GDC Europe 2014: Oculus VR – ‘Developing Virtual Reality Experiences with the Oculus Rift’, Liveblog @ 8:30AM PT / 15:30 UTC

This GDC Europe 2014 session will be given by Tom Forsyth, Software Architect at Oculus VR. Road to VR Editor Paul James is at the session to bring you a liveblog. Find the event in your timezone here.

Virtual reality is significantly different from monitor-based games in many ways. Many choices that are merely stylistic for traditional games become incredibly important in VR, while others become irrelevant. At Oculus, we have collected together our own experiences working on VR titles, and those of other developers working on our platform; and it has taught us a lot of surprising things. Some of these lessons are obvious when looking at the shipped products, but there are many paths explored that ended in failure. There are subtleties that were highly complex and absolutely crucial to get right, but may not have been apparent when playing the games. In this talk, Tom will focus on a handful of the most important challenges that designers and developers should be considering when exploring virtual reality for the first time.

Takeaway
Programmers and designers will gain an understanding of the differences between traditional monitor-based experiences and those in VR, along with the physiological mechanisms behind our perception, and how they can go wrong. Examples of animation techniques, first-person avatars and how players are aware of scale will be given.

Intended Audience
Graphics and animation programmers, gameplay designers, animators. No prior knowledge of VR is necessary.

‘Developing Virtual Reality Experiences with the Oculus Rift’ Liveblog