Interactive Virtual Reality Characters | Tom Sanocki
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Delivered at Casual Connect USA 2016. As VR approaches mainstream markets, we will increasingly want it to feel more like real life. The most important part of real life is our emotional connection to others. In this talk, Limitless CEO Tom Sanocki (also co-creator of the interactive VR short film Gary the Gull) discusses how interactive VR characters that respond to voice, gestures and other human social cues will become the future of virtual reality in entertainment and beyond.
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Interactive Virtual Reality Characters | Tom Sanocki
- 2. Finding Nemo Cars Ratatouille UP Brave Monsters University Halo 3 Halo 3: ODST Halo: Reach Destiny
- 7. Real Life
- 12. Why Are Characters Important for VR?Core of Mainstream Entertainment Emotional Connection
- 13. People are How We Interact with the World
- 14. People are How We Interact with the World The UI of Real Life
- 15. Characters in VR Need to Respond Like Real Life People Otherwise We Break the Illusion
- 16. What Do VR Characters Need to Feel Believable?
- 17. What Do VR Characters Need to Feel Believable? ‣ Voice Recognition ‣ Head and Hand Gestures ‣ Gaze Direction ‣ Distance ‣ Any Other Rich Human Input Available in VR
- 18. Why Doesn’t VR Have This Today?
- 19. Why Doesn’t VR Have This Today? ‣ Characters are Too Hard to Build ‣ Character Software is Terrible and Nonstandard ‣ Expertise is Hard to Find ‣ Interactivity is Hard
- 21. ‣ First Customer Project on the Limitless Platform (Motional) Directed By Mark Walsh, ex-Pixar writer/director & animation supervisor, directed Partysaurus Rex ‣ Character Responds to Voice, Gestures, Distance, Gaze Direction ‣ Your Choices Affect How Story Plays Out ‣ Premiered GDC 2016 / Unreal VR Lounge, AMD & Sony PSVR Press Conferences ‣ PSVR Launch Title (And All Major VR
- 23. • Involve the VR Community • Next Phase of Character & Cloud Platform Tech • Closed Alpha with Top Studio Customers • Expand the Team • Be More Ambitious What’s Next?
- 24. Special Thanks To:Mark Walsh, Mark Lee, Maddie Taylor, Natalie Burke, Milton Cadogan, Trevor Berninger, Hoagie de la Plante
- 25. Special Thanks To:Mark Walsh, Mark Lee, Maddie Taylor Natalie Burke, Milton Cadogan, Trevor Berninger, Hoagie de la Plante
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, I’m Tom Sanocki, CEO & Founder of Limitless. And I'm really excited to talk to you today about interactive VR characters.
- Hi my name is Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless Ltd. I’m going to share a few quick thoughts on where we believe virtual reality is headed <history>
- Limitless is a VR startup that has recently come out of stealth. We have a team of ex-Pixar and ex-Bungie veterans, we’ve worked on 7 Pixar films and four AAA Bungie video games.
- When we first started looking into VR we saw many people who approached VR storytelling by taking inspiration from film. And that’s great, because film has many great lessons about how images and words can create powerful experiences.
- And of course video games are a big inspiration too, with many great lessons to learn from interactivity and player experience.
- Some peoplee even look to theater, which is great — we should do this more often, since theater tells great stories without controlling where the audience is looking. But for us all of these felt a little incomplete — they were missing something. In some ways we’re missing the original inspiration for VR, which is…
- the Holodeck. And the Holodeck wasn’t trying to put you into a game, or a movie, or theater. It was trying to do something else.
- It was simulating real life. For us this was an important realization. We should take our inspiration for VR from real life. And what’s the core of real life? What makes real life interesting?
- It’s people.
- Conversations
- Community. Sharing and being present with others.
- And building emotional connections. That emotional connection is what makes real life interesting,
- So why are people, or characters, important for VR? They are the core of mainstream entertainment. We care about people and characters, real or not. That is what the mass market consumer audience cares about in their entertainment. And characters create that emotional connection that’s so important to us as humans.
- People are how we interact with the world. Across time, space, and technology, or lack of it, the one constant is that we engage the world by engaging with people.
- I could even say that People are the UI of real life. And as VR approximates real life the UI of real life becomes the UI of VR.
- We need characters in VR to respond like real people, otherwise we break the illusion. If I put my hand in your face and you don’t back away, you don’t feel real.
- So what do VR characters need to feel believable? A few things
- Voice recognition — they need to respond to what you saw. As we all know, people spend a lot of their time talking. They need to understand hand and head gestures, like nodding and shaking. They need to respond differently based on where you’re looking, whether you’re paying attention or not Distance matters. Saying something two inches away from your face has a very different emotional resonance than if I say the same thing five feet away. These are the core available today, and we’ll add additional ones as VR tech improves.
- You might ask, if this is so important, why isn’t it happening in VR today?
- Well, you need to build the characters, and that’s crazy hard today. The software is terrible and nonstandard, so it’s hard to use and even harder to share your work. Character expertise is very specialized and hard to find. Only after you get all that done can you tackle interactivity, and interactivity is really hard. These are the problems we’re excited to solve.
- I was talking to my old friend Mark Walsh, CEO of Motional and an ex-Pixar writer-director and animation supervisor, we worked together on a few films at Pixar. He thought the same things about VR characters, so we made an interactive VR character in a short film together. It’s called Gary the Gull. You’re sitting on a beach about to enjoy your tasty lunch, when a seagull shows up and starts talking to you. And just like in real life, you can talk back! You’re a part of his story, just like he is a part of yours.
- It’s the first customer project on the Limitless platform Gary the Gull responds to your voice, gestures, distance, gaze — what you do and say Your choices affect how the story plays out — you are a part of Gary’s story just like Gary is part of yours. You can replay Gary the Gull and make different choices. Gary the Gull premiered at GDC 2016 at the Epic VR Lounge, and was featured in the AMD and Sony PSVR press conferences. It’s headed to consumers in October as a PSVR launch title and all other major VR headsets. I’m going to show you a short trailer. You’ll see how Gary responds to the narrator’s voice.
- We’re excited to share Gary the Gull soon and introduce a new way to tell stories in VR. What’s next? - First, we want to involve the VR community. Interactive VR characters have so many great problems to solve, and we can’t solve them alone. We’re excited to work with other people and companies tackling these and other VR storytelling problems. So if you’re excited to tackle this, you should do it. We’re continuing to build out the next stage of our character & cloud platform tech We’re running a closed alpha with film & game studios to help them build more interactive character experiences. We’ve raised a round of funding so we’re growing the team And be more ambitious. We’re going to tackle the next level of interactive characters with a marquee customer, where we’ll be deep in the trenches suffering together
- And thank you to some of the folks who helped bring Gary the Gull to life. Thank you everyone! Happy to take a few questions.