Some Thoughts on Occulus Connect 2
Ken, Dan and I spent last week in LA attending Oculus’s VR developer conference to show off our new VR game Land’s End. Despite our jet lag, we managed to see some pretty exciting stuff, so I thought I’d sum up the best parts of Oculus Connect 2 as we saw it.
Gear VR
We’ve spent the last 18 months getting to grips with VR ourselves, and the product of our hard work, Land’s End, is nearly ready for release, exclusively for Samsung’s Gear VR. In the main keynote Samsung announced the new Gear VR with a price of $99. We were very happy to see Land’s End opening the list of games in the announcement, showing on a huge screen on the same stage as the Oscars are held.
We think that mobile VR isn’t getting as much love as it deserves so it was great to be able to show Land’s End to so many VR developers and get such good responses. People said “I didn’t know you could do that with mobile VR”, “best experience I’ve played in VR”, “I could stay in there for hours”.
We’re really happy to be showing how great Gear VR actually can be, and how in many ways it can actually provide a better experience than full-on desktop VR. Being able to pull devices out of our bags and show people Land’s End wherever we were — in queues, on video shoots, at the airport — was amazing, and the freedom of having no wires was an eye-opener for people used to other headsets.
Social VR is great
Oculus has built several demos to show off different aspects of their tech. In Toybox you use their Touch hand controllers to build towers of blocks, fire a slingshot at vases or juggle bouncy balls. They are great fun to use but it will take practice for them to feel natural.
The really impressive part of Toybox is not the virtual hands or the physics but the fact that you’re not alone in there. In Toybox you can see the virtual hands and head of another real human person (in this case an Oculus employee who walks you through the demo). You end up passing blocks back and forth, playing table tennis and eventually duking it out with ray guns.
Even though I knew my partner was in a different room, I kept thinking I was going to hit him by mistake as I flailed around. The sense of his presence was very real — you can tell that he is seeing the same things you are and your subconscious picks up on the subtle body language of his hands and head. It’s amazing how much the addition of non-verbal communication (gestures, pointing) and reading physical intentions adds to a shared virtual experience. We’re very excited to see how developers use this whole new communication channel.
Hand controllers are getting there
Oculus showed off a bunch of different demos for their Touch hand controllers. Oculus’ aim is to deliver ‘hand presence’ where the player begins to forget they are holding controllers and just starts to use their virtual hands naturally. Our impression was that they have great potential but they are still fiddly to use at first.
Maybe that’s why our favourite Touch demo was Epic’s Bullet Train, in which you teleport around picking up various guns and firing them in slow motion into various faceless future-soldier enemies. Incredibly childish, but also incredibly fun to pull all those poses from the movies, cocking your shotgun Arnie-style before picking bullets out of the air and throwing them back. The controllers are natural fits for pistol grips and because you didn’t have to do much other than point guns and pull triggers, we spent more time enjoying the experience and less time worrying about how to control our thumbs.
Exciting times
Overall Oculus Connect 2 felt very different to last year. We are moving away from sheer amazement at the novelty of VR and beginning to figure out what kind of applications are actually good (worth buying a device and donning a headset for) once the novelty has worn off. We met so many amazing people at the conference, it’s incredible to see such a concentration of talent, dedication and excitement all in one place.
VR is really hard to get right, and developers are mostly still blindly groping around for what will seem obvious with hindsight, but we think visions of the future are starting to shine through. The next year is going to be very interesting!
Peter Pashley, Technical Director at ustwo games
