Best practicesin virtual reality

Jaroslav Stehlík

Lead programmer

DIVR Labs

@jaroslavstehlik

Divr Labs

First Czech VR game company

Working on a sci-fi horror shooter Blue Effect

for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Playstation VR

http://divrlabs.com

Virtual Reality?

So, what is the virtual reality?

What was Virtual Reality?

early 1991

slow/huge hardware

expensive components

people were more interested in the internet

What is Virtual Reality?

2012

Oculus reinvented VR

Valve invented absolute positional tracking

Now every hardware manufacturer has it's own Head-mounted display

Perception of reality

Why does the brain think that something is real?

Perception of reality

Depth perception

Stereoscopic vision works only in short range distances and not everyone sees in stereo.

Actual head movements give us much more information than stereo vision.

Perception of reality

Measure

People do compare everything to everything.

Scale matters a lot in VR.

If something is off, the perceived reality often breaks.

Perception of reality

Textures

Every surface has microstructures "texture" which our brain is possessed with.

Without detailed texture, there is almost no perception of depth and motion as well.

Immersion

What drives immersion and what breaks it?

What drives immersion

emotions

memorable moments

physical world

gameplay

graphics

sound

Designed immersion

Design

If everything in the virtual space has it's clear purpose and is fully interactive, people get easily immersed by every item, tool placed in your virtual world.

Motion sickness

What causes motion sickness?

Motion sickness

It is not clear how many people suffers from motion sickness but from reported cases, it is clear that it is not a minor problem.

Most people get sick when their body starts moving without perceiving actual physical movement.

Motion sickness

Velocity changes

Twist and rotation

Moving ground or large part of the world

This discomfort can leave a really bad experience

Does not affect everyone the same

What is safe: constant linear movement or teleportation :-/

Graphics

How to prepare graphical assets for VR?

Graphical assets

How to prepare cool 3d assets?

Keep your units straight! 1m in 3D editor = 1m in 3D engine!

Always prepare assets for PBR "Physically based shading"

Constantly check your assets in VR!

Even, if you model by blueprints it is highly probable that

you will make a mistake which can be noticeable in VR.

Scanning assets

Most realistic assets are scanned physical objects.

They have proper shape, size, material properties and because they are real, they have some purpose in our physical world.

https://megascans.se

Optimise assets!

Your assets are rendered in stereo. That is min. 2x per frame.

The best looking VR games do render twice the native resolution!

The game has to run always smooth 90 FPS - that is 11ms per frame!

Keep your polycount minimal as possible!

Reuse materials and textures as possible, use texture atlases.

PBR Physical materials

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice

PBR Physical materials

At DIVR Labs we use Substance Painter. It is not about the software but about the result.

Keep your albedo / metalness / roughness near physical values

PBR Physical materials

Be extremely careful with normal maps in VR.

They tend to create shimmer artefacts which can be perceived as aliasing and cannot be solved with a regular antialiasing method.

Valve does not fake geometry with normal maps!

PBR Physical materials

What workflow to use?

Depends on your model.

Metalness can create nasty artefacts around blending from metal to non-metal.

Specular has bigger memory overhead on your VRAM.

How does it look in Unity?

How to showcase VR?

Mixed reality

Green screen your player

Buy a third Vive controller to act as a camera motion tracker.

Mount controller on the camera and render the game instead of the green screen.

Awesome results!

http://www.kertgartner.com/making-mixed-reality-vr-trailers-and-videos/

Thanks...

Thank you for your attention!

Now is the right time to ask me any question.

Do not hesitate to try out our demo today.

Also, we are hiring: http://divrlabs.com