Oculus VR – Ciaran Laval

September 30, 2015

Joyce Bettencourt Captures Fascinating Chat With John Carmack At Oculus Connect 2015

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has blogged about mobile phone footage from Joyce Bettencourt of John Carmack talking Metaverse, Second Life, Minecraft and a hell of a lot more at Oculus Connect 2015; John Carmack: “Crass Commercialization”, Not High-Mindedness, Will Lead to the Metaverse.

John Carmack, for those who aren’t familiar with the name, was the co-founder of ID Software and lead programmer on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake amongst others. These days he’s the chief technology officer for Oculus VR … the company behind the Oculus Rift … I hope most of you are familiar with Oculus VR! Oculus offer their staff free breakfast, lunch and dinner on their campus, so they sound like a decent company to work for although with perks like that you wonder if their staff get time to go home or out for a meal. Don’t panic, they also say they have family friendly policies.

Anyway, back to the footage. This comes in at just over fifteen minutes long and would probably have been longer if it hadn’t been for the fact that Joyce’s battery on her phone died whilst filming. Modern technology hey. I hope this is legally obtained footage, I trust Joyce so we’ll dive right in and I’ll embed the video at the end of this post.

John Carmack talks about virtual reality, head tracking devices, how the technology is still evolving and you get an insight into just how technically challenging getting a compelling VR experience to work is. He also talks about virtual worlds and the metaverse and I guess that’s what most people who read this blog will be interested in.

He starts talking about virtual worlds around the two minute mark and then gets deeper into the concept of a metaverse around the four minute mark where he states that he fought against Oculus building a metaverse team because they don’t really know what they are doing well enough yet, he adds that they didn’t want to build a Second Life but better in some way. John also raises the point that what the metaverse is still a question that hasn’t really been answered.

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August 4, 2015

Second Life’s Shadow Gives Linden Lab An Edge In Virtual Reality Future

For a virtual world that many people comment with surprise about it still being around, Second Life seems to still cast a mighty shadow over the virtual world scene. Over at Re/code, Eric Johnson has published an excellent article about how the land lies : Welcome To The Metaverse. I heartily recommend that people read this article in full.

The article opens with commentary from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg regarding humans creating spaces :

Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.

These spaces are of course what people have been creating in Second Life too, in many and varied forms and guises.

Early on in the article Eric seems to be talking of Second Life in the past tense. This needs to be taken in context, Eric is really talking about how Second Life did not become the 3D internet that some hoped it would and how in the future, VR ventures will be hoping to go mainstream, become the next big thing and really get embraced by society :

A perfect metaverse, then, is more than just a video game or an application. Like a Web browser, or an operating system, it would offer users a means to do many things, and likely pay for them in many ways. That’s the Big Idea — that VR would be as transformative to the Internet as the World Wide Web — and it’s why so many companies are testing the waters. If one or more of them can crack it, they would unlock a great deal of virtual reality’s long-term potential.

Those of us who have already embraced virtual worlds know that the potential is there, but we also know that a large number of hurdles exist too.

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January 19, 2015

Oculus VR And Linden Lab Both Hiring As Development Of VR Gathers Pace

A sign of a healthy market can sometimes be found in the number of vacancies in that sector. Sometimes a number of vacancies can indicate that a company is not the best place to work because there’s a lot of churn. However, let’s be positive here.

Oculus VR and Linden Lab are both hirng and both list plenty of vacancies. Both companies also have plenty of perks. Reuters have reported : Facebook hiring spree hints at ambitions in virtual reality and beyond. Whereas this indicates Facebook hiring going beyond Oculus, there are an impressive number of job listings at Oculus :

Oculus Rift, the maker of virtual reality headsets that Facebook acquired in a $2 billion deal last year, is among the key areas slated for growth, with 54 jobs listed on its website, according to a review by Reuters of listings.

Oculus are advertising positions for Software Engineers, Hardware Engineers, Content, including a game designer, Resaearch, Recruiting, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Design & User Experience, Interns and Co-ops and University Grads, Masters & PHDS. Whereas this doesn’t give us a clear indication of where Oculus are going as a team, it is interesting that they are advertising for Unreal Engine and Unity engineers. Are Oculus planning on making games or are they planning on making sure games work well with Oculus?

