Oculus Launch Pad Grad Lou Ward Shares the Development Process Behind ‘Tinker’

Each year, Oculus Launch Pad supports promising VR content creators from diverse backgrounds as they iterate on their unique ideas and bring them to market.

In this edition in our Oculus Launch Pad Q&A series, 2020 grant recipient Lou Ward spoke with us about his involvement with Launch Pad and how it helped shape his career and the development of Tinker⁠, an interactive performance that utilizes real-time VR interactions to provide each individual with a unique narrative experience—one of purpose, one that endeavors to convey the profound mental effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Launch Pad has been an amazing experience. To me, it solidifies what it means to grow as a creative and director. This is my second Launch Pad. The first time through my team and I knew we were on to something totally innovative and groundbreaking but needed more time to hatch our brilliant idea. Our experience in Launch Pad gave us the confidence to continue to pursue development and prompted my decision to expand Tinker Studio to refine this new style of VR storytelling - live bespoke virtual theater - which allows participants to experience stories from an embodied, first person perspective in real time. I’m also grateful to Oculus and my fellow Launch Pad members for supporting my storyliving vision and providing me the space and opportunity to share my grandfather’s story.

By the time we were in Launch Pad for the second time, Tinker had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. In a previously entirely self-funded production, winning the Oculus Launch Pad grant provided our team the opportunity to finish Tinker and make the final optimizations we needed to get Tinker in the place it is today. I never thought seven years ago when we began this project: designing our own custom motion capture rigs and facial tracking tools to capture the actor’s nuanced expressions in real time, adapting to the dynamic nature of virtual production: coping with the many networking, framework, and middleware software changes and even headset changes throughout the years; that we would be where we are today. Now we can showcase Tinker to anyone in the world. And we have some exciting new features to share with everyone! With the support of Oculus, their tools, resources, and people, we were able to finish our app with a supportive community - and we are eternally grateful.

My grandfather. He was a computer engineer who put me in front of a computer at an early age. He was a brilliant man and a master tinkerer. I would spend hours playing with him and working alongside him in his workshop; he was like a father to me. Until one day, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. I began to witness his greatest strength slowly being taken away.

For my SCAD senior project, I directed a 2D animated film based upon my grandfather: I wanted to find a way to keep his memory alive. That film evolved into Tinker, the virtual reality theater experience - live and unscripted. I wanted to share with others the story of my grandfather and find a way to connect with others and what they were going through. I wanted to find a way to represent memories - the power of their creation and the fragility of losing them. Memories are who we are and connect with others through shared memories. And I wanted to show what Alzheimer’s disease was like through a story living perspective. There are many pamphlets at the doctor’s office about neurological disease but nothing ever fully prepares you when a loved one experiences it first hand. I wanted to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s disease, its symptoms, but most importantly elevate empathy towards individuals and their families who are experiencing it. The immersive story of the living power of virtual reality provided me a way to share my grandfather’s story, and that of so many others, in a very impactful way.

Because Tinker is such a technically and artistically nuanced experience, our studio had to consistently push the boundaries of what was possible. In many cases the technology didn’t exist yet, so we had to invent our own way to make it happen. For example, we engineered a custom motion capture facial tracking rig that allowed us to capture the nuanced facial expressions of our actor who was performing as the Grandfather in the real world, and fed that into the VR headset to give life to his avatar. When the mocap middleware software was deprecated, we pivoted to create our own custom facial controls - with the help of Oculus LipSync- for the actor to animate his avatar’s expressions in real time. Our goal was to create a meaningful experience for the audience and allow the participant to connect with the grandfather - and the story - in the most authentic way possible, so we did whatever we could to make that possible.

I was inspired by the animation style of Pixar and Headless Productions (like My Family and The Wolf) which was a type of painterly style animation. It was approachable, playful and would avoid uncanny valley: we wanted our characters to feel comfortable and familiar. The grandfather with his large eyes and welcoming smile combined with the talent of actor Randy Dixon, allows participants to feel more of an emotional connection with the character, and in turn fosters a more personalized and impactful narrative. Because our narrative is intimate and carries a very delicate subject, it was crucial to make design choices that best supported the story and the way the participants would feel inside that story.

