Staying Grounded While in the Air with VR

Game designer Theresa Duringer has a physical reaction to flying. Her heart races, her palms sweat, and sometimes she breaks out in hives. However, as a CEO of a Bay Area indie gaming studio, Temple Gates Games, travel is unavoidable. She designed a virtual reality experience that would engage her mind while in flight.

While VR is touted as a way to expose people to their phobias, Duringer is more interested in using VR as removal therapy. Duringer, who has worked in console and PC games (Spore, Sim City and the Sims), shares with us what she has learned about designing for VR.

Where did your fear of flying come from?

I used to love flying, but have had a string of bad flights from having rough turbulence to getting evacuated for a bomb scare. A fear of flying has crept up on me, and now I can’t stand flying. I know logically, it’s a safe way of transit. However, I still have a physiological reaction.

As an indie game developer, I go to conferences to learn from other developers. I still fly a lot even though it’s uncomfortable. On a flight over a holiday, I was working on a flying carpet game in a VR headset. After an hour of being in VR, my heart was not beating out of my chest and my hands weren’t sweating. I got excited that there is something there with VR. Maybe VR could help me break out of fight or flight mode by helping me forget I was on a plane.

I wanted something that would fully distract and engage me so I couldn’t focus on the fact that I was on a flight 30,000 ft above the ground. I started thinking about what would be more strategically engaging. When I’m on a plane, I’ll read a book or play a game on my phone. I’ve been thinking about the Ascension board game, which is in a fantasy forest.

After my flight, I called the people that made the board game and I told them that it would be a great game in VR. It’s a great game in general, but I knew it was a game that would demand focus in VR.

So…. does it work?

There’s two things (1) replace what you are seeing around you by seeing something completely different (2) engaging content that keeps your attention on something other than the flight. So far I’ve had mixed results. Sometimes it works, but I can’t tell if that’s just the novelty of a new solution. On some flights with bad turbulence, I still prefer to take the headset off and look at the people around me for the reassurance that others are calm. There’s space to explore whether we could benefit from local multiplayer games with other flight passengers to retain the social benefits from human connection while distracting folks from a stressful environment like a flight. I’d like to see some testing with Galvanic skin response and heart rate monitoring to see whether there could be a real improvement for people with aviophobia in VR.

This benefit of mobile VR is that you can bring it with you. It’s private and quiet so you can avoid irritating others around you.

One of the interesting things is that I hadn’t expected, when the plane tilts to the side the effect is amplified in VR, rather than dampened. When you’re in a tilting plane, you see the interior of the plane around you. The plane tilts, but you also tilt. Relative to the plane, your visual horizon lines don’t change. At the start of a VR game, it registers an absolute horizon independent of the plane. When the plane tilts in VR you no longer see an environment tilting with you, your world is dramatically angled reflecting the delta from your originally registered horizon.

I’m excited to see research against what we could do with these phenomena, both for entertainment as well as therapy.

Technically speaking, what are some of the challenges you’ve had in designing for VR content?

There are two mental shifts happening in VR: (1) Figuring out how to get the user to look where you want them to! From the calculator to TV screen, it has been very easy to direct the user. There is more space available, which can be distracting to the viewer. (2) In VR, you can ditch abstraction. In non-VR, you’d type in your user name into a box, then click a button. In VR, you can get rid of the symbols and do what you’d do in real life, such as picking up a pencil and writing out your name. But, with this new realism, people don’t have a good idea of what is expected of them in VR.

In one of my games, we asked them to nod their heads. But there is a huge range of what nodding looks like. It’s been problematic to capture the range of behavior. As a designer, I go back to putting in a form that says yes or no. In the end you need to strike a balance between novelty and familiarity for successful VR UX.

Can you tell me more about your gaming technology?

All of our games use a custom engine, we wrote in C++. This allows us to use unique tricks such as hybrid-scopic vision, where we blend monoscopic and stereoscopic geometry to maximize performance and visual effect.

Performance is a critical issue. Using our custom engine, we can optimize our games for a variety of headsets. In VR, you have an opportunity to rethink development paradigms for big wins. For example, typical games use frustum culling, which a uses a pyramid shape to determine what content to draw and what not to draw. Developers want to reduce draw calls to maximize performance. We historically use the frustum because the pyramid maps well to a rectangular screen, like those on TVs, computers, and phones.

But in VR, there are circular lenses, and we could map a better shape to these circles: cones. Conical culling is something our custom engine does to more aggressively reduce draw calls, by literally cutting the corners to make a faster game.

Are there other ways that optics affect VR development?

In VR, you have to think about stereoscopic gotchas. For example, if you present visual targets for a player at different depths, one will be doubled or blurry while the other is in focus. That can be a problem if you want to draw a cursor, which you probably do! Imagine having a cursor in your field of view in the real world. It would be something like a reticle, a pinpoint floating in space between you and the world around you. You can see the problem of this right now, even without VR with a quick experiment.

If you hold up one hand in an “OK” gesture as your reticle, and the other as your visual target, looking through the reticle hand with both eyes open, the target is doubled. Closing one eye solves the issue, like a normal monoscopic game, but in VR you have both eyes because it’s stereo.

There is a solution to focusing clearly on both reticle and target. Bring your hands together to the same depth. That’s what we do in VR. We draw the cursor at the depth of the item you’re looking at. This means that as you scan the world the cursor is moving in and out along the topography. This makes the cursor look like it’s growing and shrinking, so we dynamically scale it to give the illusion that it’s seamlessly floating along. If you do VR right, you’re solving a lot of optical issues and the player never even notices.

What do you like about designing in VR?

VR is a huge opportunity for extra-physical globalization. We can bring people together who would otherwise not have a chance to meet. It’s a personal teleportation device to grant access to places we could never have visited before. VR has a lot of promise, and it’s fun to be on the front of that, but it’s also difficult to develop for. I’m excited to keep at it and see what we can accomplish together with this new technology.

Images courtesy of Theresa Duringer