Android game engine developers can now support Oculus Quest using OpenXR instead of Facebook’s Oculus Mobile API.
The support is currently described as ‘prototype’. OpenXR 1.0 doesn’t offer a standard Android loader, but Facebook provides one as part of its OpenXR SDK Package.
OpenXR is the recently finalized open standard for VR & AR. That means that apps built for Quest using OpenXR should theoretically also work on any future Android-based Quest competitor.
The Oculus Rift will also get OpenXR support soon. When SteamVR adds support for OpenXR, that means PC game engine developers will be able to support all platforms with one API.
Just to clear up any confusion here: OpenXR is not the same thing as OpenVR. OpenVR is Valve’s API for SteamVR, entirely unrelated to OpenXR. While OpenVR works on all PC VR headsets, it doesn’t support Android headsets like Quest and due to Facebook’s policies cannot be used on Oculus Rift store apps. Valve said last year it plans to support OpenXR in SteamVR but that doesn’t appear to have happened as of yet.
The Problem OpenXR Solves
An API (application programming interface) allows software to interact with other software or hardware. VR developers use APIs like Facebook’s Oculus and Valve’s OpenVR to build apps. The API is often part of an SDK (software development kit), and informally these terms are often used interchangeably.
The problem with the Oculus API is that apps developed with it can only run on Oculus hardware (without hacks). In addition, for developers using a custom engine, there are actually two separate APIs between Quest and Rift.
This means that if a developer wants to support all VR headsets, they need to use multiple APIs. This can be time consuming and increase complexity.
Engines like Unity and Unreal make this easier, and both are trying to separately unify VR APIs under their own new engine subsystems, but the problem still exists.
What Exactly Is OpenXR?
OpenXR is an open standard for VR/AR. It was developed by a working group managed by Khronos, a non-profit industry consortium. The working group includes the major VR companies such as Facebook, Valve, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, HTC, Google, Unity, and Epic.
The API allows developers to add universal VR support to their apps, so in the future any Windows OpenXR app should technically run on any PC VR headset, and any Android OpenXR app should technically run on any standalone headset.
It’s also important to note that most VR apps are built with the Unity game engine, which has not announced any plans to support OpenXR yet (Unity is a member of the consortium, though).
A few years ago, OpenXR seemed like a distant dream. But now it’s here, and soon engine developers will be able to develop for VR without worrying about what hardware they’re supporting. This should shorten the time taken to develop cross platform VR apps, and may encourage developers to jump into making VR software who were originally put off by proprietary APIs.
Hand-tracking on Quest rolled out as an experimental feature in late 2019, but Oculus is letting it gestate before it will accept third-party apps with hand-tracking. In the meantime, the company has published fresh developer documentation which establishes best practices for working within the limitations of Quest hand-tracking.
Hand-tracking brings many benefits to Quest, especially ease-of-use. And while Oculus’ first stab at the feature is reasonably solid, there’s still limitations around accuracy, latency, pose detection, and tracking coverage. To help developers best work within the limitations of the system, a new section of the Oculus developer documentation called ‘Designing for Hands‘ offers up practical advice and considerations.
“In these guidelines, you’ll find interactions, components, and best practices we’ve validated through researching, testing, and designing with hands. We also included the principles that guided our process,” the documentation says. “This information is by no means exhaustive, but should provide a good starting point so you can build on what we’ve learned so far. We hope this helps you design experiences that push the boundaries of what hands can do in virtual reality.”
The document notes the challenges that come with the territory, and reminds developers to “remember that hands aren’t controllers.”
There are some complications that come up when designing experiences for hands. Thanks to sci-fi movies and TV shows, people have exaggerated expectations of what hands can do in VR. But even expecting your virtual hands to work the same way your real hands do is currently unrealistic for a few reasons.
There are inherent technological limitations, like limited tracking volume and issues with occlusion
Virtual objects don’t provide the tactile feedback that we rely on when interacting with real-life objects
Choosing hand gestures that activate the system without accidental triggers can be difficult, since hands form all sorts of poses throughout the course of regular conversation
You can find solutions we found for some of these challenges in our Best Practices section.
[…]
It’s very tempting to simply adapt existing interactions from input devices like the Touch Controller, and apply them to hand tracking. But that process will limit you to already-charted territory, and may lead to interactions that would feel better with controllers while missing out on the benefits of hands.