It’s important to be mindful of inclusive and accessible design practices and to think of all the ways that you can make your app better for everyone. My personal experiences have made me think differently about design and how we build out to reach a wide range of varying abilities. My mother has ALS, I have a friend who is hard of hearing, and I did the UX/UI for a VR autism experience previously. As developers we have a responsibility to design for everyone. Features like: gravity grab, making a larger font with contrast, making controls easy to use, sound design considerations, empowering the character to choose their own gender identity rather than having it predetermined, even designing a narrative to support DEIA were all formative to an intentional inclusive design approach in our experience. It is important to us that the participant feels comfortable and safe in our experience. Our actor’s unscripted narrative guides you on the rails of our story, but the infusion of personalized elements or even the delicate subject matter that’s approached in the experience, needs to be accounted for. Our actor is mindful of gauging the participant’s comfort level and we even included an onboarding and debriefing component of our experience to ensure our audience is supported.

Also think about varying degrees of VR comfortability. We’ve done a lot of playtesting across people who have never tried VR to those who have a lot of VR experience.

Tinker defines a new genre of storytelling. It is a fusion of improvisational theater and virtual reality that connects the audience through a delicate and dynamic narrative, so we had to be very sensitive to the audience’s journey and intentional in our approach to storyliving design. Two of the biggest challenges were designing an onboarding and offboarding experience to support the performance itself.

It was very important for our audience to be able to distinguish where they were - physically and emotionally - in relation to the story. Borrowing from traditional proscenium theater, we created a lobby environment - the Grandfather’s attic - where crucial elements of the experience took place: onboarding and offboarding. Onboarding for most VR apps is a tutorial sequence or demo that allows players to practice the core mechanics before they start. Since our VR app is non-traditional, we had to reconcile providing gameplay instruction while also preparing the audience for the performance itself. And the best way for us to do that was through the Grandfather character. In the onboarding process, the Grandfather is not wearing his hat, indicating that he is in fact Randy Dixon, the actor, during this time. Using classic improvisational technique, Randy asks the participant, who will play the role of the Grandchild, inclusively-minded questions about themselves that are later woven throughout the narrative to make the story more personalized to them. The viewers, who aren’t seen or heard during the performance, also have the ability to speak during this time in case they have any questions before the performance begins. Once Randy has prepared everyone for the experience, the entire audience is transported together to the top of Scene 1.

By the end of Scene 5, the performance is over and the audience has returned back to the lobby area, the Grandfather’s attic. Because Tinker explores sensitive content throughout the experience - losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s disease - we created an offboarding experience to provide the space for the audience to decompress and be able to share their emotions if they felt comfortable doing so. This discussion is once again led by Randy, who has been there from the beginning to act as a guide and character whom the audience has come to connect with by the end of the experience. During our Sundance premiere, we also opened the door to allow audience members to email us if they wanted to talk more or share about their experience - it created a type of community around Alzheimer’s awareness, memory loss, and what it’s like losing someone close to us. VR is such a powerful tool to create complete immersion and allows us to connect with each other in a transformative new way. We wanted to push the boundaries of storytelling in a way that always puts the participant first. And we designed the entire experience - from start to finish - with that intention.

That people really play a role. Every performance of Tinker is totally bespoke because each participant is unique and the connection that each one forges with the grandfather is totally different. While our development team has created the environment, the functionality, the characters, it is up to the people who are playing these characters to bring the story to life.

The story was based on my experience with my grandfather, but what I’ve found is that while my story is very unique and personal - the experience has become universal. We have all played this role before - and while it might not be directly coping with a loved one who has developed a neurodegenerative disease - it could be the role of making memories with someone and those memories in some way fade away. We are all a sum of the memories we make. And seeing how each participant responds to the story in their own way has been really interesting to witness.

Utilize a standard SDK template like Human Codeable, Oculus, Bearded and other frameworks. Start from here, then prototype. Begin learning systems and start building small things.

Scope, scope, scope. It is so important in designing interactive entertainment.

Three things immediately come to mind: scope, playtesting, and community.

Accurate scoping with long term vision in mind is essential to making a successful application. In addition to our talented team of developers, we added a producer and project manager to our team to help create a realistic scope with milestones, a QA process, and a keener anticipation of bottlenecks and the resources to help mitigate them. Figure out what it will take to create the MVP and then what it will take to get that MVP to a point in production that’s ready to launch. If you do not go in with a clear goal and scope, you can waste time on things that really impact the user experience. Scoping your project will allow you to build things that ship.

Playtesting and discussing your game with others is vital to making the best result possible - talking with others about your app or game will make you realize that sometimes something that you see as important is actually trivial, or that sometimes you need to spend more time on something that you didn’t realize was necessary.

It’s important to build community. It’s important to give exposure to what you’re creating and to get feedback from that community you’re building it for.

For more information, visit Tinker⁠ + Our Story⁠.