was great, but I got sick really quickly. Even before that, I didnâ€t really feel present in the game. Neither did I feel present in Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life 2. My brain did not accept the simulation as reality. I felt like having a 360° view, but not that I was actually there. In particular the interactions were quite poor and non “natural”: sitting in a chair, interacting with a keyboard/mouse/gamepad, moving at high speed does not feel natural. Those games are perfect for desktop PC (I spend a lot of time in those), they are not perfect for VR in their current form. The content was not designed to maximise presence, which should be the first goal of any VR application. Without presence, I wouldn’t call it VR.

I have tested several of the new VR games and experiences recently released and havenâ€t felt present in much of them. My “presence barrier” has unfortunately been pushed far.

The notable exceptions are the ones where you are in a vehicle: Titans of Space, the UDK Roller Coaster, etc. The reason they work well is because there are no interactions: you are seated in the simulation as you are seated in real life, and the interaction is limited to (automatic) navigation. It is easier to deliver what your brain expects. Hawken and EVE: Valkyrie will probably also work because you are in vehicles, whether it is a robot or a spaceship.

The case of “The Gallery: Six Elements”

There are very few experiences where you are interacting naturally with your environment. The Gallery: Six Elements / exploration school preview is a very encouraging and ambitious experiment: I felt present at several points, but unfortunately not for the whole experience. The Gallery was successfully funded by Kickstarter. “Influenced by the Myst series, The Gallery: Six Elements is a transcendental adventure with a heavy emphasis on environmental immersion, exploration & path-finding, physical challenges, puzzle solving, and emotional depth. (…) [it] is being designed from the ground up to immerse players as deeply into the experience as possible. No cut scenes, no 3rd person, no unnatural interruptions to the game experience.”

I would like to take some time to discuss some interactions in the game, because it is exactly the kind of game I want to see in VR. There are a lot of things to learn from it already. You can purchase the pre-order directly here (which gives you access to Alpha, Beta and Release content). I also encourage you to greenlight the project on Steam here.
I have been lucky to talk to Denny Unger about some of the points I want to highlight. Denny is the president and creative director from Cloudhead Games, editors of The Gallery.  I have included some of his answers.

Denny Unger, creative director at Cloudhead Games

The good

• Great graphics! Really great to see that pushed forward even though it is not necessary for a good VR experience. Denny’s answer: “We just brought on talent from Blizzard to further polish our assets!”
• Seeing your body and hands is totally awesome. Seeing the shadows is definitely great and important for consistency.
• Help and menu on a tablet: really great. It gives a real-life analogy rather than floating GUIs.
• Objects behave in a coherent physical way: they fall, they break. This is how you expect physics to happen in real life. Even if itâ€s not perfect, it is very acceptable.
• The sound is also great and really important: it really adds to the immersion and coherence between what you see and what your brain expects. Dennyâ€s answer: “Sound design is hugely important to a solid VR experience. We were lucky enough to recently bring on Joel Green from Bioware (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) to really push the limits there. Should be interesting!”
• All small experiments are really cool: paintball, graffiti. Especially the climbing part is awesome and feels very natural (even for me practicing real life mountain climbing). The only issue is that you quickly reach the tracking limits of the Hydra.

The less good

• Rotations are too fast. I was reall really close to throw up (Iâ€m very sensitive). Dennyâ€s answer: “Rotation speed is something we played with quite a bit. If rotational translation is too slow it makes people sick, too fast it makes people sick. So you have to find this balance in the middle and it doesn’t work for everyone. Its really something you have to acclimate to.” I still think having an option to change the sensitivity would help.
• Lots of objects that are in the game are supposed to be interactive in real life: drawers, switches, … but you canâ€t interact with them in the game. This is very frustrating and definitely breaks presence. Those objects should either be removed or there should be an an excuse so that it is obvious they canâ€t be interactive, or there could simply be dummy interactions (like flipping the switch with no effect). Dennyâ€s answer: “Absolutely. It was more of an issue of running out of time before launching the Alpha. We plan on being more diligent with interactions.”
• I found it strange that the hand collision makes the body move back. This is particularly problematic when you are trying to reach an object on a table for example. If you are not careful it is impossible to reach it. It would be better to constrain the movement of the hand. This would also provide some “pseudo haptics”, touch feedback through vision. Dennyâ€s answer: “We actually tried it both ways. This is a tricky one to explain but it has to do with the interactions between IK, Mechanim, Unity physics and our unique implementations for climbing and other behaviors. When we tried hand constraints Unity gave us massive issues that we could not overcome at the time. That being said, I’ve never been a fan of the current implementation. We’ll be digging deeper into that one for sure.“

• Because of this it is extremely hard and frustrating to grab objects. Most of the time you touch the surface beneath before, which makes your body go back. Also you tend to make objects fall. This also definitely breaks presence. Dennyâ€s answer: “Positional tracking is going to help us immensely on that front. Once that is in play, leaning in for object grabs suddenly becomes a non-issue.”
• Highlight of objects: Iâ€m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. This is not realistic, and in light of previous points I would say everything that seem interactive should be, so no highlight should be needed. But this does not seem critical. Dennyâ€s answer: “We plan on making this an optional feature for beginners. We haven’t yet implemented our complete menu settings. I agree though, its not an option I would personally select for my particular play style. I want full immersion wherever possible!”
• I would like to see the use of buttons limited to its absolute minimum. Dennyâ€s answer: “Hopefully we can limit the number of button interactions once we have STEM to work with. That being said because the game is also playable without an HMD and with gamepad/Keyboard compatibility, you have to build in conventional button options.” Maybe using the menu from the virtual tablet could help reduce that, or using gestures ?
• The reflection in the mirror is missing. This is a minor issue but it still breaks presence. Dennyâ€s answer: “Agreed. Again, Unity gave us some issues with occlusion culling on the mirror that we couldn’t fix prior to the Alpha deadline. You can however see your reflection in the water in the sewer.”

• It is hard to read text on the tablet with a non-HD Rift. Dennyâ€s answer: “We made the fonts as large as possible for readability on DevKit 1 while still giving us a pleasing interface. We brought it as close to the player as we could to help with reading. We are limited by DK1’s low resolution but, at the end of the day, this is a commercial game being designed for the commercial Oculus with a much higher resolution.”

This is still the most promising experience Iâ€ve seen so far, and a several of those points can be easily addressed. A big thanks to Denny for taking the time to answer!

Conclusion: presence is in the details

Adding interactions in VR is hard because it is very easy to do something “wrong”, resulting in breaks in presence. Creating a realistic environment is even harder because your brain knows exactly how physics, sounds, shadows, interactions etc. are supposed to behave. If they don’t behave in a coherent way, you will be reminded that this is “just” a simulation, and not a possible reality.

As we are still in the prehistory of VR, I would advise starting with simpler environments. Recreating a whole new reality is a long task, and presence is in the details. If you create a complex and rich environment, you will have more chances of introducing inconsistencies.

Finally keep in mind that the simulation does not have to be realistic as long as it is consistent. A cartoon has its own unnatural rules, but you still accept them because they are consistent.

It is probably time to watch “Who framed Roger Rabbit” again!

When I was on a field trip to London back in high school, I played my first virtual reality (VR) game: Zone Hunter. I was immediately hooked and I knew I wanted to work in VR! I started my VR career more than 12 years ago working on industrial VR training applications and VR software tools.

I am now the founder and president of a company called “i’m in VR“. We offer tools to simplify the creation of VR applications such as MiddleVR, a VR middleware that enables 3D applications (like Unity) to run on any VR system (HMD, caves etc.). I’ve been blogging about VR long before it was cool, and you can also find me on twitter (@Cb_VRGeek)

Now, you may think creating VR applications is easy: simply add camera rotations using the Oculus Rift tracker and you’re done. This can work for some applications, but it will fail for the vast majority of them.