Instead, focus on the unique strengths of hands as an input and be aware of the specific limitations of the current technology to find new hands-native interactions. For example, one question we asked was how to provide feedback in the absence of tactility. The answer led to a new selection method, which then opened up the capability for all-new 3D components.
It’s still early days, and there’s still so much to figure out. We hope the solutions you find guide all of us toward incredible new possibilities.
The ‘Interactions‘ section of the document offers some of the most practical advice for how developers should consider allowing users to interact with the virtual world using hand-tracking.
A clear distinction is made between Absolute and Relative interactions; the former meaning objects directly touched by the user and controlled 1:1, with the latter being about how to control objects at a distance in discrete ways, like rotating an object around one axis.
The ‘User Interface Components‘ section makes specific suggestions about how things like buttons and menus should work, and how they should be sized to complement the accuracy of Quest’s hand-tracking. There’s also some examples shown of more complex interface modules, like toggle switches, radial selectors, and scrolling lists.
Oculus says they aren’t yet accepting hand-tracking applications onto Quest. In the future they plan to graduate hand-tracking from an experiment to a full fledged feature, and when they do they will open the door to apps which use the feature. The company hasn’t given any indication as to when that will happen, but we’d expect some time in 2020.
Controllerless hand-tracking on Quest is a great convenience feature. While we still expect controllers to be the go-to for hardcore games, there’s definitely opportunity for casual and novel games and experiences to prosper with hand-tracking.
Daniel Beauchamp is one VR developer that’s dreaming up creative uses for hand-tracking on Quest that go far beyond laser pointer and touchscreen interactions. He’s created a series of prototypes as a means of understanding the capabilities of the feature and what kind of interactions and experiences can bring delight to users. Here’s three that he shared recently.
Thrown Hand
Turning the tracked hand into its own independent object allows for a ‘remote control’-like capability where the hand propels itself around the environment by ‘crawling’ as the player continues to move the fingers on their real hand. Intriguingly, one could consider this a form of VR locomotion which only applies to a specific body part. This also extends the range of potential interactions in a more interesting way than 2DOF interactions like laser pointers and guns.
Finger Skateboard
Harkening back to the ’90s fad of fingerboarding (AKA Tech Decks), Beauchamp envisions a game mechanic where players control a tiny skateboard with their fingers. In later experiment he even showed some basic physics, allowing the user to flip the board to do tricks.
While it’s easy to get around using VR controllers thanks to a combination of 6DOF motion and physical inputs like buttons and sticks, things get more complex with just your hands. In this prototype, Beauchamp shows a locomotion scheme where the player puppeteers a leg gesture with their hands to walk forward. While not likely a serious solution for VR locomotion, it’s a thought-provoking concept and one which could form the basis of other interesting interactions involving the personification of the user’s hand.
Experimenting Outside of the Box
Beauchamp is the Head of VR and AR at Shopify, a leading e-commerce platform. While he told us that his Quest hand-tracking experiments are done on his personal time, he applies the same concepts to how he thinks about the intersection of XR and e-commerce.
“One of the best ways to unlock new & powerful ideas is to build upon silly ideas. That’s what I’m doing with hand-tracking. Rather than starting with ‘How can I build a useful product with hand tracking’, I play around with many little ideas that bring a smile to people’s faces. They may seem random, but I’m learning a lot about what’s possible with the tech and interactions that could be applied elsewhere,” Beauchamp said. “I wish more VR devs did this. Don’t put the burden on yourself to build out a whole game or build out a whole product. Build many small things, no matter how silly they may seem. You’ll be surprised at just how much you learn.”
“A lot of people are surprised Shopify has a VR team. We’ve had one for the past five years. Our goal has been to figure out how VR will impact the world of commerce.
This problem space requires outside-the-box thinking. Every time I talk about VR & shopping, people immediately suggest shopping malls. And to me that’s such a narrow view,” said Beauchamp. “In VR you have the ability to do anything you want, be anyone you want, and be anywhere you want. You are a wizard…and you want to shop in a regular mall? Wizards don’t shop at boring malls. So we’ve tossed out a lot of the notions you’d expect from a brick and mortar store bound by reality. We’re looking at things that are delightful and effective that are now possible in this new medium.”
