Oculus VR’s Jason Rubin says designing VR titles is the toughest learning curve in games

Above: Jason Rubin and Geoff Keighley talk about designing for VR at GamesBeat 2015.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: Are you going to get into VR yourself? Will we see a Jason Rubin game?

Rubin: I’m happy doing what I’m doing now. I consider all of them my children, but I raise them from afar. I don’t know. Who knows? But right now I’m really happy jumping from project to project and helping solve the little problems as they move toward launch.

GamesBeat: You mentioned the mobile gold rush may be over, but there’s an interesting conversation to be had about mobile VR versus the Rift. Gear VR is out there. What’s your view of at least the first way a mass market is going to experience VR? Is it going to be through mobile or a headset like the Rift?

Rubin: Oculus’s answer is that we believe in both, clearly. We have our partnership with Samsung and we’re working very closely with them on Gear VR. We’re excited about that product. The $99 price point announced a couple of weeks ago is an incredibly compelling addition to a phone you already have to get you into VR. It provides a really cool experience that surprises most people who put it on. They say, “Wow, this is absolutely amazing.” On the other end of the spectrum we have the Rift. It provides this experience that’s unforgettable. Everyone who puts it on remembers the first time they put it on. It’s hard to say how VR pans out. But I would say, right now, mobile is starting at lower-end and moving up. Rift is starting at the high end and moving toward the middle. Somewhere in the future we end up with the perfect device at the right price point that has a broad enough market to become a huge success. How that exactly plays out I don’t know.

GamesBeat: The Rift is obviously not just the headset. You need a great computer to run it. There are barriers to entry there. That’s why I think the mobile experience — it’s pretty compelling. When you’re thinking about studios and games, where are developers going? Are they building games that work on both? Do they have to bet on one or the other?

Rubin: Sometimes you show the developer the Rift and they say, “This is unbelievable.” But then they put on the Gear VR and they say, “This is where I want to work. This is the future.” At other times you give a developer the Rift and Gear VR and they absolutely just want to work on Rift. That’s a developer preference.

GamesBeat: Are you doing games that will be on both?

Rubin: There are definitely games that are on both. The fundamental difference between the two is that there is no positional tracking on the mobile device right now. It has three degrees of freedom. You can look around and see in any direction, but as you move forward, backward, left, or right, it doesn’t register that change. If you were to stand up and run forward in your game, the whole world comes with you on Gear VR, whereas you will run into whatever you’re running at on Rift. That fundamentally changes some games. Some games don’t work on one or the other. HeroBound and HeroBound 2, these third-person dungeon crawlers we did, work great on both.

Above: Samsung Gear VR with Oculus tech

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: When you think of studios and where you’re placing your bets moving forward — I know you’ve worked with a lot of developers. What are some of the titles you’re working on or the types of experiences you want to build?

Rubin: We’re trying to run the gamut. We have a lot of games we call tabletop, for lack of a better word. RTS and MOBA would fall into that. There’s a weird feeling like when you were a kid and playing with toys, when you’re playing a game and looking down like a giant on a tabletop. It’s incredibly compelling. You feel like it’s your little universe you’re building. We have third-person character action games – Edge of Nowhere from Insomniac, Lucky’s Tale from Playful, a bunch of others that remain unannounced – that are incredibly cool. The challenge there is, you tend to focus on the characters.

We’re trying to invent ways to get the player to actually look around, because the power of VR is having this giant universe to look around in at any given point. But third-person games have worked well. Chronos is another one we’ve announced, which is fantastic. Then we have first-person adventures. Onto that you have to layer input devices. Everything we’ve just talked about is headsets. Our touch controller gives you an incredible ability to put your hands into space and reach out and see them. You can point and thumbs-up and do things like that. Another thing to say, by the way, is that Facebook believes in social. Facebook owns Oculus. There’s a strong belief that social is going to be a huge part of VR’s future.

We have demos right now where I can point over there and you’ll turn around and look at what I’m pointing at, even though we could be on different continents looking in different directions. It all just works with the 3D sound and 3D visuals. We can play ping-pong across giant chasms. It feels like I’m standing in front of you. The second presence moment I experienced after walking off the building was the first time I went into what we call Toy Box, which is a multiplayer demo where you do nothing but pick up and mess with stuff. There’s no game in it. I’m a floating blue head, you’re a floating blue head, and we have floating blue hands. There’s just hands and a head.

If I walk at you, you will get that feeling of human fight or flight. What is this person doing? Why are they coming at me? Do I need to do something? No other medium, no matter how—I watched Jurassic World last night on my flight. No matter how that dinosaur gets up to the TV, it’s still just a dinosaur on the TV. When you see things in VR come at you, you get that feeling. Even though I’m a floating blue head that’s nothing to do with me, you’ll recognize my body motions. You’ll recognize me as human. You’ll react to me as if I was human. We’re doing a lot with the touch controllers and social interactions.

GamesBeat: When you say this, you paint an amazing picture of VR and how impressive it is. When you look at the traditional games business, is VR just going to wipe out the traditional console game? Is everything going to be in VR? Or will VR just be something that’s cool for short session experiences, and I’ll still want to sit down and play Grand Theft Auto like I used to?

Rubin: The short session experience I’m not sure is a truth. There are things I’ve done for many hours without having a problem. What I will say is, there are some things we’re really good at doing in 2D games. 30 years of Naughty Dog has created titles that are not all of a sudden going to go away. A lot of those titles won’t work in VR because of the locomotion issues and comfort issues.

I still want to play those games. VR does an incredibly good job of letting me play those games on a 70-inch television with the best sound system in the world sitting next to a friend. Nobody in VR space says, “We’re going to wipe out every other kind of game.” You don’t hear that. No one at Oculus says that this is the end of anything. We think that it amplifies and improves everything that’s out there. We announced the Netflix app. Netflix is awesome in VR. It’s a gigantic screen that most people can’t afford to have in their house. On a plane, if you download your movies, it’s a great way to zone out in coach.

Above: Jason Rubin, the head of worldwide studios at Oculus VR, is hooked on VR.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: Those traditional 2D games will still exist, but you think everyone will be viewing it in VR?

Rubin: Maybe not everyone. But I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. I happen to love the Grand Theft Auto franchise. I can play it in front of her if I have a headset on. When I was going to college and I was stone broke, we were three people sharing a tiny TV. I can put on an Oculus headset, plug it into my laptop, and I’m sitting in an amazing room watching TV, again, with friends who are not in the room, avatars of my friends. I can tune out my roommates. They’re not there anymore. We have an Xbox integration that plays through Rift. It’s amazingly good.

It’s a great way to play. When I grew up, we would play Mario Kart next to each other on the sofa. We’ve lost the trash-talking, right? We’ve lost the ability to look over and laugh at somebody. Trust me when I tell you, even though you’re an avatar – you’re playing a gnome and I’m a flaming chicken – when I look at you and I laugh, you get that. “He just laughed at me.” You feel that. Going back to the Mario Kart party, even though we’re not in the same room, is incredibly compelling. I think it makes everything better.