Joel Green is a producer and audio director at Cloudhead Games working on the The Gallery: Six Elements adventure game. He talks about the process of being invited to a secret meeting at Valve to experience the HTC Vive for the first time, and then going home with a development kit to create room-scale VR experiences.

Cloudhead Games has been working on consumer VR for a long, long time, and they’ve tried out a number of different hardware solutions. They see that the HTC Valve have really solved the input and tracking problems for the first time in a viable way. Up to this point, it’s been a lot of incremental progress and half-steps, but Joel says that Valve has really nailed this solution and it will take VR to another level of immersion and presence.

Joel talks about the process of collaborating with the other development shops who were invited by Valve to develop a demo for GDC. They were going through the process of debugging the hardware and software together because Valve was still developing the underlying SDK as they were already building experiences. There was a private forum that the developers used in order to share their lessons learned for developing a room-scale VR experience.

Joel also says that Cloudhead Games intends on still supporting as many different VR experiences as they can since they know that not everyone is going to be able to experience the full room-scale VR experience. He talks a bit about the Lighthouse tracking solution, and what’s involved with setting it up. And finally, he says that room-scale VR and this new tracking solution from Valve has the potential to bring in a lot more physical interactions into VR and that he’s excited to continue to experiment and develop more experiences that explore the realm of what’s possible.

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

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