Gadgetory

hey Ron this is steve from gamers nexus dotnet i am joined by chance ivy from Epic Games and he is the community manager on the Unreal Engine so we had an interesting topic to bring up today with virtual reality and its design challenges yeah so it's interesting you know there's a lot of focus on VR right now there's a lot of you know people pouring money and passion into it so we're seeing a lot of really great things come out around the viewer space you know with your oculus rifts it's really getting what feels like you know Klaus and it's getting routed into the mainstream and for a long time there's been arguing about if it's if it's legitimate or not I think we're actually seeing that yeah it is you know it's really we go you think it's going to stick the sea I think so I mean epic sure certainly does we're diving pretty heavily into it especially on the engine side yeah with that there's a lot of people out there making cool stuff and you know there's a tons of things you can download now that are like spaceship or cockpit simulator right because it's like natural meter sitting here in this chair right and you can imagine yourself doing something that doesn't require anything but you sitting here and what's cool about VR actually taking off and getting its legs is all of the weird design challenges that we've run into since the beginning that have made people sick that have like had to try to break the whole my head's doing this thing but my fingers are trying to be the thing that moves my person around that break a lot of that's being solved now so not everything is solved there's still a lot of you know wild west of yarn if you will but it's it's an exciting time to be a part of it and I remember I remember the first time I got simulation sickness from it and I was like I think I might be done for a bit so what about things like what aspects of traditional game design are the most heavily influenced by VR are there certain accommodations you have to make and it specifically for B or right yeah so there's a really great document written up by Nick who was the technical technical designer take the artist I guess it's kind of all over the place Nick's benedek a little bit of everything but it talks about some do's and don'ts for design it's things like stairs are not great but lifts are good and a lot of that it comes down to the fact that in VR we haven't found a way and I don't really know that there is one to accurately emulate or simulate force acceleration and actual sense of gravity that is separate like in a video game you can flip a car and I've made VR games before that are in a car and the minute you flip it it's like you know the game says gravities that way and I say gravities that way my mind's like I don't really like anything that's going on right so with that it's you know something you have to keep in mind when it comes to rotation of the head it kind of has to follow gravity always kind of has to be in the same place there are some ways around that like if you're doing a space simulator right you're flying a jet in space because you can you know suspend your disbelief just enough to know that oh I I really shouldn't feel I the weightlessness feeling should kind of be here even though still sitting and it's okay for my plane to flip upside down and and do those things but that's been one of the bigger ones that that it's been kind of a no no it's is the same as well looking for your car and your according to slam into the wall your bodies have that inertia a forward motion that comes that sudden halt as well and so that's something that'll really you know put a put somebody into a little bit of a shock state why why are stairs bad so I think a lot of that too is the fact that when you move upstairs you expect you expect your body to be doing things like that kind of have like a step step step step you know that Bob you don't want to mess with a camera in VR either you want it to kind of say the same so stairs kind of move like forward and backwards left and right move into VR feels almost natural enough because you don't have enough of that acceleration but when you have steps that are going up you can feel the the extent of gravity as you move right so imagine you're walking up stairs or a ramp anything like that walking up or down those you can feel that changes and where your body is and how gravity is affecting you in that I think the reason that the lift is different like I get into a lift you know like an elevator or something that if things move directly around you that is something that the body understands like the right right it's it's a it's very much up and down and then we've got this round this way it's when you start to mix those two things get a little weird there's probably some great science behind why that works but it's some of the information we've extrapolated from testing and seeing the things that have made us throw up on our computer so you mentioned a few design don'ts with VR like stairs yeah are there any any elements of design that are almost exclusively introduced because of ER or is there something that has a design you're drawn more toward using with VR game yeah it's interesting it's interesting thought a lot of people are looking at cockpit simulators because it's the things that it's the my head moves I'm sitting on this chair and this is this is where I normally operating game so i'm playing first-person shooters i'm putting my head into the players head right but i think there's a lot there's a lot to be discovered and found out by taking the camera out of the players head not not switching between the two that is extremely drawing but having it somewhere else in the in the game that is actually watching the player it's less about head tracking and more about the stereoscopic and feeling like you're looking over something at with that as well like people are having great success in putting outside of the game space people into places that either don't really exist don't really exist anymore or too expensive to go to write like I think there was something they just happened to coachella with Paul McCartney that you there was like the last 60 candles on stage that you could like take control of it like I'm actually there I think we're going to see a lot more of that too so I guess we'll close out here with you work on Unreal Engine of course yeah to community management there a lot of our audience are necessarily game developers by trade but if they wanted to play with it I where where should they go to learn marble engine no that's great so with Unreal Engine you know it's it's free to download for you to use and it's available at any religion com you can just sign up for a free account there download it start playing then and we have like set out of the box vr support so if the arch thing you can just pick up your DK 20 or DK one or anything that we've been working with the Crescent Bay prototypes as well and a slew of other devices as time rolls on the stream has more info of all that stuff to it but yeah it's kind of plug and play at this point and it's really great it's it takes hardly nothing to get started so always good news so check out links in the description below for more information on all this coverage and we will see you all next time right you