Renyan Jiang

Virtual Reality Storytelling

May 1, 2016

Graduate Student Assignment

The development of a VR game software – VR Fruit Slice

Background

The rapid development of the VR technique provides the game developers an open environment, and thus numerous of eye-catching innovations have been created recently. Facebook, the company which has acquired the oculus two years ago, is now one of the biggest holders of VR contents. I interviewed my friend Herz, who happens to be one of the VR game app developer works for Facebook, about his experience in building VR content. This perspective that differs from those of VR app users and players is professional and meaningful to all beginners in VR like me.

About the APP

The Virtual Reality APP he introduced to me is a motion capture game named The VR Fruit Slice. Just like the 2D version of the fruit slice, the players could slice to cut the fruit apart and gain credits upon, but the experience is augmented. The principle behind is all about the motion capture. Players can use any kind of cellphone that has the gyroscope as a hand lever. This hand lever is equivalent to a position sensor, and transmits its position to the connected VR head set. Therefore, the VR head set is able to perceive the location of the hands. Herz’s group had built up the demo of this game and he said more applications could be add-on items in this game accordingly.

Where did the idea come from? Herz said he was inspired by a VR game developed by Google named the “Lightsaber Escape”. Similarly, Lightsaber Escape is a motion capture VR game that can be controlled by wielding the cellphone as the handle. And the users can simply fight like the heroes in Star War with a smartphone and a computer.

Procedures of the development

The process of developing the gear and building the app is relatively complex. They had to first read the date on the gyroscope handset, and then transmitted them to the gear VR. And then built the virtual knife or spear which would be later applied in the game according to all the position information the hand could possibly be interpreted from the data.

The game was built in Unity, however they had to learn more to make this happen. Herz said, it would be impossible if he knew little about the Java script and had no skill set of JS. The group had to network with the predecessors in the VR industry, who have experience in Java interpreting and massive data transmission, to promote and push the project forward as well.

It seemed painful for creating this handy VR game, however, the whole process took places in a super efficient way. The demo was built up only in one day, including the investment and the promotion.

Difficulties

What’s unique about this project is that it’s the first time a gesture-tracking function, which doesn’t acquire supports from other specific hardware, has been built on a Gear VR device.

They had encountered difficulties when analyzing the gyroscope data. The gyroscope data were vast and scrambled, and couldn’t be used as a source of motion tracking. They then interpret the data and translate it into a Java script so that the game engine could read and understand. The amount of coordinate calculation was huge, and it was rather complex，tiny miscalculation could lead to a serious failure. For a while the team was hindered on this crucial step, yet the group was finally able to over come it.

There were only five members in his group, one in charged of the web construction, two focused on the sensor, and the rest two took the responsibility of designing the front end. It was a tough task for them as the human resources and the time cost were so limited.

Target Customers

The target customers they aimed at were mainly the younger generation, since the youth is always fascinated about the high-techs, and can never say no to an interesting game. While the 2D fruit slice was already so famous that all generations were playing that, they figured their productions would arouse a wide attention as well.

Although what they’ve got now is only a prototype, it won’t take long to have this app ready to be distributed. And there will be an easy access to this game – simply play online and there won’t be any shipment involved, the bright future of this game is foreseeable.

Takeaways

Herz said, the Kalman filtering, also known as linear quadratic estimation (LQE) – a more advanced measurement, would definitely offer a great help, which would make the relocation more robust. Yet this technique is still beyond his reach. But he did learn from the experience and gain more knowledge on the Apache server (The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially called Apache, is the world's most used web server software.) when they were testing the demo.

Herz also mentioned in the interviewed that the VR hardware will soon be lighter and the processor would be a lot faster. In the future, VR can be widely used in remote shopping, remote medical care, and distance education, aside from game television and film. It was predicted that 9 million VR headsets would be sold out this year, so that a massive use of VR headset could possibly happen in the following year.

The reason why it has still been rejected by some of the costumers is that the new technique of VR requires an updated of personal laptops, in order to provide mutual supports. And the contents that have been produced are not good enough as well, namely the resolution has to be as high as 4K to reduce the dizziness. Vertigo is mainly caused by three aspects: the images appeared in the headset have more than 20 milliseconds of delay; everything we see is focused, unlike in the real world, our eyes have been used to focus on one point and the rest were out of focus; the movements of the pictures we see do not match with actual body movement. But those issues could be resolved shortly.

The author’s feedback

According to the experience of my friend and my own, VR headset and VR related contents are novel, yet it would cause some uncomfortable feelings like dizziness. And the device always comes with all kinds of lines, which is of a troublesome when using it. But as long as those problems could be settled, we won’t be able to regardless of the revolution VR brings up. Just like what the third industrial revolution had brought to people's life, VR would provide us a brand new perspective human could ever view the world.

Questions Addressed in the Interview

For either you or your team-What's the project you most proud of or you find is the hardest？Why is it？What's your responsibility in building this？What's the project about and where did the idea come from? What's unique about this project? How long did the investment take and how long the development has/had been？What skill set you applied to build this project? What tools/engines you used to build this project? Brief introduction of the key steps you built your part of the project? Any technique you hope you could have known to make this project better？What did you learn from doing this that you did not know before? Any bugs that you had a hard time solving and why is it hard? Who your target customers and the reasons behind it? Where and when could we/customers access to this product? How is the user experiences? What VR technique could not achieve currently or what new high-tech in VR would be soon achieved? And finally, what’s the brief history of Facebook VR development. What’s the future of VR? Why the user acceptance still remains law? What are the pros and cons of applying VR technique? What uncomfortable feelings might VR experience rise and how it could be solved?