Amir Ebrahimi - Unity at CopenX, September 2016
Amir Ebrahimi is the Principal Software Engineer at Unity Technologies. Mr. Ebrahimi holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He worked in different tech and startup companies before he joined Unity as a Technical Account Manager.
After a couple of years at Unity he ventured out as an entrepreneur starting Luminary Studioes, later LUMINARY, before he came back to Unity
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َ and computer science嚣 χ sono, Essen esta tuve tu Joey K assume qu three qu te d worldwide known company. We're headquartered in San Francisco now, which is where I live. And we've been investing heavily in VR and AR over the past couple of years. So today I'm going to talk about VR primarily. AR is certainly interesting. I see it as a couple of years off in terms of widespread adoption. I mean, there are devices you can try that are AR based, but right now VR is the hot topic. So I'm going to focus primarily on that this morning. And I entitled this Eyes Wide Open because I'd like to have you guys move into, if you're just starting in VR development, move into that development with your eyes wide open, knowing about what to expect as you develop applications for VR and what the market looks like, what the business looks like. So why this talk? Well, you know, some of you here may have come because you've heard VR is the hot thing. There's money to be made or, you know, maybe something like this. So my hope is from today to actually save you time and help you gather info about the industry in a way almost to sober you up about what VR is really about. So we're going to take a look at the business of VR, the market. We're going to look at some design, technical issues, and then how you would market your app in VR. And my hope is that for each, you know, I don't know where people are coming from, but my hope is that each of you, you know, each audience group will get a little bit out of this talk. So I look at 2016 as the year that developers and VR application producers survive. And what I mean by that is the market's not here yet. So as you experiment with VR, you really need to survive before you can thrive. And then I look at 2017 and beyond, and actually I'm going to, I would extend this into this experimentation into 2017. I'd say that beyond those years, then you'll really start to thrive if you've been able to survive these early years. So John Ricatello, our CEO, back at our Vision Summit in February of this year, he gave our keynote and he talked about this thing called the gap of disappointment. And it was kind of bold because at the time there were, there was a lot of hype around where VR would be about the market size and the, you know, this doesn't have actual numbers, but the point of this is generally we'd think of this adoption curve as linear. So starting at 2016, we're going to sell, you know, I've heard as much as like 10 million devices in the first year. And then it's just going to grow from there. And when John Ricatello was saying is that actually it doesn't quite work that way. And because of how all the predictions were with VR, that there would be this gap of disappointment. In the long term, it doesn't really make a difference. You see both of these intersect at a point in the future where it's not going to matter. But right now it does matter in terms of what journalists write about and what people's expectations are of the industry. So then, you know, I've captured a few quotes from around the industry just to give a sense of how, what I would say is the silver look at VR and what, how others are looking at it right now. Julian Lynch gave a talk at Vision Summit and, you know, their company focuses on doing VR for architectural visualization. So they have large multimillion dollar projects where they're building buildings in Dubai and East Asia. And they use VR to have virtual walkthroughs of the buildings they're building. So they're making good use of that. So I think the business to business side of things is very important to look at. Deloitte did a predictions for 2016. And I think rightfully so. They said that they would say that 2016 would be the year of experimentation. And then, Neil Schneider is the executive director of the, I think it's the Immersive Technology Alliance. He said 2016 is going to be, you know, a modest year. So then what? So with all, you know, with these quotes coming around, I mean, there are more, there are more, like Bloomberg did a recent study, or not study, but predictions for VR for 2016. And also very modest. So I like to refer to this, this quote given by Michael Abrash. This was it in LA last year, I believe, and at Oculus Connect. He works for Oculus. And he said these are the good old days. And he said, we're going to have a great day of VR. And the reason he said that, and he's been in the industry for a long time, the reason he said that was there's over 20 plus years of research ahead of us with VR. And a variety of categories. From optics to displays to even perceptual psychology. You probably can't read, well, maybe you can read some of those. So for instance, even with that 4K display sitting on our desktops, well, to have the equivalent in VR, if you're sitting at a virtual desk looking at a virtual screen, you need a much higher resolution to have the equivalent of what you're looking at when you're looking at your desktop screen. And so we're talking about being in the range of 8K to 16K displays. So almost a 200X increase in pixels that we need to have for our VR displays. So that's just one example of many of how VR is going to grow over the years. So there's certainly not going to be any shortage of work and engineering effort and innovation in the