VR is all about presence in a virtual world. If you can’t keep your player immersed into it, you’re not doing it right. You can trick your brain into thinking it is in another reality, but this is more difficult than it sounds. This feeling of presence is very fragile.

Articles dealing with VR often adopt a too technical approach. I think VR is first about what’s happening in the user’s mind. In this article I am going to focus on some fundamental points about this presence in another world and why it is important to design your application for this goal.

VR in 2013

Virtual reality allows you to immerse people in a 3D environment, with head-mounted displays (HMDs or VR goggles), or other immersive systems. That’s why we often call it immersive VR (iVR) — to differentiate it from virtual worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft. VR was hyped in the early ’90s, but failed to deliver the experience the public expected.

However, it continued to evolve on the serious games side, to a point where it is now an essential tool for several markets:

• Training in VR can be much more efficient than in real life: you can control the training environment very precisely, view replays, and actually safely practice real gestures in many different, potentially dangerous, scenarios. This is used for training surgeons, soldiers, policemen, firefighters, dentists and even workers applying coatings on houses! This allows companies to save expensive materials while delivering better feedback about gestures.

• All major car manufacturers have their VR systems where they can test designs and ergonomics of products that don’t yet exist, and iterate very quickly compared to a physical mock-up. This is now also applied for planes, boats, tractors, production lines, factories, and even kitchens! See the VR applications and systems from Peugeot or Ford.

• Communicating around a digital mock-up is very natural: you can get immersed in your future building, or live urban planning years before modifications. See this Enodo demo reel.

• It is also a great tool for market research for the retail industry: you get a real feeling of your shop before it is built or rearranged. You can track all the customer’s movements and record where they look. This is useful to test the layout of furniture or make sure that the design of your product is visible among other products.

• Treating phobias in VR is an efficient method: if you’re subject to a fear of heights, we can create a virtual cliff and you will actually experience your phobia. Then a real therapist can help you dealing with it more efficiently than going to a real cliff. The same applies for fear of taking the plane, fear of spiders, dogs, and speaking in public for example. See the Cyberpsychology lab from Stéphane Bouchard.

And, of course, VR can be used for games! But since the mid-’90s, very few games have been created with this technology; most were developed at research labs or by enthusiasts. Doing so required the skills and hardware to assemble a VR system and program the game themselves. To my knowledge, no commercial VR game has been created in the past 10 years.

Here’s an on-going list of pre-Oculus VR games. But now, thanks to the arrival of the Oculus Rift, everyday is Christmas! We’re just starting to see new VR games and experiences (like the virtual guillotine).

Why (Not) Create a VR Game?

The first question to ask is whether your game would be relevant in VR. It’s like with 3D. Not everything is interesting in 3D, and if it is not appropriate it can get worse in VR!

So why go VR?

The objective of VR is that you feel like you’re present in another reality, whether it is realistic or not. For me, presence is the definition of VR. Without presence, there is no VR!

Obvious game genres that would be great in VR are all the first-person games, like first-person shooters. Imagine Mirror’s edge or Call of Duty as VR games! Some third person games like Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, or Gears of War could potentially be converted to first-person, so we can actually be the hero. Of course, I’m sure we will see a revival of puzzle and exploration games. We will also probably see very different VR games in the future: God games? Guitar Hero?

But I think the games that will benefit the most from VR are those that try to generate emotions in the player.

Survival horror games would be extremely intense. Also take Heavy Rain, for instance. The game is great; I felt really present, and I experienced a lot of emotions while playing it. However, the game was sometimes ruined by non-natural interaction, and lacked half the presence — the physical presence. And this is where VR can help!

