Getting beyond our comfort zone with Oculus Rift development

What a phenomenal time it’s been these past few months since the Rift dev kit arrived at our door. We’ve built all kinds of fun projects, with the best yet to come. We’ve been overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of interest in non-game applications.

However, in our own pursuit of growing commercial business around this new technology, I’m growing increasingly concerned that we’re not leaving ourselves enough time to dream. I fear we risk losing sight of an even bigger opportunity to push ourselves out of our comfort zone, toward discovering new, unprecedented, and innovative applications that push the boundaries of what virtual reality can be. I wonder if other developers are experiencing the same?

Obviously, these are early days.. the consumer Rift hasn’t even been released yet. We have all the time in the world, right? I’m not so sure. We’re setting the stage, and laying the all-important groundwork for how we will approach the coming VR revolution. Now is a perfect time to step back and take a critical eye toward what we intend to do with this exciting momentum.

Hardware development progress is moving faster than any of us imagined, yet the fact remains.. we have primarily seen so many twists on existing concepts in Rift development. It’s a first-person shooter but now it’s in VR. It’s architectural visualization, but now it’s in VR. It’s medical simulation, but now it’s in VR. It’s Pong, in VR . We’re watching the same movies, or looking at panoramic images.. but in VR.

That’s fantastic, and these are obvious and natural first steps in early development with lot of the best stuff being built on existing concepts. I’m amazed by many of the latest Rift builds emerging in these early days, and see a lot of exciting games that are being repackaged into VR. There’s huge demand for it, and a lot of easy money to be made in these pursuits.

However, these are so many shifts in existing typologies being repurposed for VR. I’m definitely going to keep building new Rift experiences within this familiar territory, but at the same time I want to be sure we leave enough room to expand beyond it. Even within adaptive Rift applications like architectural visualization, for example, there are almost certainly ways we can completely re-think that offering within the context of this new VR technology. Similar to the way the advent of multi-user, virtual worlds with user-generated content enabled experimentation with totally new collaboration methodologies (Studio Wikitecture being a perfect example), perhaps the step into holistic virtual reality visualization will allow break-through ways of approaching professional practice.

There are certainly quite a few paradigm-shifting ideas out there, and they’re the ones inspiring me the most. I’m a lot more interested in experiencing and hopefully discovering those kinds of Rift applications that build on the native capacity of VR technology that can only be done in VR rather than working exclusively with the goal of cloning existing typologies.

How do we get there? I have no idea. But that doesn’t quell this nagging sense I have that the best stuff for VR hasn’t been thought of yet. Here are a couple of things that might help instigate development toward this end.

Out of our comfort zone

The new concepts I’m pining for will almost certainly emerge organically, over time, without my prying for it. But I still think it’s worth openly challenging ourselves to step it up a notch, and step back from focusing exclusively on the lure of bill-paying gigs to step outside of our comfort zone, and challenge the norm. Bigger opportunities lie there, imho, in the things we haven’t thought of yet. If we don’t endeavor to side-step the pull toward exclusively building on what we know, we’ll just keep building what we know. What fun is that? Why not try something completely different, something you would never have thought of attempting with the Rift? Or, take a tangent track and look outside your own industry. Maybe we can collaborate with people in other industries to build something new. This is something I personally need to do a lot more often.

VR sketching with a garbage can nearby

In architecture school, I once heard someone say it’s important to design with a garbage can nearby. That is, to not be afraid to make mistakes, and to try everything until you stumble into something that works. This is an approach I think we could adopt more with VR development, rapidly pushing out lots of unpolished sketch builds that explore every possible angle you can think of. Sometimes ideas come from the most unexpected places, and some of the strangest or seemingly worthless ideas turn out to be the strongest if you spend some time fleshing it out. I intend to do a lot more sketching and blue-sky ideation in the months ahead.

Rift Riffs – toward a more open source mindset

In addition to sketching and publishing, I also think we could be a lot more open internally in sharing our sketch concepts and encouraging others to further iterate on those ideas. You never know when something you developed seems like a mistake or isn’t worth pursuing inspires someone else to build on the idea toward creating something even better.

In jazz, they call it a ‘riff.’ I know of so many developers who have built incredible concepts, but shelved them when they ran out of time, or thought the idea wasn’t worth sharing. Others are working underground, feverishly scrambling all hours of the day to secretly build their brainchild new Rift game. They’re convinced they’ll get rich when they finally release it, and maybe they will. But I honestly think it’s way too early to latch on to any one idea at this point. I think there’s far greater value in working in the open, sharing ideas, and working collaboratively toward new concepts that push this technology forward.

For what it’s worth, a more open, iterative approach to building new VR concepts is in keeping with the spirit of what kickstarted this whole thing to begin with, and holds so much more potential than any of us could ever come up with on our own.

So that’s my over-caffeinated, unedited, rambling rant for the day. Call it an early new year’s resolution, but I’m going to start sketching more. I’m going to push our team outside of the comfort zone. We’re going to start sharing more of what we come up with, and encouraging others to build on those ideas and to share their own. While we grow our VR business and tackle so many new and exciting projects, I want to be sure we leave room to dream.