Face tracking is another big one, because of the level of emotional depth they hope it will allow players to express in virtual spaces, especially cooperatively. ![]() Hand tracking isn’t the only other VR tech that Eiche and Reimer are excited about. Go cut.’ But I've never encountered a situation where somebody hasn't walked through the steps and the game has not been better on the other side…We throw 90% of stuff away. So your game will be better if you just see that through…So developers are a little bit more gun shy to come up to me and be like, ‘I've thought of this cut.’ Because I'll immediately be like, ‘Yes, do it now. Because once you've conceptualized it, you've already solved the hardest problem. “Once you've conceptualized the cut, so once you've thought about it and you're like, ‘I think that if we had to cut this we could,’ it's now your moral obligation to do that cut. But Eiche also keeps a pretty strict philosophy on cutting content. ![]() Eiche says that the team is quite adventuring internally, often supporting developers who preface sentences with “Okay, this is a really bad idea, but…” in whatever harebrained ideas they want to try out. Often, these are affordances they decide to add later.īut affordances also seem like an infinite rabbit hole of adding features, which seems like it could lead to scope creep quite easily. Eiche will then ask them what they expected to happen in that moment, and write it down. The pair tells me when they playtest, the only time they speak to the playtester is during those moments when the tester tries to do something with an object, nothing happens, and they momentarily look dismayed. I should be able to.affordances is what we talk about a lot.” So then you pick it up and the next thing is, I should be able to uncap it and then I should be able to drink it. If you have a water bottle on the table and you reach through it, that disappoints people. “We used to say the water bottle on the table is the worst. ![]() And then you're like, ‘Ah, an egg.’ And you squeeze as hard as you can and it crushes and you're like, ‘Yeah, I did that.’ But you can do a soft pickup with hand tracking and then squeeze. “Even with analog controls, it never feels right. “Spraying a spray bottle, squeezing a sponge, those are all things that controllers don't do well because they're so binary in their state,” he says. Extra stuff that a person might want to do with an object in a world that might be extraneous or even silly. But what a controller can’t do is what Eiche calls “affordances,” or secondary interactions. A controller can give you a button to pick up an object, and maybe do a single interaction with it, then get rid of it. Eiche tells me that hand tracking is great technology for exploring interactions with worlds that controllers can’t accomplish. But explorative as in, I'm messing with the environment.” “VR games just tend to work best when you get sand boxing and you get explorative as a core feature and not explorative in the ‘going through a Zelda world’ exploration. “The things that make console games great are not the things that make VR games great,” he continues. Eiche calls it a “technical nightmare, but worth solving.” The physical space has to be believable not just with one person running around in it and interacting with objects, but multiple. And we are experimenting with those things.”īut with experimentation comes a whole host of technical challenges. “But people haven't conceptualized: we're playing a duet on the piano, the equivalent to that, or we're writing together on a whiteboard or we're sculpting together. “VR multiplayer in the current state, which is totally great and fine, is a lot like, I lay on my floor and shoot you with a big sniper rifle, or I'm flying around an arena throwing the ball,” Eiche explains. Specifically, they tell me, they want to work on multiplayer play that’s collaborative, not competitive, because they believe it just works that much better in the VR space specifically. Hand tracking technology, for instance, is progressing well, and is a major staple of Owlchemy’s plans for multiplayer play in its upcoming new, untitled VR game. ![]() Speaking to me at DICE, the two are ecstatic about the leaps and bounds Owlchemy and VR as a whole have been able to make over the years. And it’s a legacy Reimer is deeply proud of as he steps down from the post of “CEOwl” to move into philanthropic work using climate tech to fight the ongoing global climate crisis, leaving his colleague Andrew Eiche as the new “CEOwl” in his stead. But in VR, this sort of combination of simplicity and playfulness has been the successful brand of Owlchemy Labs for over 12 years. It’s a simple gesture, one that any of us could do in the real world any time there are donuts around.
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