Developer Perspective: GDC 2019 Insights

As there are obviously a million things to do, see and learn at GDC, we thought it would be a great idea to collaborate with a few of our friends in the VR development community, to provide you some of their key insights from this year's event. This post provides a curated set of learnings, framed by each developer's unique perspective, and we hope you find it interesting if you were in meetings 24/7 or were unable to make it out to SF this year.

If there was a specific panel/demo/tool that stood out to you at this year's GDC, feel free to share it in the comments.

Doug North Cook, Asst. Professor of Immersive Media, Chatham University
Robin Hunicke, CEO, Funomena
Cy Wise, Co-founder and Live Raccoon, [unnamed next venture]
Kat Harris, Experience Designer and Prototyper, Magnopus

Before this presentation took place, the 4 speakers met as a group with other VR designers, researchers and creators at the Fallingwater Institute for an Immersive Design Convening. They rolled out butcher-block paper around the walls and wrote down all the problems facing the VR industry, spending the next few days framing those problems as they tried to answer the question “how do you make VR for everyone?” One of the main problems they recognized was that the industry is fragmented across every stage of the VR lifecycle. For widespread adoption, they argue that there needs to be more diverse creators, increased accessibility, sharing of our successes and even more importantly, our failures. See below for how they organized this discussion and some of the key points that I found especially insightful:

Accessibility:

As VR developers, we are often heads down in the details of development. This talk helped me take a step back to look at the issues facing our industry, and how we can increase wider adoption of VR. Every year, there are always new VR devices that come with their own idiosyncrasies. This issue of ecosystem fragmentation alone can often divert our focus from other meaningful conversations like user accessibility, creator diversity and the future of these topics. I came away inspired to return to the @SeattleVR community and share more of my failures and successes, while also keeping accessibility and inclusion front of mind going forward.

We realized this was an excellent way to paper-prototype VR concepts. The way the games included action, body gestures and expression related strongly to many of our VR ideas. Having these games exist outside of a headset make it much easier to get direct feedback on the mechanic itself and not anything else.

We really enjoyed the game HOT SWAP: All Hands on Deck! In this game, two players control a ship through 3D printed input controllers while each controller performs a single action. There are 6 different inputs and each player can only use two at a time. One of us initially used the "Steering Wheel" to turn the ship and the "Crank" which adjusts the ships speed. Player 2 had the "Cannon Loaded" to ready the cannon and "Fuse" to fire the cannons. We had to swap controls quickly as the enemy ships surrounded us, keeping in mind that our cannons will only fire on the side where the player is controlling it. We ended up tossing the controls back and forth, shouting out what we needed and trying to collect treasure while outmaneuvering the other ships.

The only downside to all the Alt-Ctrl games is you can't play them anywhere else, but it also makes you appreciate the time you had to play it at GDC. We are excited to see what unique set of Alt-Ctrl games become available in 2020, and to start prototyping with these sorts of out-of-the box control mechanics to inform our next VR experience!

As a developer of VR rhythm games and shooters, the potential for full-body, responsive haptics is very exciting. I was able to try demos using bHaptics hardware in both genres and I have to say that receiving haptic feedback exactly where you get hit in a shooter had a real effect on my overall immersion. I believe that technologies enabling this kind of feedback will play a significant role in taking VR to the next level, and bHaptics makes this feature a lot more accessible for all VR developers.

From The Oculus Team: