Ghostline Newsletter Waltz of the Wizard: Comparing the Room-Scale VR Platforms View this email in your browser Today's newsletter marks the public release of a new Ghostline report illustrating differences in platforms and audience for the two room-scale platforms — Steam and HTC Vive, Oculus Home and Rift. Being the first time such information is made accessible to the world, it presents highly valuable VR data that we are publicly releasing to help the broader VR development community better understand how to design for the major platforms. As mentioned by Upload VR's recent coverage of this report, the release of Ghostline insights enables creators to better shape their experiences to suit player trends. It is our goal to continue making statistics such as these available in order to help excel the development of high-quality content and support developers' abilities to understand their audience. Waltz of the Wizard: Comparing the Room-Scale VR Platforms, Steam and Oculus Home (PDF) Report Overview The industry is now faced with two major PC VR platforms leading the way in high-end consumer VR. While each of the platforms is capable of delivering 360 degree tracking and room-scale, there are some key differences, largely relating to their audience and recommended system setups for each platform.



The report is based on anonymous data from Waltz of the Wizard, collected in April 2017 from users that chose to be opted-in for our analytics collection. In total for both platforms the data represents around 20,000 gameplay sessions. For each of the two platforms we filter relevant data to measure only their respective flagship hardware. In the case of Oculus this is the Rift and Constellation tracking system, and for Steam it is HTC Vive and the Lighthouse tracking system.

The report covers a number of important VR factors and we have included a summary of interesting findings. Among the metrics we are looking at are the most common play area sizes, further segmented according the top countries for each platform. It is noteworthy that 36% of Steam players have areas larger than 6 square meters, compared to only 6% of Oculus players. Tracking loss is another focus of the report, which we have found is twice as common in Waltz of the Wizard for Oculus users compared to Steam. It is further of note that for users with 3 sensors, the tracking performance on Rift is similar to Vive (15% of Rift users have 3 sensors). Using Ghostline to further segment tracking loss into different scenes allows us to better understand how the design of content relates to tracking loss. Identifying Tracking Loss using Ghostline The tracking section of the report is not so much about measuring the quality or capabilities of VR hardware. Rather, it's about measuring the interplay of content designs with the limitations of current platforms, showcasing common VR setups to better inform content creators about their target market. Both platforms are very technically capable at this point and a good experience now largely depends on content being designed correctly. Using Ghostline for Cross-Platform Compatibility A human being's natural inclination is to move and turn naturally in any direction. This means that, until all platform holders start recommending 360 setup configurations, it is the content creators burden to design worlds that circumvent issues by discouraging users from moving as in reality. While this is an uphill battle there are measures that can be taken to minimize issues, such as organizing scenes to guide the user towards a single direction while avoiding designs that encourage physical actions like turning around. This must optimally be done in a graceful manner that avoids users noticing that they can not fully behave as in the real world, since such awareness can often break sense of presence.



Because content types and world designs vary greatly, the difficulty of avoiding platform limitations also varies and each developer must actively be on the lookout for issues particular to their own products. In this report we highlight different scenes in Waltz of the Wizard in order to illustrate how the design of a virtual world relates to tracking configurations. As can be seen in the report, different world designs can mean significant differences in tracking quality and this is one reason for why Ghostline is necessary for quality assurance. It enables detailed real-time insights into how platform limitations relate to your designs in particular, making it easier to tailor content around limitations and deliver a good user experience. Using Ghostline to Segment by Play Areas Room-scale sensor/basestation configurations alleviate the majority of design restrictions that haunt forward-facing setups, allowing users to fully move and behave as in reality. Yet room-scale, of course, still carries its own restrictions such as the size of play areas. As can be seen in the report, play areas are typically around 3.3m2 for Oculus and 5.7m2 for Steam. The play area variations between the top 3 countries that use these platforms are significant; which is particularly relevant for content being localized or tailored to a specific country. It is noteworthy that smaller play areas also appear to entail fewer physical actions, which has implications for content design. The report shows how 1.4% of HTC Vive users lay down on the floor compared to 0.7% of Rift users, and 75% of Vive users crouched by a certain table compared to 55% of Rift users. We see this same relationship when using Ghostline to examine physical actions of HTC Vive users with different play area sizes. Going Forward Development of Ghostline is ongoing and we invite subscribers to contact us for further information on Beta Program availability. We hope our early publications will provide better understanding of the current VR landscape and help the broader VR community improve design practices. Visit the Ghostline Website