VR as a New Medium

I should say a word of warning here before continuing: adapting existing games to VR is difficult if they weren’t designed for this from the outset. VR is like radio or TV at their beginnings: radio was only used to broadcast opera, and TV was only used to broadcast theatre plays. Slowly, people started to create content specifically tailored for these new media. Camera movement, zoom, and cuts created a new grammar for film, for instance.

The same will happen with VR! At first, there will be a lot of adaptations of existing games that don’t take full advantage of presence, and might even damage the field: adding VR will only marginally improve immersion, thanks to the display, but awkward controls and gameplay unsuited to VR could potentially make the experience poorer than it originally was.

I’m happy to see that a lot of indie developers are creating new games with VR in mind from the beginning, which is the right way to do it. And why wouldn’t they? VR is the ultimate experience! Those of us with experience we will happily provide feedback for your game, so don’t hesitate to contact me.

Presence

As I said, presence is, for me, what defines VR. Without this feeling of actually being somewhere else, your system is just an interactive 3D system, not a true VR system — even if it costs millions of dollars. Trust me, I’ve tested a few of those, and it’s a tragedy.

Once you get presence, your player will experience natural reactions and emotions: if you’re on top of a high cliff, you will experience the fear of heights (guaranteed). If a virtual ball is thrown at you, you will try to catch it. If an avatar saves you from certain death, you might actually smile at him. True story!

Presence is a complex and subtle topic. Mel Slater is one of the scientists conducting some of the most interesting research on presence. In a well-known article, he splits presence in two: cognitive (mind) and perceptive (senses).

Most people report presence when playing a game, watching a movie, reading a book, or just hearing a story (the roots of VR!). This is actually cognitive presence — where their mind takes them to another world.

Perceptive Presence

All of these experiences lack perceptive presence, which is in fact fooling your senses in a realistic way. Vision, but also sound, touch, smell, proprioception… Keep in mind that humans are not able to perceive the world perfectly: the human brain makes all sorts of simplifications. Knowing the limits of human perception, which is a fundamental part of understanding VR, allows you to create perceptive illusions, such as redirected walking or impossible spaces.

So how do you achieve that?

For me, the most basic way of creating perceptive presence is by using head tracking. Moving your head and, as a result of this movement, seeing the world from a different viewpoint, is the basis for the action/perception loop.

So you need to be able to move, and those moves must have an effect on the virtual world. Your body is engaged: as Antonio Damasio says, “the mind is embodied, not just embrained.”

Breaks in Presence

This also means that if, as a result of your actions, you’re not getting the result that you’re expecting your brain will know something is wrong. This is called a “break in presence” (BIP).

If you have only one goal when creating a VR game, it would be to create and maintain presence. Feeling present in an empty room is VR. Not feeling present in Gears of War is not VR.

Minimal VR system

My recommendation would be to support head tracking (rotations + translations), tracking of at least one hand (rotations + translations), and a joystick with a couple of buttons. From my personal experience, when you have this minimum setup, you cross a threshold, and your brain much more easily accepts this other reality.

This means that, for me, the Oculus Rift by itself is not (yet) a minimum VR platform. It’s missing head position tracking and doesn’t provide any kind of hand tracking. I know you can easily add it yourself with devices such as the Razer Hydra or others. But unless we have a complete VR platform, game developers can’t rely on the fact that players all have the same standard hardware.

Latency

The first enemy of VR is latency. If you move your head in the real world and the resulting image takes one second to appear, your brain will not accept that this image is related to the head movement. Moreover as a result, you will probably get sick. John Carmack reports that “something magical happens when your lag is less than 20 milliseconds: the world looks stable!”

Some researchers even advise a 4ms end-to-end latency from the moment you act to the moment the resulting image is displayed. To give you an idea of what this means, when your game runs at 60 frames per second it’s 16ms from one frame to another. Add to that the latency of your input device, which can range from a few milliseconds to more than 100ms with the Kinect, and the latency of the display, which also ranges from a few milliseconds to more than 50ms for some consumer HMDs.