But how do you think outside-the-box if the box is all you can see? Beauchamp suggests tossing out what you think you know.
“I think you just have to consciously throw out the [interaction] tropes [of real life and traditional games]. Like just prevent yourself from using them. Come up with ideas that don’t use them first, then evaluate if you still need them.”
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Quest hand-tracking is expected to eventually leave its experimental status behind and become a full-blown feature on Quest, and other VR headsets are likely to follow, making the time ripe for developer experimentation ahead of implementation.
Japan Display Inc. (JDI), a display conglomerate created by Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi, today announced the mass production of a new high pixel density, 2.1-inch 1,058 LCD display created for VR ‘glasses’ style headsets.
The low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) TFT-LCD panel is said to use a special optical design that is intended to appeal to manufacturers looking to build smaller, lighter glasses-type headsets. Notably, the company says in a press release that its new display is used in VR glasses that have already been introduced to the market.
The company’s new 2.1-inch 1,058 ppi panel boasts a 1,600 × 1,600 resolution in its square format; JDI is also offering variants with corner-cut shapes. Clocked at 120Hz, the panel has a 4.5 ms response time, global blinking backlights, and a brightness of 430 nits.
Although unconfirmed at this time, Pico’s impressive VR Glasses prototype unveiled at CES earlier this year included a 1,600 × 1,600 panel, albeit clocked at 90Hz, which likely has more to do with the constraints of a mobile chipset’s ability to render at a supposed full 120Hz capability.
Why so small? Pico is able to offer this smaller form factor by using much thinner ‘pancake’ optics, which cut the optical path significantly by ‘folding’ it back on itself through the use of polarized light and multiple lens elements.
JDI’s previous VR display, revealed in Summer 2018, was larger at 3.25 inches, but at a slightly lower pixel density of 1,001 ppi. The panel, which was 2,160 × 2,432 resolution and also clocked at 120Hz, did however boast a lower latency of 2.2 ms.
It seems with this downsizing from larger, more conventional display down to smaller ones, JDI is making a significant bet on the upcoming appeal of smaller form factor headsets. A few key trade-offs to VR ‘glasses’ as they are now is off-board processing, either by a dedicated compute unit or smartphone, typically a lack of 6DOF tracking, and a slightly lower field of view. That said, removing using friction by making VR headsets lighter and smaller may appeal to users looking to watch traditional streaming video and browsing the 2D web.
The Unity game engine, which powers most of the apps on the Oculus standalone store, now supports the Vulkan graphics API with Oculus Quest and Oculus Go.
Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, the industry standard graphics API that has been in widespread use for over 2 decades. OpenGL is similar to DirectX up to version 11, but controlled by an open industry consortium and is cross platform.
Like DX12 for Windows and Metal for Apple hardware, Vulkan is a “low level” graphics API (LLAPI). These APIs give developers more direct access to the hardware than previous graphics APIs, moving many tasks from the GPU driver to the game engine.
Vulkan is designed from the ground up to properly take advantage of multi-core CPUs, which were not a relevant factor when OpenGL was created. The Oculus Quest has four CPU cores available to games.
NOTE: While Unity 2019.3 supports Vulkan on Quest, the current Oculus Integration for Unity does not. This is, however, simply due to a check it performs to see if Vulkan is enabled, which can be bypassed by commenting it out.
The Benefits
Vulkan’s lower level access to the hardware means there is less driver overhead for draw calls (instructions from the CPU to the GPU of what objects to draw). This means that more draw calls can be used each frame – or the same number of draw calls per frame will use less CPU power & energy.
This means that Vulkan could enable Quest developers using Unity to ship more detailed scenes, use larger draw distances, use leftover CPU power for physics, or just increase battery life of existing fidelity content.
Vulkan should also allow for significantly faster initial loading times. Have you noticed that some Quest games took a very long time to load the first time you launched them? That’s because OpenGL shaders are compiled on first load, whereas with Vulkan shaders can easily be precompiled.
Facebook claims that Vulkan also allows for HDR rendering on mobile, which could be useful for future headsets.
Performance Numbers
There are no specific benchmarks for a production Oculus Quest Unity app of OpenGL vs Vulkan performance yet. When Unity first added Vulkan support for regular Android games, the company claimed “up to 35% improvement” in performance.