future. And then I like to refer to Alchemy Labs. They're a game company based out of Austin, Texas in the U.S. And last year in October 2015, they announced that they were going all in for VR. So this is a company that did mobile games initially and then also some desktop games. And when Oculus released their first DK1, they were able to do a lot of things with it. So they were able to do a lot of things with it. And so they were able to do a lot of things with their desktop games. And when Oculus released their first DK1, they were backers on Kickstarter and they decided to make a game for it. And fast forward to HTC, the Vive launch, they made Job Simulator. And just recently last month, they raised a $5 million round in their Series A. And they're now doing work for Adult Swim on one of the IP from Cartoon Network called Rick and Morty. So they've really put themselves in a place to benefit from being early adopters of the technology and to, like they said, to go all in. So I hope that's inspiration for you as developers. I still think that time to hop into the industry is now and to make all your mistakes now while the risk is much smaller than when the industry is already there. And if you have any question about whether this industry is legitimate or not, I like showing this slide. And this is from the VR Fund. And it shows the landscape of VR. I will say I have a document at the end you'll be able to download. I'll have all the links to any of the articles. I've cited everything where I've gotten my numbers. And you'll have that in a PDF. So you don't have to worry about taking pictures or looking at the slides. So right now, over the last year, we've had $2.5 billion invested in the VR industry. And I guess VR and AR. I'll include AR in that. So we're just one small logo in this sea of logos. So there's certainly much room in the industry for innovation for these things. And I think that's a great way to start. And I think that's a great way to start. So there's certainly much room in the industry for innovation for these areas that Michael Abrash spoke about that will need to have innovation. So let's move on to more of the market and what you can expect in terms of devices. Obviously, we have the Oculus Rift outside. And I don't know. Not Oculus Rift. I saw the HTC Vive. I think there are some Gear VRs out there. I'm not sure if there's a Rift out there as well. But I like to look at VR as a full spectrum. So on the mobile side, we've got Google Cardboard. And some people say that's not VR. Well, you have to include it because I don't know what to call it otherwise. And we'll look at the numbers around some of these devices. But that's on the... And I won't call it low-end because it's comparable to the actual cost of the device. I mean, to buy a Google Cardboard viewer, it's like $20 to do that. And then I would call premium mobile what we're seeing with the Gear VR. Certainly, you have a better-looking phone, higher resolution screen, and then you have a better-fitting headset. And we have Google Daydream, which was just announced and will be available later this year. So on the desktop class, on the very high end, we have the Oculus Rift, the Vive, and then soon to have PlayStation VR. And there's this interesting range in between that's starting to pop up if you're following some of the industry news, which I'm calling the tween range or the in-between range. And these are devices like the Sulon Q, which has an AMD chip built into the actual headset. So your wireless, it's kind of like premium mobile, but it's really shooting towards desktop-class quality VR. And just recently this past month, we have Intel announcing their Project Alloy and Qualcomm talking about their Snapdragon CPU and all-in-one headset. And something I'm not listing here is also in the desktop class. I don't know if these devices are going to pan out, but they're called backtop PCs. So they're backpacks with full PCs where you could use it with the HTC Vive and essentially have, you know, be untethered. So this is a dense slide. You don't really have to try and read all of it. I'll just call it the salient points. So these have all the devices I just showed you, their release dates. Pretty much everything's available now except for two categories. The Google Daydream, which will be out this fall, as they said, and the Sony PlayStation VR, which will be out October 13th this year. The unit shift is an interesting one. So Google Cardboard has five million units out there. And that's thanks to a New York Times push that they did where they included a Google Cardboard with your New York Times. And behind that is Samsung Gear VR. They have reportedly over one million active users on their platform. And they have Gear VR 2 that's readying up. There's not a distinction in terms of applications that can run. If it's Gear, if it's the Gear VR app, it'll run on both. But they're making small adjustments to the headset. So they're already on revision two of that. And then they now have two phones that can run Gear VR. So as I think they announced, they had some they had the best sales on their Samsung Galaxy S7 than in the company's history. Another important one to point out is Sony PlayStation VR. So this is desktop class VR at $399, which with the other prices is kind of unheard of. The quality is comparable. And here's the key point for the Sony PlayStation VR. There's 40 million PS4s out there. So even if we have a 10% attach rate, we're looking at potentially 4 million new VR customers this year or within a year. So I think that's significant to watch for. I'm really looking forward to October 13th and this December season, because I think that'll give us a sense of where our starting point is. Going back to that slide that I showed you