A few weeks ago, Devin Reimer ran a series of game tests at VR developer Owlchemy Labs. That’s when one of his developers asked him in VR if he wanted a donut. He said. However, the developer gave Reamer a donut to put in his mouth. his character ate it.
It’s a simple gesture that anyone can do in the real world with a donut anytime. But in VR, it’s this combination of simplicity and playfulness that has made Owlchemy Labs a successful brand for over 12 years. And when Reimer stepped down from his “CEOwl” post to transition to philanthropic work using climate technology to combat the ongoing global climate crisis, he replaced his colleague Andrew Aish in his new role. Leaving behind as “CEOwl” is a legacy that Reimer is deeply proud of. .
The two people I spoke to at DICE were thrilled with the leaps and bounds that Owlchemy and VR as a whole have achieved over the years. Hand tracking technology, for example, has progressed well and is a major component of Owlchemy’s multiplayer play plans. Upcoming and untitled VR gameSpecifically, they want to tackle cooperative multiplayer play rather than competitive. Especially since he believes it works much better in the VR space.
“VR multiplayer in its current state is absolutely awesome, like lying on the floor and shooting with a big sniper rifle, or throwing a ball and flying around the arena,” Eiche explained. To do. “But people haven’t conceptualized it yet. We’re playing duets on the piano, we’re writing together on whiteboards, we’re sculpting together. I am experimenting.”
allow chaos
However, the experiment comes with many technical challenges. A physical space should be believable for multiple people, not just for one person to run around in it and interact with objects. Eiche calls it a “technical nightmare, but one worth solving.”
“What makes console games great is not what makes VR games great,” he continues. “VR games tend to work best when they use a sandbox and are exploratory as a core feature, and not exploratory in their ‘going through the world of Zelda’ exploration. I am messing with the environment.”
This is where hand tracking comes into play. According to Eiche, hand tracking is a great technology for exploring interactions with the world that controllers can’t. A controller could provide a button to pick up an object, perhaps perform a single interaction with the object, and then remove it. But what the controller can’t do is what Eiche calls “affordances” or secondary interactions. Extra things one might want to do with objects in the world that may be irrelevant or silly. Like clicking a pen.
“Spraying a spray bottle, squeezing a sponge, these are all things that controllers don’t do well because the state is so binary,” he says. “Even with analog control, it never feels right. But the hand he can use tracking to do a soft pick-up and then squeeze. Eggs were great because it picks up eggs. And You’re like, “Oh, eggs.” And when you squeeze as hard as you can, it squishes and you’re like, “Yeah, I did that.”
“We used to say that the water bottle on the table is the worst. If you have a water bottle on the table and you walk through it, people are disappointed. So if you pick it up , next time I should be able to open the cap and drink.I should be able to pour.
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The pair told me that when playtesting, they would only talk to the playtesters when they were trying to do something with the object, nothing would happen, and they would look disappointed for a second. Eyche then asks them what they expected to happen at that moment and writes it down. Often these are affordances that you decide to add later.
But affordances also seem like endless rabbit holes for adding functionality. According to Eiche, the team is quite adventurous internally, often supporting developers who want to try crazy ideas that say, “Okay, this is a really bad idea, but…”. But Eiche also has a pretty strict philosophy when it comes to cutting content.
“Once you conceptualize a cut, think about it, and say, ‘I think I should cut this,’ then it’s your moral duty to make that cut. Once you’ve conceptualized it, you can solve the hardest problem. I mean, just seeing through it makes the game better… so the devs are a little bit shy to come up to me and say ‘I thought of this cut’ Because I’m immediately like, “Yes, do it now.” Please cut. But I’ve never run into a situation where someone hasn’t taken a step and the game hasn’t gotten better on the other side.We throw away 90% of the stuff. It’s nature. ”
Hand tracking isn’t the only VR tech Eiche and Reimer are excited about. Face tracking is another big one because of its level of emotional depth, as we hope to allow players to express themselves particularly cooperatively in the virtual space. And Reimer was thrilled that Sony was committed to making noise on his PSVR2 headset’s head. This was due to a very specific interaction in Job Simulator.
“There’s a blender in the kitchen. You turn it on and you stick your face in the blades, and there’s tactile sensation in the headset and in the headset, like this,” he says, holding his hand over his head and vibrating for a moment. “And it cracks me up so much.”
Eiche adds: It’s hard enough to get on your head. right? We are not going to shake their faces.
Wrong MetaVRse
One technical concept they don’t appreciate very much is the metaverse. Reimer likes the term, but says he’s screwed.
“A lot of people think of the Metaverse as a place where 10,000 people are thrown into the same place and do something together,” he says. “And I don’t think it will work.”
Eiche said: And we kind of have to take the fuck out of here.
Reimer said that even in places like large conferences, you won’t be with all 10,000 people. Find a small group of friends and spend time together. This is closer to what he thinks the ‘Metaverse’ could end up being.
“I think they always solve the wrong problem,” continues Eiche. And then I read my favorite tweet: ‘It’s easier to make pen and paper than to write Ulysses.’ And over and over again, each metaverse creates pen and paper… so every time someone talks about it they say, ‘so many users are going to be generating this content’ increase. It’s like making pen and paper all over again and hoping that some genius writer will show up and create the world you’ve always wanted out there, i.e. it’s been around for 15 years before Roblox became popular. It means that Anyone thinking of embarking on the Metaverse please see it and go, oh my god, we have a content problem, not a technical one. ”
Eiche believes VR is likely a component of the Metaverse idea. In fact, VR is already part of our online society, so it’s part of the Metaverse idea. But he doesn’t want his VR to be “boxed.”
“VR is super cool because I read a lot of Neil Stephenson books, so you can do more than you’re trying to squeeze in. And it’s super cool…but that world was a dystopia, too. Ready Player One, they lived in a stack of trailers and everyone went to an oasis to hide from reality. We’re building an oasis. And it’s like, are you building both sides of it?
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Reimer is leaving the company happy with the space Owlchemy has created in the VR market. Especially considering he started Owlchemy at a time when many were skeptical that VR would die out altogether. Now, there’s no question that VR is here to stay, and it’s up to Eiche to think about where his Owlchemy is in defining that future. He wants the VR industry to move toward Owlchemy’s vision of the VR space as an instinctive, creative playground that doesn’t rely on current ideas about what video games should be. thinking about.
Eiche explains that when a game relies on a controller, it tends to gravitate towards certain kinds of verbs in gameplay: shoot, throw, things that map easily to buttons. But with VR, we can get around all of that and perhaps remove most of the restrictions on what humans can do in virtual space. So why should the VR industry continue to make video games like the console industry? you don’t have to spend
“I think VR is a failure if it stays in Job Simulator.” [one of the top VR games] Within five years,” says Eiche. “It’s like Wii Sports, right? Is that the case?”
Reimer adds:
Rebekah Valentine is a reporter for IGN.
