During last week-end, along with six fellow VRGeeks, we participated in the Global Game Jam 2013 for some non-professional VR fun.

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.

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

- François Gutherz: 3D artist

Happy new year to you all !

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:

Jean Segura, french journalist and VR historian, shared his knowledge at the AFRV’s (French VR association) conference, in French only sorry!

You can find the PDF presentation here.

I have just updated my online VR introduction.

The images and videos are still copyright of their owners. I haven’t found all the copyrights so if you’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).

With the Oculus Rift which will be in the hands of game developpers before the end of the year, I think we will have a great next year

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!

[Update: a more up to date list is here: http://www.vrgeeks.org/wiki/vr-games]

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

Hey !

How are you doing ?

Long time no see ! (unless you’re following me on Twitter!)

Sorry for the lack of updates, 110% of my energy is going to my company ” i’m in VR ” and the product ” MiddleVR for Unity “.

The first version was released at Laval Virtual where it received an Award ! We had (and still have) a lot of great beta testers.

You can download MiddleVR and try it freely for 30 days !

In the meantime I went to IEEE VR 2012 in Costa Mesa and IVR in Tokyo.

Some interesting things are happening on the low-cost VR side: fellow VR Geek Palmer Luckey is about to release a DIY HMD kit, backed by John Carmack himself !

I have a feeling people are looking at VR differently now, like an accessible dream.

Or maybe it’s just me ?

During my “european tour” to beta test MiddleVR I’ve been able to experience a few new VR systems that have been recently built or upgraded:

London

- a 4 sided immersive cube in London, at the University College London :

Will Steptoe wrote an article about how and why he used a Kinect in this Cave, using MiddleVR.

Barcelona

- a 4 sided immersive cube in the University of Barcelona, in Mel Slater’s Event Lab :

Madrid

- a 5 sided immersive cube in Madrid in the CeDInt (Research Centre for Smart Buildings and Energy Efficiency) of the Politecnica University, which has the particularity of having a ceiling !

( No it’s not curved, I’m just using a fisheye lens for the iPhone )

Rennes, France

And last but not least the new immersive system of the VR4i team at the IRISA research center, named Immersia3,  HUUUUUUGE !!! 9.6m wide !! 8 projectors for the front wall, 3 for the floor, and two more for the sides soon. You can actually split it to have two immersive systems !

(the virtual rooms looks small, but remember that the perspective is only correct for the users’ eyes. So the room looks correct to him.)

All this technology is really impressive, but what I enjoyed the most was meeting the passionate people that are actually using those VR systems.

It’s not about the technology, it’s about what you do with it. My goal is that you focus on your application, not on the technology.

The tests went very smoothly, MiddleVR got great feedback and everything is looking good.

So expect the v1.0 of MiddleVR very soon !!

Oh and I’m also very happy to report that the INSA Rennes engineering school (in Rennes also) created a VR wall for their students based on the VR-Kit Wall from the VR Geeks !!

They called it the “µRV” (microRV) :

It’s looking really nice (and cheap), I’m happy to see that the VR democratization is actually helping students to learn VR !

So to conclude, a huge thank you to everyone for your warm welcome !!!

Twitting requires definitely less time than blogging

- B-Reel Eels: Mobile Projection Mapping Game – http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/b-reel-multiplayer-mobile-projection-mapping-game/
- Just tested the new Sony #HMD : quite impressed! Good fov, good picture, nice sound, a bit heavy on nose, and takes time to setup on head…
- Virtalis HCR Transforms Helicopter Training- find out how: http://www.virtalis.com/press/175/virtalis-hcr-transforms-helicopter-training.php

More after the break …

Read more…

This is a summary of Mel Slater‘s keynote at JVRC 2011, entitled “Body representation in Immersive Virtual Reality”.

M. Slater started his talk by stating that the goal of VR is that people act as if what they’re experiencing is real, even though they know it’s not. Your mind accepts the illusion. He insisted that this is not your imagination, it is really a perceptual illusion.

He briefly explained his concepts of Place Illusion and Plausibility Illusion, that are actually unified in the virtual body. The virtual body is also important in that it augments the sense of presence, and improves the estimation of size and distances in VEs (which otherwise tends to be underestimated, even though we don’t know why yet. See studies from Victoria Interrante and Betty Mohler)

Proteus effect

Normally, when you enter a virtual world, you enter it with the same personality, the same “you” (whatever that means). But studies have shown that if you have a different representation of your self, you behave differently ! In a recent study M. Bailenson showed that improving the “attractiveness” of your avatar will transfer as self-confidence in the real world.

This is called the Proteus effect : appearance can transform our behaviors towards other people.

What M. Slater is most interested in is how your appearance affects your own perception, your self-image. This is of great importance for understanding how your brain actually represents your body.

The rubber hand illusion

To try to understand how you can transfer your body in a VE, scientists have conducted several experiments. The most famous one is the rubber hand illusion:

M. Slater translated this experiment in VR, replacing the rubber hand with a virtual hand and showed that it works the same as the original experiment.

One objection against that is that the user might believe that you’re actually going to hurt his real hand, so you have no way of actually knowing if the body has really been transferred or if it’s just the fear of a real injury. They’re actually working on experiments to test this which doesn’t involve real life threat. In the meantime this can be used as a good indication and indeed not a proof of transfer.