Unity’s competitor, Unreal Engine, already added support for Vulkan on Quest back in August. While there are no public benchmark stats for Unity’s Quest Vulkan support yet either, Facebook claimed that on Epic’s Sun Temple engine sample Vulkan reduces frame times from 16ms to 13ms, a roughly 20% improvement.
To be clear, Vulkan is not a silver bullet. Optimizing a VR game to run on a smartphone processor is incredibly difficult, and most of the work still falls to each developer. But Vulkan support in Unity promises to make the rules slightly less extreme, so we’ll be keeping a close watch on the Quest content ecosystem this year to see what it enables.
Unity 2019.3 introduces a new plugin system for XR headsets, and deprecates official support for Gear VR, Google VR, and Valve’s OpenVR (the API for SteamVR).
“Valve is using our XR SDK to develop their OpenVR Unity XR plugin for 2019.3 and beyond,” the blog post from Unity explains. “They will share more information on where to access it once it is available. Until that plugin is available, built-in support of OpenVR will continue to be functional and available in 2019.3, and we will support our users with any critical fixes.”
What This Doesn’t (Yet) Mean
This doesn’t yet mean that developers can no longer build Unity games for these platforms. For now, it simply means that bugs & issues introduced by the engine which affect the support for these platforms “may not be prioritized”. This also serves as a warning that they will be removed from the engine in the future.
That actual removal won’t happen until version 2020.1. Despite using years in version numbers, 2019.3 has yet to be officially released, so 2020.1 is likely months away.
Of course, developers can continue to use older versions of Unity to build their games — although obviously that means they won’t have access to new & future engine-level features and optimizations.
The New Unity Plugin System
The new XR plugin system is intended to simplify the way VR and AR works across the various platforms in Unity in the long term, and allow for new XR features and software plugins to work across all VR & AR hardware.
Under the new system, Unity is “officially” working with 7 XR platforms: Apple’s ARKit, Google’s ARCore, Microsoft’s HoloLens & WMR, Magic Leap, Oculus, and PlayStation VR.
These platforms are “fully supported” by Unity, and the company is “directly” working with them on “deep platform integration, improvements to our engine, and optimizations to our XR tech stack for the platform”.
Valve?
Notably absent from the list of officially supported platform partners is Valve, the company behind the popular SteamVR platform.
However, the new plugin system does allow third parties to develop XR plugins for Unity separately from official support.
Valve’s application programming interface (API) for SteamVR is called OpenVR. According to Unity, Valve is “currently developing their OpenVR XR Plugin, and they will share more information on where to access it once it is available“.
There are two Unity designations Valve could be delivering this system through. One is as a ‘Verified Solutions Partner’ (VSP) and the other is as an ‘Innovator’. Being a VSP “offers various levels of support, including test verification and promotion of the plugin once released.” It has not yet been revealed whether or not Valve is a VSP.
Will This Really Matter?
There are no announced plans for an unofficial plugin for Daydream or Gear VR, however, there are plans for an open source plugin for Google Cardboard. This means developers will eventually have to resort to non-current versions of Unity to develop for Daydream or Gear VR.
For SteamVR, the change means that responsibility for support of Valve’s platform in Unity now rests solely on Valve. It also may make it more difficult for Valve to work around engine-level bugs or introduce new features that require engine support.
Unity’s own OpenVR Plugin is now deprecated, and will be removed in 2020.1.
At the end of the day, however, this probably won’t really mean much to the average SteamVR developer other than the fact that the party responsible for the core OpenVR support in the engine changed.
It could be argued that a lack of official support would be important to large publishers/developers choosing which platforms to develop for, but even this seems like a stretch for now.
We’ve reached out to Valve for clarity on the current state of its relationship with Unity, plans for future support, and any other statement on the topic. We’ll update this article if we receive a reply.
Valve’s new VR game, its first set in the Half-Life universe in over a decade, has “around 80 people” working on it. The studio itself confirmed as much during today’s Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. Not only that, but this makes it the “largest single team” the company has ever had working on a game. Yup, even more than Half-Life 2 or Portal 2.
“Right now it’s around 80 people,” the company said, “which puts it as the largest single team we’ve ever had at Valve.”
In another post, the company confirmed that some people working on Alyx even worked on the original Half-Life back in the 1990’s.
