While CES 2019 this week tends to focus more on the hardware side of things when it comes virtual reality (VR), for gamers and videogame developers the first big show of the year is the 2019 Game Developers Conference in March. As per usual the event will host the Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA), honouring titles across the breadth of the industry. All the nominees have now been announced, with several VR titles managing to find their way out of the dedicated VR/AR category.
To be honest there aren’t really any surprises when it comes to those VR titles who have made the nomination grade as you can see below.
Honorable Mentions: Jurassic World Alive (Ludia), In Death (Sólfar Studios), Tendar (Tender Claws), Firewall Zero Hour (First Contact Entertainment / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Deracine (FromSoftware / Sony Interactive Entertainment)
What’s far more promising for the industry as a whole is the inclusion of several titles in other categories, showcasing the reach VR experiences are starting to have. For example, Polyarc’s Moss also features in the Best Debut category with an honourable mention in the Innovation Award category. Tetris Effect shows up in Best Audio, Innovation Award, Best Visual Art (honourable mention) and Game of the Year (honourable mention.
Others worth noting are:
Beat Saber (Best Games) – Best Audio (honourable mention), Best Debut (honourable mention)
Astro Bot Rescue Mission (SIE Japan Studio / Sony Interactive Entertainment) – Best Design (honourable mention), Innovation Award (honourable mention)
This will be the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards and will be hosted once again by Tim Schafer, LucasArts industry veteran and founder of Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts 2). The ceremony will take place on Wednesday, 20th March, 2019 at 6:30pm at the San Francisco Moscone Center, and held in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival Awards (IGF).
Just like CES 2019, VRFocus will be at GDC 2019 to bring you all the very latest news and announcements relating to VR and AR as they happen.
Having created the humorous and award-winning virtual reality (VR) title Virtual Virtual Reality for Google Daydream in 2017 – porting it to more headsets this year – developer Tender Claws set its sights on a project using augmented reality (AR). Called Tendar, the AR experience has now arrived, specifically for Android compatible devices.
Tendar isn’t your average AR title like Ghostbusters Worldor The Walking Dead: Our World. Using Google’s ARCore technology, the team wanted to address themes around biometric data, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and social interaction in the digital age.
“Our goal for this project was to apply long-form interactive storytelling to the emerging field of augmented reality, specifically for mobile so that the experience is easily accessible and encourages social interaction,” said Samantha Gorman, Co-Founder of Tender Claws in a statement. “By using the very mobile devices that we’re all so attached to, but infused with parody and hyperbole, the experience helps us examine how we relate to others through our devices and current topics in computer vision as it becomes more sophisticated and pervasive. We’re thrilled to be launching Tendar on the Google Play Store and are eager for players to delve deep into this curious AI world!”
The AR experience revolves around emotions and facial expressions, with players tasked with training one of Tendar’s unique AI “Guppies” to identify human emotions. Players must bring the Guppy out of its virtual fishbowl and into their physical surroundings via AR, and feed Guppy with “emotion flakes” – achieved by showing it a well-balanced diet of varying facial expressions. Guppy can also recognize and respond to over 200 objects, building up knowledge as it interacts more and more with the physical world.
Players will be able to see Gubby evolve over time starting as a non-verbal AI and soon developing its own unique personality as it encounters more people, expressions, and objects.
Tendarwill support compatible Android devices, find it on the Google Play Store. For further updates from Tender Claws, keep reading VRFocus.
What did the makers of the exquisite Virtual Virtual Reality do next? Something completely different.
Launched today on Android smartphones, Tendar is an AR app that brings the developer’s surrealist imagination into the world around us. In it, you look after Guppy, a virtual fish that wants to explore the big wide world with you. But you’re not simply making sure it gets fed on time and sending it off to the bathroom; Guppy is destined to evolve based on the everyday interactions you have out in the world. Check it out in the trailer below.
Weird, right? We’d expect no less from the makers of a game in which you slap toast on a sentient slab of butter. But Tendar looks like it could shine the same satirical spotlight it placed upon VR in VVR, only this time on AR and AI instead. Guppy will learn about the facial expressions you make when interacting with him for example, and the app can also detect and scan over 200 real-world objects that you’ll then be able to place in his virtual fishbowl.
Doing so will expand his knowledge of the outside world and help him evolve with his own unique personality based on what you’ve taught it. But it may come at a cost, as the game’s press kit reads: “beware that sentience may lead to a full blown existential crisis!”
Tendar is free to download. There’s no word on an iOS release just yet.
This year the Independent Games Festival, more commonly known as IndieCade, is celebrating its 11th year. The event has now announced the nominees for the 2018 festival, which this year will be held in Santa Monica.
The shortlisted entries this year sees virtual reality (VR) titles in a prominent position, with titles for Oculus Rift, Google Daydream and PlayStation VR getting a mention as well as VR and augmented reality (AR) installations making appearances at the event.
“We’re kicking off our second decade of festivals with a truly innovative selection of the most creative and thought-provoking indie games in a brand-new location in Santa Monica said Stephanie Barish, Chief Executive Officer of IndieCade, “We strive to reflect the diversity of indie game developers, players and fans across the globe and look forward to bringing the community together annually at IndieCade.”
Among the nominees are three notable immersive titles – namely Pixel Ripped 1989, TendAR and Laser Mazer. The nominations demonstrate the rowing acceptence and influence of immersive entertainment and technology.
As well as featuring the nominated videogames, IndieCade will be showcasing over 100 emerging titles along with as numerous tournaments, workshops, sessions and networking opportunities.
The organisers of IndieCade note particular highlights such as Night Games on Friday evening, which transforms the IndieCade venue into a giant arcade. There will also be keynote talks covering various topics including theme parks, immersive theatre, VR and AR, escape rooms and live action role playing.
The full list of nominees along with one and two-day passes are available on the official IndieCade website. Passes start from $25 (USD).
IndieCade 2018 will be held at the Center for Media and Design at Santa Monica College on 12th-13th October, 2018.
For future coverage of IndieCade and other VR-related events, keep checking back with VRFocus.
Being completely honest, the idea behind what augmented reality (AR) can possibly achieve is all well and good but at this moment in time it just doesn’t have the same wow factor that virtual reality (VR) does. Yet there are developers getting to grips with software like ARKit and ARCore, producing some interesting projects that have caught VRFocus’ eye. A recent one that came to our attention was TendAR, a videogame/app from Tendar Claws.
Tendar Claws has already made a name for itself in the VR world with the suitably wacky – and extremely fun Virtual Virtual Reality – and now turned that same inventive process towards AR with an app that feeds on your emotions (not in a scary way).
Kind of mixing the Tamagotchi idea of looking after a pet, whilst examining our modern relationship with technology, TendAR is about teaching a virtual guppy (a fish) to live in the real world by feeding on emotions you provide it. Like any animal your guppy needs a well-balanced diet that’s rich in different emotions, so this invariably means pulling all sorts of faces at the phones camera. TendAR will ask for a sad face or a happy expression for example which sounds easy enough, yet trying to pull an unhappy expression when you’re trying not to giggle is a lot tougher than it looks.
Adding to this is the fact that TendAR is a two player experience, so you both hold the phone at either end to begin with. After going through several options the screen splits allowing both players to see their faces and cooperate on pulling expressions to feed the guppy. The app can also be used to scan the area for faces and pick up on their facial expressions as well.
The short demo during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018 was certainly one of the more inventive use cases of AR that VRFocus has come across. The facial recognition technology definitely seemed to work on point for most of the experience (apart from sad face), even managing to capture those around the show floor who were several feet away. How well this might be perceived somewhere more public is another matter.
Due to the length of time and the actual build on display VRFocus didn’t see much in the way of the long form interactive storytelling aspect Tender Claws has touted TendAR will have – an important aspect to keep users playing – but the main gameplay aspect was enjoyable and light-hearted. Much in the same way the visuals have been designed, bright, bold, with an air of whimsy and energy.
If there’s one studio that can turn AR development on its head and create something unique, bizarre, and engaging then Tender Claws has to be near the top. TendAR is an intriguing concept and one that VRFocus looks forward to seeing in greater depth soon.
Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality experience that paired two people holding a cell phone and sharing two channels of an audio stream featuring an fish guiding the participants through a number of interactions with each other and exploring the surrounding environment. The participants were to instructed to express different emotions in order to “feed” and “train” the AI fish. Google’s ARCore technology was used for the augmented reality overlays, the Google Cloud Vision AI API for object detection, as well as early access to some of Google’s cutting-edge Human Sensing Technology that could detect emotional expressions of the participants.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Overall, TendAR was a really fun and dynamic experience that showed how the power of AR storytelling lies in doing interesting collaborative exercises with another person, but also becoming aware of your immediate surroundings, context, and environment where objects can be discovered, detected, and integrated as a part of a interaction that’s happen with a virtual character.
I had a chance to talk with Tender Claws co-founder Samantha Gorman to talk about the studios’ approach to experiential design for an open-ended interactive AR experience, the unique affordances and challenges of augmented reality storytelling, their collaboration with interactive storytelling theater group Piehole, the challenges of using bleeding-edge AI technologies from Google, and some of their future plans in expanding this prototype experience into a full-fledged 3-hour, solo AR experience with a number of excursions and social performative components.
