From user behaviour, understanding touch and finding inspiration to game design, optimisation and open standards, the VR University sessions feature speakers from developers such as SVRVIVE Studios and Game Cooks to organisations including the Khronos Group and Google.
Filmed live at VR Connects San Francisco on 28th June 2017, this is your chance to hear insights from some of the VR industry's key influencers.
Topics covered in this series of videos:
The Impact Of User Behavior Of Social VR
VR For Everyone – Daydream And Google Play Games
How To Succeed In Unknown VR Territory
VR Games From An Unexpected Place
Game Design For VR
Post Mortem: Now You See Me In VR Study Case
Presence And Immersion In AR
Performance Optimisation For VR – How Not To Go Bust Getting Great Visuals
VR Adoption – Standards For Content Development
Don’t Wait For 2020 – Turn Your VR Idea Into A Viable Proposition Right Now
Translation Sickness – Why And How You Should Translate Your VR Game
Clemens Wangerin, Managing Director at vTime, the most widely available social VR experience today, shares insights from the community, the cohorts that exist within it, and more - at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
VR For Everyone – Daydream And Google Play Games
Mike Almeraris, Global VR/AR Gaming & Store Lead at Google, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
Google Play has become a critical platform for game developers to reach a wide and diverse audience. As VR is a nascent technology, both platform and developers have an opportunity to create a marketplace that offers a similarly broad and diverse catalog. In this talk, Mike Almeraris shares how Google Play is adapting its store management approach to programming the launch portfolio of games for Daydream – with the goal of moving VR from a novelty to a mainstream movement.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
A snapshot of today’s VR landscape including learnings from SVRVIVE Studios and the team’s own experience of how to enter the VR market, why VR itself, and thoughts on imagination (stories), exploration (worlds) and emotions (immersion).
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
With a start in mobile gaming, building for VR already came with its own set of challenges, let alone being situated in a market with a very young gaming community and no VR community to rely on for information sharing and collaborations. In my talk, I will tell you how we overcame those challenges and how we efficiently made the switch from mobile to VR.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Game Design For VR
Tadhg Kelly, Game Designer, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
Although Tadhg Kelly works in developer relations these days his background is as a game designer (in the UK for 10 years then the US for 4). He’s been working with numerous VR developers over the last year and seen many good and bad executions of VR games as a result, and as a designer it’s led him to formulate many ideas about what good and bad VR means. His talk focuses on this and presents some rules of the road for studios getting into VR or struggling with existing titles.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Post Mortem: Now You See Me In VR Study Case
Guy Bendov, CEO at SidekickVR, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
Study case for Now You See Me In VR, a movie tie-in game with Lionsgate.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Lessons learned from our released and WIP Tango games: AR gives players not only a sense of presence but also the freedom to choose their own viewpoint. Control of the camera moves from developers to players, and game objects start to take on the properties of physical objects. This is likely to open up new categories of games, and shift existing 2D genres into 3D.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Performance Optimisation For VR – How Not To Go Bust Getting Great Visuals
Tristan Moore, Founder at Broken Window Studios, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
Many developers tackling VR underestimate the performance requirements of building a stereoscopic game at over 90 frames per second. Whether digging into technical features or building VR-ready content, this presentation should get you used to the potential hurdles building a game for VR that runs smoothly, as well as provide some practical examples for how to optimize content for any type of game, VR or otherwise.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Neil Trevett is the president of The Khronos Group, a non-profit consortium committed to creating royalty-free open standards for graphics, parallel computing, vision processing, and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms – and they’ve just announced the working group for their VR and AR standard: OpenXR. The group is made up of a who’s-who of VR industry leaders.
Neil will discuss what it would take for VR to go mainstream from a content standpoint and how open standards are combating industry fragmentation. API fragmentation results in application developers having to spend significant time, money, and resources integrating with a variety of hardware. On the hardware side, companies have to convince both application developers, as well as game engine providers, to support their new devices.
Beyond developers, API fragmentation poses a problem for consumers who need to check if their favorite hardware is compatible with the applications they wish to use, and are unsure whether today’s software will be compatible with tomorrow’s hardware.
An industry standard will allow application developers to spend more time on creating amazing experiences and less time on getting the experiences to work on a myriad of hardware combinations. It will also enable device vendors to have more content available on their platforms and will future-proof their investments. This presentation will look at the development process and roadmap for OpenXR and the impact that open standards will have on mass-market adoption of VR.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Don’t Wait For 2020 – Turn Your VR Idea Into A Viable Proposition Right Now
Deniz Opal, Founder & CTO at Hologram, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
VR provides an incomparable immersive experience that can enrich existing services, as well as create new niche use cases. If you have an idea of how VR can make a change, whether it’s B2B, B2C, educational or recreational, make it a reality today. CTO Deniz Opal talks about how the platform developed at Hologram LTD can help you take control of your delivery pipeline, and catapult you ahead of the stalling “VR is not there yet” crowd.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Translation Sickness – Why And How You Should Translate Your VR Game
Steffen Roemer, CTO & Co-Founder at Applanga, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
Even though English is the lingua franca in game development actually less than half of the possible clients speak English and especially for Virtual Reality you need to make sure that your players understand your game as quick as possible since it’s incredibly important to give them a good feeling from the first second or else they might feel lost and will not try the game a second time.
Additionally the non-English speaking market is huge and localizing any game brings a very big potential for better monetisation. But translating games is no easy job. You need to get the texts out of your game and into the hands of native speakers for every major language who quite often have no clue what the game is about.
To ensure translation quality you need to provide them a lot of context. That means all text elements with their descriptions as well as screenshots and testbuilds of the game need to be constantly sent around and updated. And while there are some translation management solutions that support you in the process for traditional and mobile games there are none that have proper support for vr games.
Regular screenshots do not work very well to explain the context of a vr scene to the translator. It’s also not easily possible to deliver testbuilds since translators would need to have vr equipment and even if they have, it’s quite complicated to deliver updates to test the translations quickly.
The talk will propose tools and workflows to deal with these issues, e.g. how to capture 360 degree screenshots and preview them in a translation management platform, maybe use cheap cardboards to preview scenes and update text over-the-air to let translators preview the translations in-game without creating new builds.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Virtual Reality Game Development
Matt Tullis, Business Development Director, Gaming & VR at Immersion, delivers a VR University Session at VR Connects San Francisco 2017.
With the promise of VR gaming becoming a reality, there has been an increased interest from game designers and developers in leveraging new technologies to create fully immersive gaming experiences. As developers and technologists continue to drive VR gaming innovation forward, one thing has become clear: to feel fully immersed in the VR experience, gamers must be able to interact and feel things around them in their virtual environment to feel present.
From the impact of bouncing a basketball to the tension of a bow and arrow, the sense of touch helps anchor the user into the VR environment and creates presence, thus enabling a fully immersive experience.
With a deep understanding of the science behind how people react to touch, grounded in extensive research, Matt Tullis will discuss how the combination of haptic technologies, audio and visual stimulus can create presence and help make a truer VR experience.
The final entry in the 2017 Connects series is XR Connects Helsinki on 19th and 20th September.
Steve is an award-winning editor and copywriter with nearly 25 years’ experience specialising in consumer technology and video games. He was part of a BAFTA nominated developer studio. In addition to editing TheVirtualReport.biz, Steve contributes to BeyondGames.biz, PocketGamer.biz, PCGamesInsider.biz and BlockchainGamer.biz, as well as creating marketing content for a range of SMEs and agencies.