The question is then can you transfer your whole body and not just your hand ? Also how much latency or error can be tolerated ? How close to your body does the avatar has to be ? How close to a human does it have to be ?

He showed two examples, the first putting you in a fat avatar, and the second where your arm is stretched and you accept it roughly until it’s three times as big as usual.

Avatars

Some answers were found in other experiments.  In an experiment conducted in 1998, Petkova and Ehrsson used a real mannequin as an avatar :

(oh and this one is fun too : )

An approaching experiment was conducted by M. Slater in which a user is put in an uncomfortable position, both in real life and in VR. In the VE, the user is alone in a gloomy room and hears strange sounds from the next room. People reported that they were very worried for their safety :

Here’s also how to transfer your body to the body of a young girl :

(and the corresponding article in PLoS ONE)

M. Slater noted that fear is probaby easier to trigger in VR, but that inducing happiness would be quite interesting. That’s one reason a new project called VR-Hyperspace was just created: to try to make you think your body is in a more comfortable position than it is in reality, which could have applications for plane or train travellers.

Conclusions

All these experiments show that virtual embodiment and transformation appears to be possible. It also shows that VR is an excellent tool for cognitive neuroscience, for example to understand how your brain but also that it broadens the possibilities for VR (raw from the presentation) :

- Put yourself in the shoes of the other

- Change in attitudes

- Rehearsal and preparation for events from different standpoints

- Changing how the body feels

Those are really exciting possibilities. I am mostly interested to see what could be done to create empathy; experience another person’s view of a story, his life, for example as a handicapped person. Teaching social interactions could be really beneficial: a recent experiment by Benjamin Lok’s team taught new doctors to speak with a patient, and then enabled the doctor to re-live the talk from the patient’s point of view. This is really helpful to understand the impact of every word you say and how the patient receives and lives them.

But we also have to watch out for the ethical implications of those possibilities, because it could cause even more damage than TV !

I just got my Razer Hydra, the new cheap (140$/€) magnetic trackers distributed by Razer, and created by Sixense.

Magnetic tracking was the king of tracking several years ago, with Ascension and Polhemus leading the way. Magnetic tracking was expensive and widely used.

Now it’s mostly been replaced by optical and inertial tracking (ART, Vicon, Optitrack, Wiimote, Playstation Move, Kinect…)

My first impression is that the Razer Hydra is really nice. It comes with two tracked controllers that are identical and both look like a big Wiimote Nunchuck. Both have a joystick and several buttons, which means you don’t have to buy two packs if you want to play with a friend. The controllers are ergonomically designed for adults’ hands.

The pack also allows you to download Portal2 for free. The game was adapted to use the Razer Hydra, and it was adapted quite well ! The movements are really smooth, and you can have some basic 3DUI interactions like moving a cube with a near 1:1 mapping to solve puzzles. It reminds me of Tumble for the PSMove.

The SDK is quite simple to use, appart the fact that you need to point the base with both controllers to initialize the right hemisphere tracking (a typical magnetic tracking issue). I’m sure there’s a way to hardcode this once and for all if you decide that you’ll always be on the same side of the base !

The SDK also seem to indicate that 4 players could each use two controllers ! Will it work if I buy plug more than one base ?

It seems you can tweak or disable the internal filtering, which can be interesting to do your own filtering. The jittering is present yet really minimal. Testing with a HMD will tell if it’s acceptable.

I haven’t measured it but the latency seems to be really low, see video :

(left hand moves the camera, right hand moves a cube)

The two problems with magnetic tracking are 1/ if you have metal in your surrounding it will affect the magnetic field, thus your tracking and 2/ you have wires.

The Hydra is also disturbed by metal (my desk has metal in it..)

And why, ooooohhhh whyyyyyyy so many cables ? Why any cable at all ?

It seems we’re back in the 90s ! Each controller is wired to the base, which is also wired to the computer. After all the efforts by other controllers to remove wires (or even the controller), that’s a big step backwards ! That said, there’s 2m of cable between the controllers and the base, and there 1.5m of cable between each controllers.

It seems they are able to go wireless since “The Sixense wireless dev kit supports up to four controllers per base station. The Razer Hydra supports two controllers” and “A 12′ diameter use zone provides ample room for full-body gaming (wireless dev kit)”.

So maybe in the future they will lift this limitation..

Within this range the controllers seem to perform well, but more tests would be required to know if the precision is the same if you’re further from the base. They claim a “precision to 1 mm and 1 degree” at 60 hz.

Another small drawback is that there is no vibration in the Razer Hydra, which can always be useful for some simple tactile feedback.

Ryan Pavlik has already reverse engineered the HID protocol and integrated the driver into VRPN.

Conclusion

All in all that’s certainly an improvement upon the GameTrak + Spacepoint Fusion combo, but it could have been better without those cables. The vibration feedback would also have been a nice addition.

The range, precision, latency and ergonomic controllers (and price!) are really interesting.

Time will tell if it’s really usable for cheap VR. Attaching one Hydra to an HMD will certainly look ridiculous, and I hope that there won’t be any magnetic disturbance near HMDs..

I’m happy to see more and more cheap 3d tracking, and it seems some nice cheap HMDs are also coming up (Sony’s, Vuzix VR 1200).