Develop 2015: The state of Virtual Reality

As Develop is an event where devs get together to discuss the bleeding edge of technology and the production models that accompany it, it’s hardly surprising that VR and AR should feature prominently. Like GDC, Develop is split into a series of concurrent themed tracks, and what’s perhaps more surprising is that these discussions weren’t merely contained within the technology track, but bled into almost every other topic including art, narrative, audio and business. Despite still being a way off coming to market, VR is already impacting every area of game development and design and providing the catalyst to numerous discussions.

The problem of implementing audio was discussed by Nick Ward-Foxton, a Senior Audio Programmer from Sony’s Creative Services Group; on the indie track Ana Ribiero discussed making the transition from being a Brazilian pie maker to making a highly anticipated VR game Pixel Rift; Katie Goode reprised her talk given recently at the Norwich Gaming Festival on techniques of how to implement; Richard Tongeman was on hand to explore the applications of VR for filmmakers; John Foster of SCEE discussed the making of much discussed Morpheus demos London Heist and The Deep, and specifically how to maintain believability; User Interface designer Dan Gilmore discussed how to go about creating a UI for VR.

It reminded me of the impact Wipeout 2097 had on me when I first played it.

For me, though, the best examples of VR were to be found on the show floor. In particular the futuristic racing game Radial G, developed by Tammeka Games, provided a rollercoaster of an experience (although I managed to avoid screaming in terror this time). Racing around a cylindrical track that snakes through space, dodging disrupter fields and hitting speed boosts, has something of F-Zero about it in terms of speed, but it also reminded me of the impact Wipeout 2097 had on me when I first played it, not least because of the kick-ass Drum ‘n’ Bass track that accompanied the sensory overload here. Without VR, Radial G would be a fun but largely unoriginal racer, but the implementation of VR instantly makes it a fresh and exciting experience.

Moving away from games completely, Develop played host to the finals of a fascinating competition in the experimental use of VR conducted by Epic and The Wellcome Trust, a charitable organisation dedicated to medical science and furthering its image and public awareness through its portrayal in media. The Big Data VR challenge saw five teams come up with ways to use VR in visualising large amounts of real world scientific data.

The winners of the £20,000 prize were Lumapie, a partnership of creative studio Masters of Pie and Luma Code, whose solution to visualising the vast amounts of data collected through following the offspring of 14,000 pregnant women over three decades by Bristol University impressed researchers. The data is displayed as a series of spirals and using two motion controllers you can alter the attributes of various aspects of the display to explore relationships between different factors. What I found interesting was that you select these variables through the kind of radial menus that console gamers should be more than familiar with.

Another approach to the same data was by Melbourne based technology and design company Opaque Multimedia, who focused instead on using VR to deal with querying the data and collaboration. Once I’d donned my Vive goggles I found myself standing in a kind of 3D graph with data points floating around me, like I was standing in the galaxy map of a Mass Effect game. Meanwhile my ‘data buddy’, whose job was to manipulate the data to aid scientists and researchers in establishing datasets suited to their thesis, could be seen flying around the space in a little camera mounted sphere that reminded me of Dinklebot from Destiny. Colours can be applied to the data to make it easier to spot correlations, for instance in the five minutes I was in the simulation we established, if memory serves me correctly, that there was no obvious relationship between a high BMI and instances of Diabetes in the data, contrary to established thought. Of course I won’t claim the credit for the breakthrough, though it’s worth pointing out what I achieved (with the help and patience of my data buddy) in a few minutes would have taken researchers many months using conventional methods.

The applications for science, business and academia (basically any field that tries to make sense of huge amounts of complicated data) are clearly vast, and I find myself surprised that this has been the aspect of VR that has impressed me the most so far. It’s this wider application of VR to the benefit of wider society that I feel will help the technology gain the foothold it needs. It’s fascinating to see tech developed in the games industry could have so much of a positive impact on our future.