from our CEO, there's no question in my mind that by 2020 we're going to get to where we're going to get anyway. So I mean, it's not about that VR is for me. It's not about whether VR is going to be around. It's just what's the curve going to look like. So on the feature front, I used to have this slide in other talks, and I've had to keep updating it because more and more features are coming online. For instance, the Oculus Rift initially didn't have room scale, but recently they announced that they are going to allow for four cameras, four trackers attached to your PC to give you that. And they have controllers coming soon. Again, this is a dense slide, so really there's nothing to call out except that desktop class has two key things or three key things that the others really don't. And that's having controllers you can track, your head which you can track, and room scales so you could walk around within an area. But there's interesting developments on the mobile front where with Google Tango, you're going to be able to track your space. Essentially, it will map out the physical space, so then it can place yourself in that space. So I'm looking forward to seeing where that technology goes. And if in the future we have mobile where we can walk around, move our head around, and yet we don't have any we don't have to set up any cameras on the outside. So let's move into some of the design aspects of building for VR. So going back to actually let me go back once. So going back to this slide, as you think about what VR apps you want to build, you really do need to think about where the cutoff is in terms of what hardware you want to support. Because it might be difficult to have many different ways of interacting with the hardware. So for instance, if you're going for cardboard or Gear VR, you don't have track controllers. You don't have head tracking. So a common approach for selection in this paradigm is to use the hardware that you have. Also on the cardboard, you have a single button on the side. So you can use that once you've looked at something. You can pull the button and that can also select. Another option, though, with the gaze detection is when you're hovering over something, if you see something, you can pull the button and that can also select. On Gear VR, you have a touch pad on the side. So you can both select that way. Plus it's a full, has X, Y coordinates. So you can actually track where the finger is and you can do things like gestures. So that's the way you can do it. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. Feel free to share your ideas through the contact information or email box. Feel free to share your ideas through the contact information or email box. So let's move on to the next slide. So let's move on to the next slide. We have four區準 keypad stores these days. And certainly it's pretty ModeG好不好. The company I mentioned before, Alchemy, this is the founder who's actually quite good at juggling. This is him juggling tomatoes in VR. So the... it's very close to, in terms of the reaction time, juggling is a pretty tough thing to do. So I thought that was cool to include. So how do you design VR apps? Well, there are two approaches. So there's the idea of do you augment an existing app or do you go exclusive for VR? So I'm of the mindset you should go exclusive. I know you could dip a toe in, into VR. But if you're going to put money behind something that you're going to put on an app store, I would say you're going to be competing against everyone else who has VR out there. And for those who've built exclusively... exclusive apps that cater to the strengths of VR, do you think just dipping your toe in is really going to do much for you? So I would really impress on you to go exclusive if you are going to put money behind an app and play to the strengths of VR. So one thing I didn't say, but David did earlier, is you have a nice setup that they have out here for trying different devices. And while you might be in this mode of gathering information, there's one thing about VR and about even me speaking about it. It really doesn't matter what I say, you need to try it. And I mean that in a sense I've seen hundreds of people come through the Unity offices. And I've been fortunate enough to see that single moment at the beginning when they put on a Vive or an Oculus Rift and they move their hands around and they go, oh wow. And I'm hoping that all of you can have that experience so that when you see more slides from some of our other speakers, you'll get it. Because really it's something that... I'll just take a little segue to my experience with VR. Initially I backed the Oculus Rift and I received it. I had worked at Unity, then I went off and started my own mobile game company. And we had received Rifts and we tried it out. And everyone on the team was like, yeah this is pretty cool, but it's not there yet. So even I wasn't a complete believer that VR was ready for prime time. And it wasn't until I tried room scale VR that I had my wow moment. And I felt that the future had just changed at that point. So I hope that you'll get that chance to try it if you haven't already. So going back to... and the reason why I was taking a little moment to explain that is when you start to think about how to design your apps, try it. Try it both for both sides. So if you think an idea won't work, prove it to yourself. It's easy to prototype. You can use Unity, Unreal, it doesn't matter. It's easy to prototype, stick a headset on, try moving stuff around. If it doesn't feel right, then maybe you've just invalidated a... You can validate that that was the right way to go. And vice versa. So if you think there's a design with VR that's going to be really awesome, try it out first before you design