And if you want to run your game in stereoscopy, keep in mind that the game needs to compute the left and right images for each frame. As a game developer, you can’t do much for the input and display latency, but you have to make sure that your game runs fast!

For more information about latency, I recommend these great articles by Michael Abrash and John Carmack (my personal heroes): “Latency, the sine qua non of AR and VR” and “Latency mitigation strategies.”

A Coherent World, Not Necessarily a Realistic One

We have seen that perceptive presence requires you to fool your senses in the most realistic way. Cognitive presence — fooling the mind, not the senses — results from a sense that your actions have effects on the virtual environment, and that these events are credible. This means that you must believe in the “rules” of the simulation. For this, you must make sure that your world is coherent, not necessarily realistic. If a player can grab a particular glass, for example, but can’t grab another one, it will break presence because the rules are not consistent. Once cognitive presence is broken, it’s very difficult to “fix” it. The player is constantly reminded that the simulation is not real, and it will take some time to accept it again as reality.

If you’re targeting a visually realistic environment, it is more likely to generate breaks in presence. This is because your brain will expect many things that we are not yet able to achieve technically: perfect physics, sound, force feedback so that your hand doesn’t penetrate an object, objects breaking in pieces, smell, etc. Having a non-realistic environment will lower your expectations that everything should be perfect, resulting in a more consistent presence feeling.

If you manage to achieve cognitive presence,  and fool the mind of your player, the events from the simulation will affect his sensations. If an attractive character looks at a shy guy into the eyes, his heart rate might increase, he will blush, etc. People with a fear of public speaking will react with anxiety if speaking to a virtual audience.

This is why the application I still find the most immersive is “Verdun 1916-Time Machine.” It fools many senses at a time: vision, smell, touch… But the most important point is that, by design of the “experience,” the interactions are extremely simple: you can only rotate your head, because you’re a wounded soldier.

Given that extreme limitation, it’s extremely simple to keep the player from experiencing a break in presence. You can’t move your hand, so it cannot penetrate objects; you aren’t forced to navigate with an unnatural joystick. It has been reported several times that some people smiled at another virtual soldier that came to save the player in the simulation!

Measure Presence

The problem is that it’s very difficult to concretely measure whether a player feels present in the world. There are currently no absolute indicators for that. You can measure the heart rate or skin conductance if you want to evaluate anxiety. But this is only relevant for stressful simulations.

What you can try to evaluate though is if the player is responding naturally. We already mentioned a few natural reactions: trying to catch a ball, fear of heights near a cliff, fear for your virtual body if somebody is trying to hurt you, trying to avoid collisions…

Tips for VR Games

Enough with the philosophical considerations, for now. Here are a few practical tips:

Scale 1. The scale of the world has to be realistic. You should feel like you are the right height (unless you want your player to be a child, as in Among the Sleep). Head movements should not be amplified (unless you’re using redirecting techniques).

The easiest way to achieve Scale 1 is to make sure that 1 world unit is 1 meter. The field of view should exactly match the field of view of your HMD. In an ideal world (or big industrial VR system) the distance between your two eyes should also be correctly measured and used. Your brain picks up all these cues; you might not be able to create or maintain presence — and even make people feel sick! — if you don’t strictly follow this rule.

Know your hardware. Know the range of tracking: Can my hardware track translations, or only rotations? If the tracker also reports positions, up until what distance? What’s its precision? When does the tracking data stop being usable? Know the field of view: As you are supposed to follow the “Scale 1” rule, you shouldn’t distort the virtual field. If the field of view is narrow, the user will have to move her head much more to see around than with a bigger field of view, and might miss some important action in the periphery. Know the resolution: if you want the user to read information, she will have to come much closer with a low-resolution display than with a high-resolution display. As with Android development, your game might end up running on different hardware. We will soon have a HMD war with lots of HMDs, each with different characteristics. Using tools like MiddleVR will help you work with many different VR systems.

