tommy-palmCandy Crush creator Tommy Palm has moved into making casual virtual reality games with Resolution Games. They’ve already released Bait! on the Gear VR, and it’s the first VR app to feature in-app purchases, and they just announced at Google I/O that they’re designing a launch title for Google’s Daydream mobile VR platform with a title called Wonderglade. I had a chance to catch up with Tommy about developing causal VR games that are interruptible, how they’re designing in natural breaks to not create games that are too addicting, thoughts on the future of free-to-play VR with in-app purchases, how VR games can be social without it being multi-player, developing a game with Daydream’s 3DOF controller, and how casual games may really start to blur the line between games and VR experiences.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Here’s some other videos and updates from Google I/O including a new GoogleVR YouTube channel and the @GoogleCardboard has been deprecated, and Google’s main Twitter VR account is now @GoogleVR.

Here’s some of the relevant GoogleVR talks from Google I/O over the past couple of days (with more coming soon to their GoogleVR YouTube channel.

VR at Google Keynote where Daydream Labs was announced.

Daydream Labs: Lessons Learned from VR Prototyping. This is an absolute must-watch talk by any VR designer since they condensed lessons that they got from rapidly prototyping 60 experiences in 30 weeks.

Daydream Labs: Drum Keyboard will revolutionize text input.

Monetization and Distribution on Daydream

Designing & Developing for the Daydream Controller – Google I/O 2016

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VR Design Process – Google I/O 2016

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Kent Bye
  • Jad

    I have problems seeing this guy as “creator”. He just copied Bejeweled from PopCap.

  • DonGateley

    Thank you for the collection of Daydream relevant I/O 2016 links. That could (should) have been a separate story.

  • Albert Hartman

    You write that Daydream controller is 3DOF orientation-only. But Google IO talk (https://youtu.be/l9OfmWnqR0M at 17:21) shows controller is full 9-DOF. Can anyone confirm?

    • basheertome

      The orientation you get back as quaternion is 3DOF: pitch, roll, and yaw.

      The IMU used to compute that pulls data from 3 different types of sensors: an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer. Each of those gives you 3 axes to work with (so 9 total). However, they’re all measuring essentially the same dimensions in different ways, so the final output is not a cumulative higher dimension. Instead we use that overlap to fuse the data together and get a much higher-quality version of each of the 3 axes of rotation.

      • Albert Hartman

        Beyond the orientation quaternion, it looks like you can also directly call for the gyro vector (rad/s) and accel vector (m/s2) as shown in the slide presented. Isn’t that correct?

        I’m asking because it would be nice to construct a 6-DOF controller tracking, even if only the orientations were good and the translations subject to drift. You could recenter the translations periodically. I’m hoping this is possible.

        • basheertome

          You should be able to access the raw gyro and accel values