around that key thing. Because what you'll find is that this is a new medium. So we're trying to figure out things. And I know a lot of people are wanting to have standards that I can just tell you exactly these are the things you need to do. But I also think that's the fun of working in the industry or building apps right now is that you don't have those clear guidelines. So... and then on the consideration, so when you're building apps, think about what your target is or your goal. Are you looking for widest reach? If you're looking for widest reach, then you might consider using Google Cardboard because there are five million of those out there. If you're looking for potential sales, well, the Gear VR platform at a million active users, that's a pretty good stable base to build for. You have the Rift and the Vive, but those numbers are still coming online still in terms of how many units are out there. If you're building for studio survival, so if you're wanting to build VR and survive so you can be around in one to two years, well, then maybe you should look at B2B. Maybe you should be building commercial applications so that you can keep your company afloat. So I'd say be clear on what you want to achieve as you move in to building these VR apps. And above all, please build for comfort and avoid motion sickness because, you know, this medium's new. So as people try things, it'd be unfortunate if they try one experience and that sours their view of VR as a whole. And then be consistent throughout in your design. So if you're going to go for high quality animations, do that across the board. There's nothing more jarring than having a great experience but then seeing that maybe the budget ran out near the end of the project and the animations aren't so good. That'll pull me out of the immersion or I would think pull anyone out. So, you know, really build the scope of your apps around what you can afford and what you can build and try and be consistent across that with all of your sounds, your assets, your GUIs. And then there are a lot more resources in the PDF. I've included a lot of UX design patterns and links for that, so you'll have that as well. So moving on to interface design, if we have any UI designers out there, this would be hopefully helpful to you as you start to build UIs. I think that the near field of VR is very special. So it's within arm's reach. There's something about both the parallax that you get from moving objects close up and being able to touch things in the near field that works really well. So I would say be close to any of the action that you have in any UI and make it world space. So put it out in the world where you can now pick up and reach it, reach forward or point at something or actually press a physical or virtual button in front of you. The UI should be in front of you and it shouldn't be like, you know, be careful about putting stuff outside of the player's view. And then don't pin things to the head unless you can build a full HUD if that's actually part of your application. Make it a 3D HUD if you are going to do that. So if you were building a flight simulator, then you could have a helmet looking HUD for that. But don't just throw like a UI that's 2D that distracts with the head that can make people sick sometimes. And then if you pause your game or apps, they'll allow them to look around and possibly you can put a little polish there where there might be some moving elements. It'll keep them immersed in the application. And then a common thing is if I have a track space and I leave the track space or if I stick my head through a wall, because you can do that in virtual reality, do something that would kind of point the user that they should come back to the interaction. So fade the colors, blur the visuals just to signify that, you know, hey, this isn't something you should be doing. Pulse the controllers and give them real loud sound so they jolt them if they move out. No, I'm just kidding. So and then help them find their way back. You have positional 3D audio. So you can have like if they are over here, you could have something virtually that's drawing their attention back. And then don't rely just on static or visual effects. And then don't rely just on stereo that you've got 3D. There's a good talk. If you Google Carl Callowart, he works at Unity and he gave a talk at Vision Summit. And his talk is entitled Genius Loki. And it's going back to architecture and looking at how we use architecture to actually guide the eye and that it's not all about stereo, that there are tricks from hundreds and thousands of years ago that have been used with designing buildings, designing spaces to make spaces interesting to move around and to explore. And then also on design, we have 3D audio. So we have spatialized audio in this thing called HRTF. It just stands for head related transmission. It's a head related transfer function. And what that means is that what we're doing is we're simulating now how sound will come to the ears. So when you have your headphones on, you can actually hear different audio to each of the ears. And this is magical. It actually helps place you in the space even more. It is expensive to do this, but it certainly will add to the immersion. So if you are able to incorporate these audio into your app, then I think more power to you because you're going to create an immersion. Not everyone's doing this right now. So you need to make sure that the audio clips or that they pop, that they sync with whatever the person's doing in your app. Because on the flip side, if you're not in sync, that also will bring people out of the immersion. If you're streaming audio and it's not in sync or it's slow or it's even off by a little bit. It's not auto magical, so