Heads up, game makers: The big GDC Europe conference in Cologne, Germany is just around the corner, and today GDC officials are proud to announce another pair of great talks you'll be able to see at the August event.

You'll find both of these sessions on GDC Europe's popular Design track of talks, a perennial crowd-pleaser that explores the challenges, benefits and practice of game design.

This year we're happy to have Valve's own Yasser Malaika speaking to his fellow GDC Europe attendees about virtual reality interaction design in a talk simply titled "Interaction Design in VR: The Rules Have Changed (Again)."

Malaika plans to explore design topics explored by the VR team at Valve, as well as some explored by third-party developers using the developer edition of Valve and HTC's Vive VR headset. Attendees can also expect to learn about the idiosyncrasies of motion control in VR and other areas where traditional rules of interaction significantly change -- or no longer apply.

Also, VR-curious game makers should make time to attend SCEE senior designer John Foster's "About VR: Designing for Believability" talk. Foster has worked on a number of attention-grabbing VR demos for the PlayStation Moprheus headset, including The Deep, VR Getaway and A London Heist, and now he's coming to GDC Europe to share what he learned from those experiences.

Expect to learn more about why "presence" is so critical to VR experiences, what steps VR developers can take to ensure players have a strong sense of immersion at all times, and what new challenges come with this new frontier of game design.

As always, you can find more details on these cutting-edge talks and all other announced GDC Europe 2015 sessions over on the GDC Europe Schedule Builder.

GDC Europe 2015 will also continue to offer business and matchmaking opportunities to all attendees with a developer-focused Expo Floor area and networking events throughout the show. For more information, please visit the GDC Europe website.

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