Back on March 20th at the Game Developers Conference, better known as GDC, our guy redacted had the good fortune to meet Palmer Luckey – the founder of Oculus. I’d like to tell you that the guys are now hanging out, and we’re getting all the inside news regarding developments in VR headset gear, but that just wouldn’t be true. This was our first opportunity to attend GDC, and it couldn’t have been better. Our first stop during the conference was at the Oculus booth so we could be first in line to try the DK2, and that’s exactly where we were first in line!
Had we known what to expect from Epic, we’d have been hard-pressed to choose where to be the first morning of GDC. We were out of the Oculus booth maybe 20 minutes after arriving and had already tried both Couch Knights and Eve: Valkyrie – we were feeling the privilege. By the time we’d gotten around the corner to Epic’s booth, there it was writ larger than life, but it didn’t register even a little bit that the price and information we were seeing had anything to do with the Unreal Engine. It took a real Unreal person to get it through our heads that not only was Epic announcing UE4, but it was also available RIGHT NOW and for only $19 a month – TO ANYONE! This was overwhelming news. We recognized that the greatest game engine ever was being unleashed on everyone for a price that everyone could afford. Like the t-shirts worn by some of the reps said, “$#!T Just Got Unreal.”
The next stop was with some people that are starting to feel like friends – Allegorithmic. Not only did we make the effort to visit them in Hollywood back in December, but I’d also run into Alexis Khouri and Jeremie Noguer at Steam Dev Days in January, and now here we are in March, seeing even more of the crew. The night before, we went to a get-together sponsored by Allegorithmic that pulled together some of the key people working with the Substance suite of tools; for some reason, redacted, and I were invited. To be honest, we’ve been on point with feedback following our testing of alpha and beta versions of their products, so I guess a free burger on the guys was in order. This was also our second encounter with the CEO of Allegorithmic, Sebastien Deguy, and Dreamworks concept artist Gee Yeung. If only we understood on these days how important FMOD Studio was going to be to our products we would have spent more time with them; blew that one.
Being in the right place at the right time. There we were, standing at the corner of the Sony booth minutes before the GDC floor was going to open to the general public, when someone said, “You’d better get in line around the corner if you want one of the 650 tickets Sony is giving out to try the Morpheus VR headset they are debuting.” redacted nor I needed to think two seconds about that before we were charging in the wrong direction for the line. When we got to the correct corner, there were already about 80 people lined up for one of the coveted tickets; we had no problem scoring one for each of us. Our tickets were stamped for an 11:00 a.m. demo, and promptly at 11:00, we showed up and were soon immersed in a shark tank, followed by another demo of Eve: Valkyre. There was no denying that the Sony experience was within a few degrees of quality of the Oculus Rift, which adds to the verification that VR is definitely on its way.
Earlier during the Conference, we’d seen Cymatic Bruce trying the Virtuix Omni. The Omni is an omnidirectional treadmill-like device that will allow players of various VR games to run, walk, jump, and crouch to allow greater realism in their VR experience. Later in the day we ran into him on the floor and took a minute to talk things Virtual. He was just coming from his encounter with the guys from Razer and STEM. Redacted, and I had met with them the night before. Cymatic is certainly one of the strongest proponents of VR out there and has introduced many of us to some Oculus demos we’d have otherwise missed as we work crazy hours to create our own environments.