it's not just going to fix everything. You do need to mix to record your audio well. And then in Unity and probably other game engines, you should avoid the default fall offs. Those default fall offs were built for games. And this is, you know, we're trying to simulate, you know, at the ear, realistic audio. So you probably will want to change those settings. And of course, try it out in VR. Don't have your audio designer go build out a whole bunch of sounds without trying it first, like a first batch of things in the experience. So in Unity, how would you start to build things for VR? Well, it's as simple as checking a checkbox. And there's much more to it if you're building a full app. But what I like to point out is if you go to the player settings in your Unity project, you can check a single box. And that will enable head tracking and rotation for an HMD. So even if you're an artist or a designer and you want to throw something 3D in front of you and move around it, you can do that just by checking a box and adding the devices that you want. Do we have any engineers in the audience? Okay, maybe like 2% of the audience. Part of this talk is about the engineering side. So again, this is also in the PDF. But if you're business people or you're artists, some of this will appeal to you if you're an artist. But if most of you are business people, I'd say get this information to your developers so when they're building their apps, they'll know what to do. I'm a software engineer actually at Unity. So a lot of the things we do for mobile apps, we're also going to do for VR. And that means using baked lighting or baked global illumination. And then we're going to use occlusion culling in our apps. This basically is so that you're not rendering things that are not actually or potentially visible from your location. You're going to use batching, which for if you have buildings in place, you don't want... It's an optimization where if these buildings aren't moving, then you might as well batch a bunch of them together when you're rendering. You're going to share materials that you're using on your assets. And then there's level of details. So if you want to have a virtual Apple up close, well, you might have a really high resolution lot for that. So it looks believable when you have it in front of your hand. But if you have a bunch of apples around the bottom of a tree, you don't need to have that resolution for those apples really far off in the distance. You'll be spending way too much rendering those for not much benefit. So that's where level of detail comes in. And one of the tools you can use is simply gone to generate those lower level of details. Full screen image effects are expensive. So I'm talking about things like motion blur, which doesn't really work that well in VR. And any kind of vignetting on the frame. They are better now in Unity 5.4, but still be wary of how many of those you use. And then with 5.4, we have new VR specific optimizations. So back here, there's a checkbox at the bottom that says single pass stereo rendering. And before in VR, we had to render each eye separately initially when we first started. And that's expensive. And so we now have a single pass where it renders. It will at least issue the draw calls once for rendering to both eyes. And then as developers, you should be using your profile early and often. This allows you to see where your time is being spent. And I think anyone will get this, even if you're technical or not. 90 FPS is 11 milliseconds. And that's how quick you have to render those frames to keep immersion. And there was a talk by Alex Vlachos from Valve at GDC earlier this year. And he says really 11 milliseconds isn't correct on PC. You should be shooting for 10 because the operating system is going to take at least one millisecond to do the stuff that it's going to do. You're never going to really get that full 11 milliseconds. So 10 milliseconds is not a lot of time. And you need to watch every millisecond or nanosecond of what you're spending your CPU usage on. So I'd say profile your app as soon as you have an app to try out. And there are profiling tools in Unity. I think Unreal has those. Pretty much any, even if your whatever toolkit you're using doesn't have profiling, there are tools from the industry that you can use from Nvidia or AMD. And then best practices. So frame rate is king. It's I would say one of the most important things in VR. It's not worth having better graphics if you're going to be rendering at 30 FPS. Another thing, too, and I like to point to Job Simulator, if you do have a chance to try it, their graphics are very cartoony. They give you cartoony hands. But once you've tried VR, you'll realize that the immersion is what's more important than the actual graphics. So and on Job Simulator, there's an anecdote where they were talking about how people would pick up items off of this counter. One of the things you do is you make food in the game and people would like cut things. And then they would want to lay the like something down like the knife. And they would actually lay the controller on the table and just drop it. It would fall. I went through a few controllers that way. So the brain accepts this immersion. And what I guess what I'm trying to impart to you is that it doesn't really matter if your graphics are tuned looking right now. So you can play with that. I already said optimize early and often. And then if you're doing anything complex, you might want to think about trying to thread that if possible. So you avoid CPU spikes. Be careful about allocations so you don't trigger the garbage collection. On a PC game, you can have a few jitters. But if you're in VR and you move your head and you have a pop because you were doing something