John: For a lot of people, XING was their first VR experience, with what we thought was a really awesome demo. Not to pat our own backs, but we didn’t get any negative responses. I’d say that’s a pretty good metric to show that people are at least interested in VR.

Reactions to XING minecart ride demo at GDC 2014

Your reaction re: Sony’s Project Morpheus?

John: Sony’s done a lot of experimentation with VR, well before Oculus was a company, back when Palmer was a baby. But so far they haven’t found much consumer success.

Screenshot from XING

White Lotus is interested in developing awesome VR content that is translatable to whatever VR tech is out there. We don’t care if it’s Oculus or Sony or whoever, because more players just invites more competition, more collaboration, and making more cool things.

And the 2nd gen dev kit (DK2)?

James: Have you checked out Oculus’ new video on DK2?

Official Oculus DK2 video

John: As far as positional tracking and whatnot, we can’t wait to support everything Oculus puts out. Once we get our DK2, we’ll see how it changes things and make adjustments accordingly.

What do you see next for VR? Do you think we’ll go back to the arcades?

John: I’d be excited to see that, because there are a lot of VR experiences that lend themselves to a 5 minute chunk. For example, I can imagine our mine cart demo being in the arcades. Like if you had a nickel — ok, a dollar.

I see a very natural place for large, well-designed VR units to be in an arcade, where you don’t have to worry about space. I’m just speculating, but with modern tech you could make a VR machine that could play a lot of different content, and in that sense kind of represents the old cabinet style of the 90s.

James: That said, I think Sony and Oculus are trying really hard to make it an at-home experience.

If it were in the arcade, though, it could be really cool. Valve was demoing a walkable VR experience at Steam Dev Days — we didn’t get to try it, but it was apparently really amazing. People approached a cliff and were told to jump off, and apparently half the participants didn’t because it was so disorienting and immersive. The setup for that hardware included the room: QR codes were all over the walls, and you needed the surrounding space to walk around.

I was actually talking with my dad this morning at breakfast about VR experiences outside of gaming. In education, instead of going to Egypt to see the pyramids, you could go in VR; you could even see the pyramids as they were in any era. Or Rome, or wherever.

My dad is a nuclear engineer and has to do a lot of consulting in outside countries, as far away as China, and it’s always a big deal to show a problem in 3D space. You have to take a lot of photos and make a detailed description. If you could replicate problems in VR, you could show it more directly to someone else.

What about VR movies?

John: We talked to a company at Steam Dev Days called Condition One that is doing exactly that. They made a rig — I guess they’re calling it an omnidirectional camera — to capture the scene from all angles, so with the Rift you could look in 360 degrees and see what’s happening everywhere.

Screenshot from VR Cinema

There’s also an app that’s very popular among VR devs right now — VR Cinema, like VLC for the Rift.

James: You can walk around the theatre and sit in any of the seats.

John: The screen feels like the IMAX. There’s been jokes like there should be someone kicking your seat and throwing popcorn.

Then there’s a Super Nintendo simulator for the Rift. It puts a crappy little TV in front of you, and you can play any Super Nintendo game in a virtual bedroom.

One interesting thing: they’ve been doing social experiments with VR. There was a big event earlier like a chat room in a VR setting, like a Second Life sort of situation, where you could look at other people’s avatars and chat with them via voiceover.

CDVR Meetup in VR Chat

Koriel: Someone took screenshots of this and posted it to Reddit, where half the people were walking around a meeting room with the same model.

John: PvP experiences are cool. Your opponent is right there “with you,” but could actually be anywhere. In theory, you can replicate the “couch gaming” culture — “I’m here on the couch with my buddies next to me.”

With the growth of mobile culture, do you foresee any conflict with a device that necessarily confines gamers to one spot?

John: In terms of mobile VR, I had one honestly very weird experience.

Guy comes up to our GDC booth, tells us to try this headset, it’s Android based. I put it on and it’s just like — oh cool, it’s like an Unreal 3 demo of looking around in a room. There’s no wires, no computer, just a device. It was custom built, essentially the guts of a Samsung S5. It looked to my eyes like it was hitting 60 frames/sec, and he said it was a 1080p screen. So it was like, well, cool, that works! Look ma, no wires.

I gave it back, and he was like, ok, see ya. And he leaves. There were like 15 people watching me at the booth, and none of them got to try. [NOTE: This device was GameFace. There’s an optimistic Polygon article about it.]

The lines between personal computers and mobile are blurring every day. I just don’t know what’s gonna come of that, but going mobile has some distinct advantages.

What other VR titles are y’all excited about?

Screenshot from Theme Park Studio

John: Theme Park Studio. We picture it as a VR Roller Coaster Tycoon: where you ride the roller coaster that you built yourself.

James: That dolphin game! Classroom Aquatic. You actually use the Rift as a control mechanism in this game. You’re taking a test underwater, but its in dolphin language, so you have to cheat. The goal is to peek at another student’s answers while avoiding the teacher’s gaze.

John: Like we mentioned before, Star Citizen. It’s by the same guy as Freelancer! Finally, we get Freelancer 2.

The Gallery: Six Elements is another puzzle adventure game like ours.

James: There’s an unofficial version of Pokémon for the Rift! And of course there’s a Flappy Bird.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bl-pZ41RKo

Will VR broaden or narrow the generational gap? Could grandparents be able to play with their grandchildren?

Koriel: Our parents have enjoyed it. We had other older folks come over and try it out, and they wanted to play MechWarrior, because that’s what they used to play.

John: Dunno if we’ll see grandparents playing VR Call of Duty anytime soon, though.

Any expected Frankenstein syndrome? How can people feel reluctance towards an idea as awesome as VR?

John: It’s funny you mention that. When we were at Steam Dev Days, Palmer gave a very short presentation about his experiences. Near the end of his presentation, he said, “I believe VR tech is the most important breakthrough… of our lives.”

Koriel: That’s classic Palmer. Best thing ever! Gonna change the world!

John: VR has a really bad history in terms of consumers, especially the Virtual Boy. There are a lot of reasons why that was a total disaster, not only because VR wasn’t ready. It was prior to 3D graphics, prior to screen tracking — there have been so many breakthroughs recently that push VR towards an affordable consumer price point.

I think you’re always going to get naysayers, sinking ship…, history proves…, but the pieces are in place for success.

Koriel: It’ll be a battle of the voices, between people who like it and people who get sick using it and/or think it’s dumb. Who will be the loudest? Alternatively, who has the most money?