Here’s a brief teaser for TendAR:
Gorman said that they’re not planning on storing or saving any of the emotional recognition data on their side, and this is the first time that I’ve ever heard anything about Google’s Human Sensing group. I trust Tender Claws to be good stewards of my emotional data, and their TendAR experience shows the potential of what type of immersive narrative experiences are possible when integrating emotional detection as an interactive biofeedback mechanic.
Mimicking a wide range of different emotional states can evoke a similarly wide range of different emotional states, and so I found that TendAR provided a really robust emotional journey that was a satisfying phenomenological experience. TendAR was also an emotionally intimate experience to share with a stranger at a conference like Sundance, but it demonstrates the power of where AR storytelling starts to shine: creating contexts for connection and opportunities to create new patterns of meaning in your immediate surroundings.
However, the fact that Google is working on technology that can capture and potentially store emotional data of users introduces some more complicated privacy implications that are worth expanding upon. Google and Facebook are performance-based marketing companies who are driven to capture as much data about everyone in the world as possible, and VR & AR technologies introduce the opportunity to capture much more intimate data about ourselves. Biometric data and profiles of our emotional reactions could reveal unconscious patterns of behavior that could be ripe for abuse, or be used to train AI algorithms that reinforce the worst aspects of our unconscious behaviors, to the benefit of others.
I’ve had previous conversations about privacy in VR with behavioral neuroscientist John Burkhardt who talked about the unknown ethical threshold of capturing biometric data, and how the line between advertising and thought-control starts to get blurred when you’re able to have access to biometric data that can unlock unconscious triggers that drive behavior.
VC investor and privacy advocate Sarah Downey talked about how VR could become the most powerful surveillance technology every invented or it could become one of our last bastions of privacy if we architect systems with privacy in mind (SPOILER ALERT: Most of our current systems are not architected with privacy in mind since they’re capturing and storing as much data about us as possible).
And I also talked with VR privacy philosopher Jim Preston who told me about the problems with the surveillance-based capitalism business models of performance-based marketing companies like Google and Facebook, and how privacy in VR is complicated and that it’s going to take the entire VR community having honest conversations about it in order to figure it out.
Most people get a lot of benefit from these services, and they’re happy to trade their private data for free access to products and services. But VR & AR represent a whole new level of intimacy and level of detail of information that is more similar to medical data that’s protected by HIPAA regulations than it is to data that is consciously provided by the user through a keyboard. It’s been difficult for me to have an in-depth and honest conversation with Google about privacy or with Facebook/Oculus about privacy because the technological roadmap for integrating biometric data streams into VR products or advertising business models have still been in the theoretical future.
But news of Google’s Human Sensing group building products for detecting human emotions shows that these types of products are on the technological roadmap for the near future, and that it’s worth having a more in-depth and honest conversation about what types of data will be capture, what won’t be captured, what will be connected to our personal identity, and whether or not we’ll have options to opt-out of data collection.
Here’s a list of open questions about privacy for virtual reality hardware and software developers that I first laid out in episode #520:
What information is being tracked, recorded, and permanently stored from VR technologies?
How will Privacy Policies be updated to account for Biometric Data?
Do we need to evolve the business models in order to sustain VR content creation in the long-term?
If not then what are the tradeoffs of privacy in using the existing ad-based revenue streams that are based upon a system of privatized surveillance that we’ve consented to over time?
Should biometric data should be classified as medical information and protected under HIPAA protections?
What is a conceptual framework for what data should be private and what should be public?
What type of transparency and controls should users expect from companies?
Should companies be getting explicit consent for the type of biometric data that they to capture, store, and tie back to our personal identities?
If companies are able to diagnose medical conditions from these new biometric indicators, then what is their ethical responsibility of reporting this users?
What is the potential for some of anonymized physical data to end up being personally identifiable using machine learning?
What controls will be made available for users to opt-out of being tracked?
What will be the safeguards in place to prevent the use of eye tracking cameras to personally identify people with biometric retina or iris scans?
Are any of our voice conversations are being recorded for social VR interactions?
Can VR companies ensure that there any private contexts in virtual reality where we are not being tracked and recorded? Or is recording everything the default?
What kind of safeguards can be imposed to limit the tying our virtual actions to our actual identity in order to preserve our Fourth Amendment rights?
How are VR application developers going to be educated and held accountable for their responsibilities of the types of sensitive personally identifiable information that could be recorded and stored within their experiences?
The business models of virtual reality and augmented reality have yet to be fully fleshed out, and the new and powerful immersive affordances of these media suggest that new business models may be required that both work well and respect user privacy. Are we willing to continue to mortgage our privacy in exchange to access to free services? Or will new subscription models emerge within the immersive media space where we pay upfront to have access to experiences similar to Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Spotify? There’s a lot more questions than answers right now, but I hope to continue to engage VR companies in a dialogue about these privacy issues throughout 2018 and beyond.