on the CPU, that doesn't feel good in VR. Reduce your poly count and texture size. And I have another slide about this, which I'll go into more detail. And here's the big part. So don't wait till the end of your project to try and improve the quality of your frame rate. What you may find is there won't be that one big thing that you can just attack and fix and then everything magically works. It's likely that's going to be a lot of small things along the way. So that's why I'm saying be mindful of your frame rate always. In fact, when you first start out, if you're not at 90, figure out how to get to 90. And then every time you keep testing, if you're not at 90, figure out how to stay at 90. So that when you get to the end, it's not like you have this beautiful application that no one's going to be able to play because all your art assets are too expensive. So I was talking about the personal space in terms of the range of perception. With zero to four meters is special in VR. You definitely get that sense of parallax when you move your head around things. Once you get beyond that, as in real life, our depth perception isn't... I mean, things can start to look flat. We have a lot of built-in depth cues that don't rely on stereo parallax that kick in around that range. And then far, of course, is beyond 10 meters. But the reason why I'm calling this out is when you design your art, you can... Ideally, you'll have high resolution textures at that close range. And your geometry will help define your shapes. You'll put a lot more resolution into the things that are up close. You can use these things called normal maps for additional detail, but use them for fine surface detail. Normal maps worked well for games and mobile, but they don't work so well in VR. Because you really need to see the shapes between when you have a difference between the eye renders. And for the intermediate range, so four meters to 10 meters, you can drop back with the texture size. You can reduce some of your geometry. You can use normal maps for larger surface detail. But don't break the silhouette. So don't try and do huge bumps along walls if you have a wall with bricks. You don't want to have that break the silhouette with trying to do that with normal maps. You should probably be doing that with geometry. And then at 10 meters and beyond, use all the techniques you've used for games. Because really, you're not going to tell in VR what those look like. So again, level of detail is very important for every stage of the rendering. And then finally, marketing. So how do you market your app? I'm going to go out of order on this. Because one of the first things I think which is working really well, if you do have a good PR agent, try and get out there in non-industry publications. So if you can somehow get in Variety or Time Magazine or New York Times, these things help the industry as a whole. But they'll also help get new people that might not usually be reading something that's specific for VR, like a publication that's specific for VR. License IP helps with that. So if you're building something for Cartoon Network or you're building the next Star Wars app in VR, you can really piggyback on getting good exposure outside of traditional industry publications. Oculus has this place called Experiences. And if you have an app that you want to have people test early, you can put your app there and get feedback from them. And people know that these are in-progress apps. So it's already kind of built into the platform that you can put your app out there before it's ready. Steam has Greenlight. And then my big thing is just have as many people try your app as possible. VR is so new that if you have an idea about what to do in VR, don't think that people are going to steal it. They probably want you to finish building it because they've got their own ideas with VR as well. So I wouldn't be so worried about having this idea that if you're full, someone might steal. I don't think that's our industry right now. Oh, sorry. And then we have Made with Unity. That's a site where we feature developers and your applications. Write your own story. Talk about how not just about your app, but your team and how you've come to be building VR apps. There are other forums you can go to and a lot of other information which is in the PDF. I'm bored with this slide at this point. Let's look at the future. So the work I'm doing is authoring VR in VR. So that's within our labs group. And I'll show some slides about that in a moment. But I'm also very excited about non-games use of VR. It's every week that I see something from the medical field about the use of VR. So burn victims that if they're using VR, they've actually reported having less pain as they're being operated on. I don't know actually how that works, how they could have this head mounted display strapped to someone while they're on a hospital bed. But someone's done it. And it's not particularly probably special to VR other than that VR is so immersive. It actually has the brain be in a different place where they don't have to use as many drugs on the person to handle to manage the pain for that. So another article I just read recently is that VR is helping people with spinal injuries recover. So there's training that can happen even at the VR level. And people have moved from full paralysis to partial paralysis. So I'm really excited about how maybe each one of you out there, if you're in a different industry other than games, might apply VR to your industry. I think it's ripe for innovation. And it's where, like for me, it's where I'm excited about for this next year. I think commercial adoption is actually going to outgrow games right now for at least a period of time. HRTF or the 3D audio I mentioned