Have a consistent viewpoint. If your game is a first person game, avoid playing cinematics or making the player drive a vehicle from a third person view. It breaks immersion.

Break habits. Longtime video game players have bad habits: when they wear an HMD they will stand still, as if they’re seated in front of a TV. Those who are less experienced with games people will naturally look around. Gamers need to unlearn the constraints of current games. In a tutorial, you should force the user to look around and move his hands. Your game should also take advantage of those new possibilities. For example, in a recent game prototype I worked on, we had enemies appearing to the right, left and above the player; there is no joystick/mouse to navigate and look around. It forces the user to look around and aim with his hand to get all the enemies. In another game prototype I worked on, the only interactive object is a candle in a very dark environment. This was a great way to force the player to explore: he naturally took the candle, and used it to explore the dark environment, pushed some objects, and burned others to solve the puzzles.

Try to keep the player active. In Heavy Rain, for example, you’re almost always playing. There are numerous cutscenes that look like videos, but suddenly you’ll have to perform an action. If you don’t have the game controller in your hands at this moment, you’ll fail the action. This forces you to always be alert and ready.

Another very interesting feature of Heavy Rain is that the game happens in real-time, which means you sometimes have to take decisions and act fast: do I have to shoot this guy before he kills my partner? You’re forced to act quickly — and as in real life, once you make a decision, you’ll never know if it was right or not.

Create realistic puzzles. Still another example from Heavy Rain: You’re in a rush and have to phone a room in a motel. Can you remember, in less than 15 seconds, the room number? Just as in real life, you have to dig it from your memory while experiencing a lot of stress.

Finally, work hard on presence. Presence is not easy to build. Start light, test often. Build presence slowly, make small additions, test again. The experience is what happens in the user’s brain! Your simulation enables the experience: it is not the experience! Presence should be natural. Observe the reactions and modify the game. Don’t throw in every possible gimmick just because it will make a cool video. A lot cool videos really end up being terrible experiences.

Conclusion

There is of course a lot more to be said about developing a VR application, but I hope this article got your attention on some fundamental points. I leave you with this quote that I hope you will apply:

“Our approach is to treat virtual reality as something quite new with its own unique conventions and possibilities that provide a media where people respond with their whole bodies, treating what they perceive as real.” – Mel Slater

While the four other VRGeeks created two other teams, I teamed with Judith Guez to work on an idea that was in my head for quite some time: create an efficient escape room in VR. The theme this year was the sound of a heart beat. We decided to use a candle as a metaphore for the heart beat. (But the focus changed a bit during the jam.)

We were quickly joined by two 3D artists, one sound designer and one coder who were intrigued by VR. They turned out to be a really great team to work with!!

I already participated in 2011 and 2012, resulting in VREscape and InSnaketion. All three games were created exlusively in 48h.

VR Escape was too complex for most “normal” (non-VR) people to handle: they were not acustomed to VR, and the lack of haptics feedback was disturbing: your virtual hand could go through the walls or tables, so you had to be precise (thus slow) with your movements.

Thus the core of the idea for VRLux is to minimize breaks in presence, and make sure anyone can play with it.

“Like a candle in the wind”

To make sure the game was easily accessible, we simplified the interactions: your only input device is.. a real candle. You can only move it around to interact with the game.

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We brainstormed about what are the interaction possibilities of a candle. It turns out there are plenty!

The first one is of course to shed some light, which allows you to explore.

Having a very dark environment was a great way to force the player to explore. Most people sat and asked “What do I do now?”. And we just answered “Find out by yourself!”. And they did ! They interacted naturally by taking the candle, and as the environment was pitch black, they used the candle to explore.

Exploration alone turned out to be a great experience.