Oculus offer some interesting perks :

Perks include flexible hours, free food, happy hours, team trips, free Oculus hardware, and much more. We offer competitive salaries and a full range of benefits including comprehensive health care and 401k.

Some of those perks I’ve seen cited as being a barrier to entry, but I’ll come on to that later. Oculus also state that they are an equal opportunity employer :

Oculus VR, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment with Oculus is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Very noble indeed. As for Linden Lab, their careers page lists around a quarter of the number Oculus do, but that’s still a very healthy 14 positions.

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January 6, 2015

The Future’s So Bright You’ve Gotta Wear Goggles But Don’t Write Off Second Life Yet

As we enter 2015 an awful lot of people seem to be getting very excited about the forthcoming VR boom. I do anticipate a VR boom, I just don’t see it really happening this year. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, OpenSim, Kitely, Inworldz are more likely to keep hold of their communities in the short term because, that’s where the communities currently are and the brave new worlds aren’t ready yet.

However some people feel that 2015 will be the year where VR goes big, I’m more in the camp of 2015 being a year of tease and talk rather than mass adoption. However there are new and interesting things on the horizon that will get people interested in VR and they’re not just in games and virtual worlds. Storytelling is a big potential market here as is live music and theatre performances.

Peter Diamindis over at the singularity hub is, not surprisingly, excited about the future of VR : These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015 :

Expect a lot more action on the virtual and augmented reality front. 2014 saw the $2B acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook. In 2015, we’ll see action from companies like Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity (the successor to Second Life), immersive 3D 360-degree cameras from companies like Immersive Media (the company behind Google’s Streetview), Jaunt, and Giroptic. Then there are game changers like Magic Leap (in which Google just led a $542 million investment round) that are developing technology to “generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world.” Oculus, the darling of CES for the past few years, will be showing its latest Crescent Bay prototype and hopefully providing a taste of how its headset will interact with Nimble VR’s hand- and finger-tracking inputs. Nine new VR experiences will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year, spanning from artistic, powerful journalistic experiences like Project Syria to full “flying” simulations where you get to “feel” what it would be like for a human to fly.

I’m certainly a big fan of the direction High Fidelity are heading in and with the platform being so open, there’s a lot of potential for people to grasp hold of it, but I think High Fidelity is also a good example of how much ground work has to be done before people adopt. I’m excited about the future of High Fidelity and I certainly expect to see a lot more people experiencing and talking about High Fidelity in 2015 but I don’t see many thousands of people leaving Second Life for High Fidelity just yet.

Over at AD Week Christopher Heing is talking about marketing creativity with VR : How Oculus Rift Is About to Reshape Marketing Creativity Brands are enamored with the potential of 360-degree storytelling. The storytelling angle sold this to me, but the article also talks about Second Life :

Nancy Bennett is a virtual-reality marketing veteran. (Yes, such people actually exist and are about to become hot commodities among talent recruiters.) In the mid-2000s, Bennett had her avatar boots on the Internet-code-built ground of Second Life, constructing cyber experiences for her employer at the time, MTV Networks.

Of course, Second Life never really took off. So with her been there, done that perspective several years later as chief content officer at Two Bit Circus, she does not deal in hyperbole when it comes to the impact the much-hyped virtual reality headset Oculus Rift will have on marketing. Rather, Bennett leans on data. One-third of her agency’s new business in 2014 was powered by the Oculus Rift developer’s kit, helping grow her 2-year-old Los Angeles digital shop from 15 to 35 employees.

When people talk about Second Life never really taking off they’re really talking in terms of mass adoption by the mainstream and that’s something that can’t really be argued with. However the point people miss so often when they talk about brave new worlds is that they recognise that there’s something in virtual communities and communications but they can’t quite figure out what that is. The Oculus Rift may well answer some of the questions, or it may be that the answer is that virtual worlds are simply a niche product. Time will tell.

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