is still not ubiquitous. So if you are, if you have the time to invest in figuring out how to do 3D audio, well, I think that's worth your while. Because then you can be a standout app in that regard. Eye tracking, I think, is on the horizon. I think that's one of the near future things we're going to have. And what that means is inside VR, I can't tell where you're actually looking. So we can't adjust the render of the eyes to focus with where you're looking inside the headset. But there's a lot of research that's happening right now in companies that are being bought by Oculus and HT. Well, I don't know if HTC actually has acquired a company on that front. But I do think that will be coming soon. WebVR, this is really awesome. Last month, Firefox in their nightly builds has the first version of the VR. The first version of WebVR built into the browser. And then Google and Microsoft have followed suit this month with extending support into their browsers. And I mean, if you look at the future of VR, most people aren't going to want to download apps just in general. We'd like just to go to something and just have it stream immediately. So I would watch this space. This is going to be pretty powerful moving forward. And then China. So I love it because China is this country that once they find out about some technology, there will be 100 companies that build hardware for it. So I don't know what that means in terms of consolidation. But China is, you know, there are a lot of people out there and there are a lot of technology companies. So I would watch where, I mean, even at Unity, China and East Asia are a significant part of the installs that we see coming through off the apps that people build with Unity. Continue to watch Apple and Google. I mean, obviously we know Google has Daydream. Apple, we're still wondering. And I'm not saying that because I know anything that you don't know. Surprisingly, at Unity, we do have a good relationship with Apple. But they are very guarded with what they share. And then I would also say, you know, watch some of the little guys. So there are companies like Lytro that are building really cool 360 camera equipment. It's expensive. I think it's like around 300,000 right now. But watch the people in that space. And another company. Well, yeah, I'll just continue. Actually, I had a space moment right there. But yeah, some of the little guys that are building hardware or software tools that I would say watch that space as well. And then the impact of AR. So HoloLens is out for 3,000. There's Meta, Magic Leap. We're waiting to see some hopefully reference hardware soon. But it helps. Both these industries are going to play with each other as we move forward. And people ask the question frequently to me, like VR versus AR, which one's going to win? And as human beings, we like black and white. But this is gray. VR is, I think, always going to be around. There are certain experiences that you may not want to be walking around your house and see your house. You might want to be somewhere completely different. I think in the long term, AR is probably the more mass adopted technology that we're going to see just because we'll probably have sunglasses at some point. Or maybe we have contact lenses. And that's something that you're not going to want to have a huge headset. Or even if it's smaller at that time, you're not going to want to block out the rest of the real world. So I think AR in the long term is where we will have more widespread use. But VR will still be around. So I work at Unity Labs. And we look at experimenting with where we might take the product in the future. And right now, we've been looking at one year out. And that started a year ago. And eventually, we'll start looking at three years out, five years out, maybe 10 years out, and charting a path. And experimenting with where we might take the product. So the current experiment is authoring VR in VR. And what that means is, can I build apps in VR for VR? Or maybe even for non-VR use? And these are old videos of our tech. But it just shows how I can literally move mountains in the distance using VR. This is showing a feature called the chessboard, where you're able to manipulate things with your hands in the near field. But you can see changes in the distance. And then this is just another visual of showing me moving objects around. And there's something special about working with objects directly with your hands as opposed to a mouse and keyboard. And I'm excited about people who maybe have never used Unity before might start to author in VR. Because you don't have to learn tools that are really built for professionals who've been building things in apps like Maya. Or where you're used to having four views of something. Now you can just look around an object instead of having to move with the mouse and keyboard to navigate to it. Oops. So I'd like to include this video too. This is from Oculus. They have this toy box demo. It's not for authoring, but it illustrates where we might be in the near future with building content. I like the idea of thinking about having multiple people in VR working together collaboratively, building an environment. And that requires our networks to get better. Again, more technology that has to come along to be able to do that. So here's the part where I like to share what I hope one of you will maybe do. Because I'm looking forward to trying some of these things. Or just hearing about them. So some experiments I'd like to see done in VR, at least in the entertainment space, are a film that's completely produced in VR. So that means that people across the world show up virtually. Maybe each person in a separate Vive setup. And there are set designers that are setting up the environment. And