This is a significant investment for any game, let alone for the fledgling VR market where team sizes are usually much smaller. Though we don’t know exact figures, it’s thought that the install base of PC VR headsets is quite small making it hard for big companies to justify pouring millions of dollars into massive projects that might not see a return.
Of course, Valve isn’t just selling a new game with Half-Life: Alyx. The company also wants to use the game as a vehicle to drive sales of its Valve Index SteamVR headset, which comes with a free copy of Alyx. That said, pretty much any PC VR headset will be able to play Alyx, so its work will hopefully help drive the entire industry forward, too.
Elsewhere, Valve reaffirmed that Alyx is still on track for a release in March, provided there aren’t any last-minute hiccups. In fact the game is pretty much, in Valve’s words, done save for a few final tweaks.
Excited for Half-Life: Alyx? Let us know in the comments below! And don’t forget to follow our recent coverage of the game, too.
MIT is hosting an event called the MIT ‘Reality Hack XR Hackathon between the 16th and 20th of January. The event is aimed at bringing people who work, study or are interested in VR and AR, requiring them to collaborate and compete in workshops over a 3-day hackathon, after which their work will be judged at a public expo.
The Hackathon is held every January and “comprises of thought leaders, brand mentors and creators, participants, students, and technology lovers to come together and attend tech workshops, talks, discussions, fireside chats, collaborations, hacking, and more.” The first 3 days of the event are for workshops where the teams produce their work. The final two days comprise of the expo, where their work is judged with the second day of the expo open for public viewing.
The event also ran in 2019, with 400 participants (with 40% representation of women and non-binary genders) who were split into 100 teams and worked with 60 mentors and 25 judges. The hackathon also has some pretty high profile sponsors this year as well, including Microsoft, Nreal, Magic Leap, HTC Vive, HP and more.
For more information on the Hackathon, or to register interest in competing in the event, you can visit the MIT Reality Hack site. If you’re in Massachusetts, you can go and see all the hard work that comes out of the hackathon yourself. The public expo is open on the 20th of January, at the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, from 2:00-4:30pm. You can register for a free ticket on Eventbrite.
While Oculus Quest and Valve Index were backordered through the holiday season as far as February 2020, it remains extremely difficult to get a handle on the actual size of the market opportunity for a VR project.
Did Facebook and Valve just have a very small number of headsets on hand or is VR finally on a path toward true mainstream appeal?
Lack of understanding of the market opportunity in VR is not a new issue but the lack of solid information remains a huge problem for many VR developers. Without knowing what works and the scale of success, developers cannot reliably judge what content they should emulate, which marketing strategies to employ and which platforms they should target first.
Breaking Down The VR Market
The consumer VR market is roughly five years old and the number of headsets in regular use remains an elusive figure.
Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is one of the only ones offering firm numbers. In March 2019, Sony provided an update to say that 4.2 million PSVR headsets sold since its debut in late 2016 and, during holiday season of 2019, it was possible to get both a PS4 and a PSVR headset for $400 all in — the lowest price we’ve ever seen for the console leader. We believe now it is likely there are well over 5 million PSVR headsets which made it to homes around the world.
The problem with this number is that some percentage of even the most popular VR headsets remain unused most of the time. This means a non-trivial number of VR headset owners very quickly just stop buying VR games entirely. Samsung, for example, provided indications years ago that its now-unsupported Gear VR headset passed 5 million “sold” and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted that more than one “million” people were using VR every month.
Unfortunately for builders of VR content, neither the PSVR figure nor the Gear VR number nor “one million” provides a sense of the actual market opportunity available in VR development. This die off in usage of Gear VRs was so high — many of them bundled free with the sale of a phone — that lots of these headsets were thrown out or never used more than once or twice.
Working Toward Frictionless VR
“Friction” is the reason why phone-based VR headsets like Cardboard and Daydream and Gear VR are now unsupported or open source. Some examples:
You can’t interact with virtual worlds in compelling ways without fully tracked hand movements.
Many people feel uncomfortable without the freedom to lean forward, backward or to the sides and see that movement matched in VR.
Your phone can overheat.
Your phone’s battery can drain quickly.
Distracting dust can get behind the lenses.
These problems mean that one of VR’s earliest and highest selling systems is also one of the first to be retired and abandoned.
PSVR features comparatively less friction, but I don’t ever wear one of VR’s most comfortable headsets because its tracking system — a single dual-eye camera — limits people to only facing forward. You lose your hands if you turn around and block the camera. I suspect many others encounter this limitation as well and it is a major cause of disuse by some VR buyers.
