Wild West of VR - Discovering the Rules of Oculus Rift Development (Steam Dev Days 2014)

Channel:

Steamworks Development

Subscribers:

48,100

Published on February 11, 2014 6:33:45 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqZZKi4UHuo

Game:

Hades (2020)

Duration: 20:02

22,633 views

293

Through the development of Aaaaaculus!, one of the first commercially available Oculus Rift games, the team at Owlchemy Labs has come to the realization that 2013/2014 is truly the Wild West of VR development. Like the days of early consumer touchscreens, the best practices and rules of VR are still to be determined. We'll cover the many key VR revelations we've had during development, such the importance of respecting the player's head direction, reduction of motion sickness, the complete reversal of UI and HUD paradigms, the introduction of developer fatigue, and realizations about subtle visual cues and the sensitivity of the inner ear.

Through trial, error, boatloads of testing, and caffeine, we arrived at a playable and immersive sky-diving experience for Oculus Rift. The methods employed will need to be explored heavily as we move forward into this new era of VR game design. We hope to begin the discussion on establishing standards, bit-by-bit, so that years from now we can look back on the early days and chortle at the seemingly "obvious" VR faux-pas made before the rules were clearly defined."

Speakers: Devin Reimer (Owlchemy Labs), Alex Schwartz (Owlchemy Labs)
Slides (PDF): http://media.steampowered.com/apps/steamdevdays/slides/wildwest.pdf
Slides (Keynote): http://media.steampowered.com/apps/steamdevdays/slides/wildwest.key

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