there's a producer and a director and actors that have full mocap. And maybe texture artists that can do work right on the spot. And I think this will happen. I don't know how soon this will be. But I wouldn't be surprised if this happens within the next 10 years. And then in the retail space, I could see a book signing being done. A virtual book signing. Maybe in the environment. So of the book. And maybe the author is actually signing virtual books. And then you get a PDF or maybe a book plate mailed to you after the book signing. And you can put in your real book. In the realm of education, kind of going back to this, I could see having a sandbox room where educators could have all kinds of props. And teach whatever they want to teach virtually. So maybe there are tutors that you would have virtual whiteboards. But if you're teaching physics, why not teach physics really with real objects? And in the tourism front, I'm a big fan of William Gibson if you've read his recent book, The Peripheral. I see a near future where we can rent a peripheral or a drone and have a VR headset. And tour a real world space with that. And be able to look around everywhere. So some things that have to come along are 360 video streaming has to come a long way from where it is right now. It's still pretty expensive to stitch the video together. So doing that in real time is still not here to the best of my knowledge. And I don't know. The stuff in VR moves so fast. Maybe some people are already doing stuff like this. Or maybe these things are already in the works. But I hope maybe this will inspire some of you to think of your own experiments. So closing remarks. So Deloitte said that VR in 2016 would be a year of experimentation. And I fully agree with that. I think you should stay in that mindset right now. Don't look for the standards. Don't look for the black and white of how to build your VR apps. Stay in that open mind so you won't miss that cool thing that will come along when you're just playing around with VR and experimenting. Right now we have few buyers of games to seed the market. It's the game companies that are building VR like Alchemy are doing pretty well with even the small market. But I think enterprise adoption over the next year will be important. I think that if you're a developer building VR apps, to focus on B2B. Because there's a lot of cool things that can be done in that space. Virtual walkthroughs of buildings, car configurators. There's no time to waste. So I think going back to what Michael Abrash said, these are the good old days. And I think it's a special moment to be a part of the industry. To build apps during this part where if we look back to the mobile market, there was a short period of time for that. I think we might have a more breathing room with VR than mobile. But maybe eight years ago or nine years ago, there was no real app store like the iOS app store. We weren't thinking about a mobile market as much. There was Java phones, but not to anything to the scale we've seen. So yeah, I think it's a once in a lifetime chance to be part of a pretty cool movement technologically. We had the TV, we had internet, we had mobile phones. So I think VR is one of those things. And in the long term, I don't see it going away. So thank you for coming to this awesome event today. And I'm just calling out special thanks to some of the people at Unity that we share a lot of information as we try to put the best information we can in our slides. And then there's the resources download. So you can go to that and download a PDF. And that will give you a lot more resources. Thank you, Amir. Thanks, David. Just a quick question before I let you go. You talked about the good old days, the new frontier. And you talked about a lot of the headsets. In your opinion, like these people here, if they're going to choose one headset they have to focus on, which headset or technology do you think is the best? Which headset or technology do you think has the most impact on the Mac right now? We love black and white. I want to know what should I be doing? There are strengths for each of the headsets. So if you're looking for seated experiences, you very much would probably want to build for the Rift. It is a good seated experience. Like if you ever get a chance to play Lucky's Tale, that's something you can play on your couch. And it's pretty cool because it's like having a giant TV wrapped around. You're in the world, but you don't have to move around. So there's that. Like on Gear VR, Land's End is an awesome experience. And that's a seated experience. So depending on what you're going for, you would pick the right platform. If you're wanting to interact in a space, the vibe is great. And I'm sure Rift at some point will be there when they have multiple cameras. And if you're looking for something really easy for people to hop into, then build for cardboard. So there's not one device. It really is your target group, what your goals are for your company, your app. I think those will drive your decisions. Just really quick, what's the best case of content you've seen for VR? So I'm excited about an app that's coming out or a game that's coming out later this fall. It's called Budget Cuts. There's a small demo on the HTC Vive. It's one of those moments I'm like, once I finally get how this thing works, I'm like, oh, that's really cool. Yeah, so. Yeah, it is. You know, you use the space and you walk around in the office too. And you can throw a ball to where you want to move, but you can look around before you move and then you teleport. And they have some really cool puzzles built with that mechanic. So yeah, it's a fun game. All right. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Ibrahim E. Give him a big applause.