Does this all mean that VR itself is dead? Absolutely not. It definitely means that phone-based VR is a dead-end and, probably, 180-degree tracking systems like PSVR are far too limiting come 2020 and beyond.
For these reasons and others, some people worked for months or even years on projects only to find markets totally disinterested in their work. For some, selling less than a dozen copies of a piece of software actually happened. Only a few developers have been able to crawl through these difficult years and find enough revenue from sales to keep themselves going.
Building The VR Market Back Up
Too many wires in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Investment in the VR market boomed and then busted driven in part by Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus VR for billions of dollars.
Facebook’s big bet on VR was only part of the inspiration for so many people making bad bets on poorly positioned VR projects in the consumer technology’s first few years. What exactly led to the creation of hundreds of poorly made 360-degree video projects and the cameras which captured them? A significant roadblock to VR developers was Facebook’s early promotion of limited VR systems like the Oculus Rift with Xbox gamepad and Gear VR — and even the $120 bargain price for the Oculus Go in 2019.
“We had to launch Rift as quickly as we could to get dev kits out there, you know, and to get Rift into the marketplace to learn from the marketplace. We launched Touch a little bit later, unfortunately, I think we should have launched it with launch,” Facebook’s Jason Rubin told us at E3 in 2019. “But we were racing to get VR to be real so that developers…could start prototyping.”
These limited systems combined with the choice to not release units sold for the Rift, Rift S, Index, Vive, Windows MR headsets, and Quest, still means developers building in VR generally don’t know what they should focus on or what opportunity is available to them. Certain developers may be privy to this information having earned headset maker’s trust, but it’s still not widely-available information between studios.
In early 2016, Valve partnered with HTC to ship the Vive room-scale VR system and it set the benchmark for high-quality VR people actually want to use on a regular basis. 2019’s Valve Index represents a refinement of this vision while the Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest are designed around the reality that Valve got right from the outset. Let there be no more debate about it. More people prefer the freedom to turn around when they want to and use their fully tracked hands in software they want to pay for and experience regularly with a VR headset.
Honing Around Success
Make no mistake: VR development is extraordinarily difficult and most people fail. Competition is fierce and standing out on digital storefronts is not easy.
“No platform holder actually has your back,” warns Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades developer Anton Hand. “At best you are convenient to what they want, and can occasionally provide useful input to them. At worst they will just lie to your face, fuck you out of a bunch of money, and/or ghost you. You don’t matter.”
While it might look like bragging to see Superhot VR — one of VR’s earliest and most successful games — saying they grossed $2 million in the week surrounding Christmas 2019, it is also a clear indication that a well-made product with broad appeal and quickly accessible gameplay can achieve significant sales in VR in a short time. In September 2018, Schell Games said its early VR title I Expect You To Die cleared $3 million in revenue over its lifetime. Boneworks developer Stress Level Zero said more than 100,000 people played the $30 game in the first week. Seeing VR games clear millions in revenue while Beat Saber made Steam’s overall top sellers list indicates that, at least, some VR projects are able to find real success.
But what about smaller projects?
Developer Nathan Rowe is the driving force behind SculptrVR — a multiplayer sculpting app that’s something like a creative playground akin to Minecraft. Rowe says the product is built by himself working full-time and a contractor working about 1/4 time. He launched SculptrVR on practically every major VR headset — including ones with lots of friction — and competed against Medium, a high quality product developed at Facebook before the team transferred to Adobe. He also was able to win Facebook’s approval for release on Oculus Quest in 2019.
“Depending on how big my PS4 holiday sales were, total sales could be slightly higher than expenses, or slightly less. But I also had some contract income, so my company is definitely profitable this year for the first time ever,” Rowe explained in an email. “This year’s revenue by platform (approximate and rounded to nearest 5%): Steam: 10%, Rift: 5%, Go: 5%, PSVR: 25%, Quest: 55%.”
He says 3DoF VR (like Oculus Go) is something he won’t support in future titles. His next title will target PC, Quest and PSVR in that order. PC appeals “for ease of development, and a great early-access market,” while Quest, he says, offers a great market as well with full room-scale tracking, and “PSVR for its strong and passionate userbase.”
