We want large shared VR experiences to happen (aka arena-scaleVR), so our Creative director Balthazar Auxietre wrote a manifesto of sorts were he tells the story about how we got into this, our current issues with the format and why it’s important to make this kind of stuff.
You can find the original post on medium here
The context
The Oculus Quest is an incredible device. Since its release, it has become an instant landmark in the history of VR and has quickly established itself as a platform where developers can meet success, like we did have with the recent release of our game ‘A Fisherman’s Tale’. After many years of fruitful cooperation with Oculus/Facebook, we can only be grateful for the immense effort they have made and are still making for the VR industry to grow.
But besides all the positive things Quest has brought to this industry thanks to its ‘untetheredness’, low-cost and robust inside-out tracking, there is one type of experience we became really excited about when the device came out: users sharing the same space (real and virtual) while enjoying a large area they can roam around freely, without any constraint, cable or tracking devices. Because it was nearly impossible to achieve with any other device (or at great cost), the advent of ‘arena-scale’ VR seemed to us like a no-brainer evolution for the medium, opening a unique set of possibilities for developers and artists.
Why are we not seeing more of this type of experience today, then? Because while we found out the Quest is ‘technically’ capable of supporting these kinds of experiences, to this day there is no proper software access for developers to the guardian settings and sadly this locks us from distributing this type of content to any audience.
Let’s roll back the tape first to explain our story and why we’re making these assumptions…
Our Story
In september 2018, during the Oculus Connect 5 event, Oculus showed publicly a multiplayer demo based on the game Dead and Buried being played in such an arena-scale setting, which seemed to imply that this type of use case might be supported some time after the show by the Quest API, enabling developers like us to make similar experiences.
The ‘Dead and Buried’ Oculus connect 5 demo
We were so inspired by this demo that we decided to dedicate some of our own resources to start a new project that would explore these exciting possibilities of VR in a large, shared space. With the developer kits we were given by Oculus a few months after the show, we discovered that we had access to the guardian settings and that even without first-party support, ‘co-location’ (multiplayer VR within a shared physical space) was not super hard to pull off. We also realized that the tracking was really robust in a large scale environment.
We took this as a good sign and hoped that the official announcement of the support for this use case would soon come. Without any major technical roadblock, we moved forward with the project, and after a few months of development it became Peach Garden, a free-roam large-scale installation where users can wander freely in a beautiful and very poetic virtual garden! We held full-scale playtests in an “ideal” setting of 30x15m (50x100feet) with 8 simultaneous users and it worked nicely on development hardware! We were happy with the result as people we showed it to were super impressed. That’s when we started to work with our partners Diversion cinema to think about distributing it and soon after some major VR festivals already started to show their interest in the project.
For the distribution, we were hoping to use multiple consumer versions of the device to deploy it in festivals, museums, art centers… but meanwhile the Quest finally launched in may 2019 and we discovered that consumer devices did not have the same access to guardian settings, dampening our hopes of distributing the project.
Lastly, at Oculus Connect 6 in 2019, Facebook unveiled the Oculus for Business program which offers more software options to customers interested in managing multiple headsets using a dedicated backend and API. It gave us hope because it seemed like a clear sign of interest from Oculus in opening up their device to other use cases, as well as a way to frame their relationship with location-based entertainment businesses, which could finally turn out good for us. But after the announcement, nothing has moved much on the specific things we were hoping for: more access to guardian settings.
Where are we now ?
For a year and a half now, we’ve hoped for a clear announcement from Oculus to happen in the wake of the Dead and Buried demo. While we have learned from our own experiments with the device that the hardware is mature enough to push these boundaries, it’s unclear to us why Oculus would make the decision to show this demo — which inspired us and several others — and then stop advocating for this use case entirely.
We reached out to Oculus for Business and tried to learn more from our contacts at Facebook, but no one was able to give us a clear answer as to how and when the official support for co-location and large play spaces might happen. We simply have no clue if Oculus even plans to give access to their co-location SDK either through their business program or on a case-by-case basis to selected developers.
Obviously, it’s a shame for us as our Peach Garden project remains at a standstill without being able to properly distribute it, but besides us we know there are many other developers and publishers that are eager to start producing and distributing this type of content. We all see it as an opportunity to create a kind of experience truly distinct from the ones we’re already enjoying at home. We’re convinced that the VR industry and the location-based entertainment industry could benefit from the impact and magic that this type of ‘unlimited virtual freedom’ allows and that it would undoubtedly make the medium even more popular. The feedback we’ve been getting these past few months showing Peach Garden around confirmed that to us clearly.
VR is all about freedom !
We did not randomly choose the Quest as a platform for our project, we made this decision because of our confidence in Oculus’ ability to push the boundaries and open new paths for developers.
After all, one might ask what the use of not having cables anymore is if developers cannot create experiences where users are even more free?
In realizing that we cannot tap into the full potential of the incredible device that is the Quest we feel limited creatively, and for not being able to distribute them, this also cuts our business from an important potential revenue stream.
Experiences like Peach Garden are arguably not the most common use case for VR, but as Facebook’s goal as a company is to ‘connect’ people together with VR, we think there could also be resources and efforts directed towards other ways to connect users, simultaneously in an intertwined physical and virtual world, rather than individually at home. It would be great to see Oculus support these kinds of experiences in the near future.
VR is still in its early stage and for it to grow as a medium, it needs all kinds of artists and producers to create all kinds of content. So in the end, this is not so much about giving access to certain parameters to developers or enabling specific features than it is about enabling a real diversity in the type of content or experiences that are made in VR, and help spread VR to larger audiences.
What we ask for
Today, we’re in need of clear answers.
We would like to know the status of the co-location work and API. Is it something that the current Oculus Quest is likely to support at some point? Is it still actively being worked on? For other devs that are in the same situation, there are huge expectations when it comes to this functionality. So, we’re still hoping that your company considers supporting this use case and we’re writing this letter to let you know that we are willing to work with you and give you feedback, if that can help make any progress on this front.
We don’t need any kind of unlimited access to the device, we just need the proper framework to work together to make arena-scale experiences finally happen.
Dear, Facebook/Oculus friends, we wish that you continue to empower both creators like us and users with great VR devices like Quest… and beyond! We hope that you’ll soon give us the tools to distribute our project and allow passionate, involved developers to show how this fantastic tech can open new ways to use VR.
Let’s continue to push boundaries together!
