Viveport, Snapdragon, Tango and a Talking Gull Highlight VRDC
We are currently engulfed in an incredible, powerful and absolutely overwhelming tsunami of VR.
That was the sense I had while attending last week’s Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) in San Francisco, an event packed with VR enthusiasts sporting orange hair and unicorn horns, wearing blue jeans, bangles and button-down shirts.
The spinoff of the Game Developers Conference brought hardware manufacturers and product managers, storytellers and engineers, business executives and venture capitalists together for coding tips, industry analysis and demos of the latest in virtual and augmented reality technology.
The talks at the Park Central Hotel in San Francisco on November 2 and 3 were intense and enlightening updates on perhaps the fastest-evolving medium of all time.
In a presentation on the making of “Gary the Gull,” a VR story about a talking seagull, Limitless Ltd.’s founder and CEO, Tom Sanocki, said the key to engaging audiences is to make the action natural and authentic. What people are seeing and hearing in virtual reality has to be consistent with how they engage in the actual world, he explained. “What is amazing about real life? The emotional connection with people, characters,” said Sanocki. Content creators need to carry that bond into virtual environments.
Nearly a dozen headsets were on display, but the two that captured the most attention were the Google Daydream View and a demo powered by the Qualcomm reference platform based on its Snapdragon 820 processor. The Daydream View, a fabric-covered headset that comes with a controller, starts shipping on November 10 and provides a direct challenge to the Samsung Gear VR for lightweight, look-around VR viewing on a smartphone. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon demo showed what others have just talked about: an untethered immersive headset that provides walk-around VR using eye tracking, two internal cameras and multiple sensors. The content on the headsets was simple — carnival games built to highlight the controller functionality on the Daydream View and a cartoon octopus that you could move toward and circle on the Snapdragon VR820 — but both devices presage more convenient headsets on the horizon.
Regarding consumer experiences, HTC pointed to its technical and financial support for developers eager to distribute content for the Vive as one way that it is continuing to lead this aspect of the industry. HTC’s senior vice president of VR, Rikard Steiber, talked about how the company — emboldened by the emergence of VR gathering places like Viveland, the dynamic arcade it launched in Taipei on October 29, and by the reach of its global app store, Viveport — remains dedicated to bringing affordable experiences to consumers hungry for early VR entertainment and educational content.
Morph 3D’s director of AR/VR, Chris Madsen, recalled the day he told his wife that he was quitting his job in mental health. Inspired by the promise of the Oculus DK1, he found his calling in social VR and pursued a dream to develop interconnected identities in avatars that remember your unique style across divergent experiences. We have found the ability “to teleport your soul,” Madsen said.
Erik Martin, a policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, spoke about the work that the government is doing to advance the use of VR to help solve real problems. He invited engineers and content creators who want to improve the world to apply for federal funding for meaningful projects through the Department of Education’s website.
The integration of the human body into the interface of these new experiences was also a common theme in discussions at VRDC. Unity’s head of VR and AR strategy, Tony Parisi, stressed the need to be aware of size and scale while writing code that considers human-scale form factors that do not exist in two-dimensional storytelling. Rob Jagnow, a software developer at Google Daydream Labs, reminded storytellers and developers that they operate at the delicate intersection of people’s ocular and vestibular systems, and advised them to think about their audiences’ comfort levels. Google software engineer Jared Finder, who leads development of the Unity SDK for Tango, explained the relationship between motion tracking and area capture, the core functionalities that allow the creation of augmented reality apps for Tango-enabled smartphones.
With displays taking people from the peaks of Everest to the caverns of the mind, VRDC was a jam-packed, caffeine-powered two days sprinkled with glimpses into the fast-approaching future of what HTC’s Steiber called the “new mass medium.”