“The Go provides a great experience for certain sorts of activities, but not for the games I want to make going forward,” he wrote. “Every single VR game that has had great success creates an intense experience that gets the user to move around their hands and body. I think someday there will be room for more contemplative VR game successes, but probably not until VR headsets are so comfortable that we don’t mind sitting in them for hours.”
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (H3VR) launched from RUST LTD. for the HTC Vive via Steam in 2016 and it is developed by a core team of four developers and assorted contractors and collaborators. In 2018, Hand and his colleagues at RUST LTD. sold via Steam their 100,000th copy of a $20 VR game that’s never been discounted. Sales accelerated since then, according to Hand, and the game’s been updated dozens of times with significant additions. He also refuses to allow Facebook software running on his computers, asking “Why on Earth would anyone trust Facebook?”
RUST LTD. is one of a handful of studios — perhaps one of the only — to find success for its project and build out a runway while not making any deals with Facebook (or Sony) nor distributing a VR project via their channels. You can still play H3VR on an Oculus Quest (via Oculus Link) or Oculus Rift, of course, but the game is only distributed via Valve’s Steam.
“Not enough of the discussion of these challenges is grounded in the reality of how hard it is to succeed in Indie Gaming (and media in general) PERIOD,” Hand wrote. “The only battle is for people’s eyeballs and product allegiance, not their dollars. A huge consolidation is occurring right now in gaming in general, with Sony & Microsoft buying up studios. We should expect Facebook to do more of that.”
Hardware Recommendations For 2020 And Beyond
Rowe is susceptible to simulator sickness, as I am, and he echoes my sentiment when it comes to recommending VR headsets to people in 2020.
“VR sickness is something that hits me hard. It’s unclear what causes it for me in each headset, but there’s only one headset I can use for extended periods of time: The Valve Index,” he wrote. “I love the ease of the Oculus Quest, but I can’t personally recommend it to people since it makes me sick in ~30 minutes. If you can afford it, get the Index. If you can’t, see if you can borrow a headset for a week to be sure it doesn’t make you sick before buying.”
For those unfamiliar, simulator sickness occurs for a variety of reasons and can be invoked by something as simple as not sleeping well or not eating a full meal before spending time in VR. It is yet another form of friction affecting regular usage of VR and early enthusiasts and developers spent years arguing on forums like Twitter and Reddit about how best to address the situation.
One way of addressing simulator sickness is through hardware design. As noted in my review early in 2019, Valve Index features a series of nobs, sliders and straps that provide some of the most finely tuneable optics I’ve ever seen.
Dialling the optics in just right with Index allows me to have a headache-free trip in VR that lasts much longer than I’ve seen in other systems — though Valve’s headset commands a costly premium of around $1,000. Some other headsets, like the $400 Rift S, cut cost by tossing some of this fine-tuned fitting out the window. Instead, a headset like Rift S seems to target the average person Facebook expects to be wearing the headset and designs the optics to fit those people just right.
What happens if your face isn’t shaped like the average person then? That’s why Rowe’s recommendation above is so valuable. There is no replacement for testing VR headsets before you buy them.
“Do your own research and don’t just defer to people’s suggestions,” wrote Hand. “There is no clear overall best system/HMD to get. They’re all better for different types of content, play patterns, budget, amount of space, etc.”
Current VR Buyers Are Still Mainly Gamers And Many Have Steel Stomachs
When it comes to software, popular products like Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator — even Beat Saber — are built in such a way that they don’t simulate movement for players at all or use instantaneous teleportation to decrease the mismatch between what somebody feels and what they see with their eyes.
Any mismatch runs the risk of making some percentage of VR headset owners feel uncomfortable, and some types of mismatch invoke discomfort more quickly than others.
Even so, Boneworks found a pathway to become one of the most popular VR games of 2019 by employing “smooth locomotion” with a default of snap turning. This means you can push a stick on the controller in your left hand to move in some directions while the stick on the controller in your right hand instantly turns “or snaps” the body to new positions at regular increments.
In some games, this method of simulating movement is sometimes combined with other systems, like vignetting the view into the world by artificially decreasing how much you see. My favorite game of 2019, Pistol Whip, splits the difference between Beat Saber’s no movement and Boneworks’ smooth locomotion. It drags the player through its levels at a constant rate of speed only in a straight line. It sends bullets directly at the player’s head to demand heart-pumping constant physical movement. In Pistol Whip, then, very few people feel discomfort while simultaneously experiencing intense and constant action.