Then you can burn or heat, which enables interesting gameplays that I won’t disclose here in case you play the game

Another obvious possibility is that you can push objects: push them to another position, or simply push a button for example.

There are of course others, but we may integrate them later

This means that a lot of interactions are possible without any kind of button or joystick involved. A bit like the great experiment dontclick.it

The best thing is that a you already know what to do with a candle, there is nothing to learn!

This is one of the strengths of VR: as it can simulate reality, you don’t have to learn any interface, you already know what to do! Natural affordances.

SPOILER: Full game:

Breaks in presence

Minimizing breaks in presence means that you should continually feel present in the game. Breaks in presence occur when your brain detects an anomaly in the virtual reality: latency, your hand passing through a table, strange laws of physics.

We paid a lot of attention to details: the behavior of flame of the candle, the light, the shadows, the realism of the interactions with the objects (trying to avoid passing through them when pushing)

(As you can see, we used the cheap Razer Hydra magnetic trackers to track the candle position and orientation in the game volume).

Based on ideas from Judith, we also made sure that when the virtual candle touches the virtual table, the real candle touches the real table! Free haptics!

At one point you also have to push a button in a box. So we put a real box with the same size and position as the virtual one, so everytime the candle touches the virtual box, you can feel it and it doesn’t go through.

We didn’t need to add real walls or ceiling: it seems most people didn’t try to go this far; moreover they were nearly out of arms reach. We also made sure the tracking was reliable in the whole game volume.

Atmosphere

I had this idea of a dark environment for a long time, and really enjoy the game genre of escape rooms, so I really loved the iPad game “The Room“. It is beautifully crafted and the difficulty is perfectly adjusted. Its atmosphere is also great, so this was definitely an inspiration for VRLux, both in terms of graphics and sound design.

Real game ?

When looking for team members, I was suprised to hear comments like: “We won’t join your team because we want to do real games”, or “Your games are interesting only because of the nice hardware”.

I hope we are and will prove all of them wrong

And based on the feedback we had from (already) a lot of people, I think we’re on the right track. Everybody, including non-players, were immediately at ease.

What do you think ?

A million thanks to the great team:

– Judith Guez: VR/Game Designer

– Florian Reneau: Game Designer/Coder

– Florian Costes: Sound Designer

– Charles Kaing: 3D artist

РFran̤ois Gutherz: 3D artist

Last december I have been invited by Wolfgang Stuerzlinger to give a keynote at the “VR software and technology” conference in Toronto, Canada.

After a lot of thinking, I decided to talk about the general theme of how to improve the VR experience, from the authors to the users.

It talks about the current trends in system design (high-end vs low-cost), MiddleVR, and how our understanding of human perception can improve the user’s experience.

Here are the slides:

You can find the PDF presentation here.

The images and videos are still copyright of their owners. I havenâ€t found all the copyrights so if youâ€re an owner please contact me before suing me !

Of course if you live in an exotic country, you definitely should invite me to give this introductory course, there is a lot more that is being said on stage

You are free to use it or parts of it provided that you follow the rules of this Creative Commons license (Attribution)

You are free:

– to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
– to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

So I thought I’d find videos of some of the VR games I’ve played. It would probably be worth making a list of all existing VR games, so if you have links for them, I’ll take that and make a page on the VRGeeks website!

In my definition of a VR game you at least need to have head tracking, so this rules out any Nintendo’s Virtual Boy or Sega VR games.

What got me into the field was ZoneHunter. Being able to shoot around and look in a different direction was a founding experience of the teenage me.

Then Atrium Experience was also a great experience:

Of course all the VRGeeks games:

I didn’t play this one but it seems fun:

I don’t mean no shameless plug, but VR Angry Bot is quite nice:

And finally Doom3 that I tested last week in the Oculus Rift:

Then you also have Cave Unreal Tournament, CaveQ3, Panoramic Quake III, … There is also a nice list on the VRTifacts website but it’s not working for me..

Please add ideas