Some developers put options in menus to let players tweak a game to their liking. Rec Room, for instance, introduced a new gameplay mode in 2019 called “Stunt Runner” that sees players running, bouncing and climbing across an obstacle course. The Seattle-based developers also introduced an extreme comfort mode we’ve seen in a few other VR games that essentially gives you the sense of being in a world within a world. The main virtual world anchors you in place while the inset world still flings your senses all over the place.
Check it out here:
Boneworks, developed by Los Angeles-based Stress Level Zero, found a significant audience exclusively in VR responding positively to the work of its small development team while not employing all these options. We rated it 4/5 stars, it carries very positive reviews on Steam and yet it employs intense climbing mechanics that sees you grasp simulated walls and ladders and “pull” your body to new places — mechanics that, when they go wonky, can make some VR enthusiasts so uncomfortable they need to rip off the headset and then crash into their bed for 45 minutes with their eyes closed.
Boneworks also simulates the physics of everything in your environment — a rare joy in VR right now as it turns the environment into a playground. You can grab a trash can lid to shield yourself from turrets or grab a threatening creature out of mid-air and then bash it against a virtual wall. When you need to go through a door you can “push” it open with your hand, or any object in your hand. Stress Level Zero helped ensure success for its title partially by teasing to a significant YouTube audience for much of 2019 the many fun things you could do in Boneworks environments. This level of simulation is somewhat reliant on powerful PC processors to calculate the physics of everything and we expect similar levels of simulation from Valve’s highly anticipated upcoming game Half-Life: Alyx in 2020.
The takeaway is that there’s a vast audience of early headset buyers who don’t necessarily need lots of comfort or movement options. Stress Level Zero picked a set of defaults that fit perfectly with people who have steel stomachs (or will just fight through discomfort because they want the experience badly enough) and want exactly what Boneworks gave them. Incorporating too many comfort options, too, can split the multiplayer audience in some VR games and tear apart a community. It is a running joke, for instance, in Rec Room that players using teleport to play a game of paintball are cheaters. Plenty of players have been kicked out of online games for using this built-in feature to play.
Of course, there’s also a large audience of early headset buyers who get uncomfortable easily in some VR games. True, this issue presents tough questions for VR developers and it remains an ongoing challenge. Do you offer lots of movement options to players? How do you balance multiplayer without fragmenting the player base with multiple movement styles available?
But I argue we are past the phase of “poisoning the well” when developers make shrewd choices about which comfort and movement options to support. Instead, we’re informing buyers by setting expectations and educating them. Boneworks warned players at every step how intense it would be and our reviews here at UploadVR.com include sections to inform players of comfort options before they dive in.
We have a lot we’d like to accomplish in 2020 helping developers shine spotlights on interesting projects as well as helping the people buying these headsets find exactly what they want to do in VR.
As always, email tips@uploadvr.com with anything you think we should know about.
The Oculus Quest now has a Dynamic Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR) feature, which developers can use instead of manually setting the FFR level.
UPDATE April 28: this feature is now available for Unity, the game engine used for the majority of Oculus Quest content.
This article was originally published December 20.
Fixed Foveated Rendering is a rendering feature that developers can use on Oculus Quest. It renders the peripheral of the lenses at a lower resolution than the center, making it easier for the software to maintain a consistent and comfortable frame rate by shaving down detail in places that are less noticeable. There are four levels of FFR developers can choose from: Low, Medium, High, and High Top.
FFR can make it easier for developers to port their PC VR games to Quest. However, the High and High Top can be very noticeable for the user. As we stated in our review of the Quest headset:
In the game’s opening training montage I couldn’t help but point my eyes down and see two blurs for feet running on a treadmill. Tilting my head up over text to move it into the foveated area revealed the scale and size of the effect
Dynamic FFR allows developers to let the Oculus system dynamically adapt the level of foveation based on the GPU utilization. This means that unless it is needed at that time for performance, users won’t see the pixelation and blur seen in some Quest titles today.
The feature is off by default, however, so developers will need to add it to their games via a software update to get the benefits.
For Unity, this can be done by setting useDynamicFixedFoveatedRendering to true on the OVRManager script.
