The fall and rise of VR

N: First, I wanna ask you from today's perspective regarding the Eipix. Can you tell me what would you do differently?

Adrian: Yeah, there were a lot of things that I would do differently of course, because I have more knowledge and experience now. But the problem is that when we started to build a company, we didn’t have enough experience regarding managing the company. So most of the things that would change regarding how we build the company and how we managed the people there. We were good from the technical state point and good in delivering products for the market. And we had success with those products but as we scale really fast the problem was building the company to work on the bigger scale. So probably the most things that I would change would be that because I learned a lot of new things during that way. And I learned how to manage the company better now, of course. Because I have a lot more experience. But this is something that we all need to learn all the time.

N: Let’s move on VR. I am sure that is not dead, but why is it still not a mainstream?

Adrian: I will not say that VR is still not mainstream.The problem with VR is that the expectations were really high. And a lot of people expected to be mainstream now, their market size to be a lot bigger than is now. And there were a lot of problems with the first generation of VR headsets, they were expensive, you needed an expensive computer throughout the games. There was a connection with the cable to the computer. VR headsets quality was not so good, it was hard to set up. And a lot of those problems are now solved, I could say that they are solved with standalone headsets like Oculus Quest 2 where its stand alone device that runs by itself. You don’t need any computer, it’s wireless and it’s cheap. Actually it’s 300 $ on the market. So it’s a really good device. And we just now see the growth of VR because of those standalone headsets.

N: We are here talking about innovation. VR by its nature is innovative and its novelty. But then the question arises how to innovate in something that in its nature is innovative?

Adrian: There are a lot of fields where we can innovate in VR. Because the problems that are in VR are that are not present in traditional, lets say, flat screens. We are building something for that. You are using for VR your body and a lot of things are linked with that.

Innovation can be regarding hardware or software. So if we are talking about software, we have a lot of innovations regarding haptic feedback because if you want to grab an object in VR, you need to feel the way to fit. So, how to solve that problem? We saw a lot of devices that are trying to solve with weight shifting, the weight on the device or something like that. On the software side there are a lot of problems regarding the feel that you are experiencing. So I see that the most common mistake is that people are trying to put the first time users for VR on roller coasters. We are speaking really fast and most of those experiences are not high quality and you will get nausea. There are some really interesting things about how we can solve that issue. Because our body, if our body doesn’t feel what our eyes see, it’s strained to react as it was poisoned. That way you are getting those nausea. So we need to trick the brain to think we are doing that.

One of the things, lets say, if we are moving in the game, you could use some kind of narrowing field of view. This is happening as you are reaching higher speed. So in that kind of way, you could trick the body, to think it’s moving faster. So there are a lot of really interesting things and researchers done in that field. And there are a lot more issues to be solved.

The most important thing is , let’s say, to have the experience where you have natural feelings like trying to pick an object from a table. If you have a table in front of you, the user will want to pick every object and to interact with it. So in traditional games or experiences, you don’t have problems like that. The user can go to the places that you didn’t expect him to go. To go through the walls or something like that. He could reach the level that you didn’t think he would reach. If he is not able to move in that way, but in VR everything is permitted. You need to think of really different kinds of ways, from the design state point, how you could give a users natural experience. Because without that, VR would not be, let’s say, special, it would be nothing special than just images on the screen in another device.

N: You gave me so many interesting examples. I don’t have any experience with VR so far.Just by listening to this it’s very interesting. I remember that you said about the roller coaster because probably a lot of people saw clips and videos on YouTube when somebody is on a roller coaster and he’s screaming and everything. And I think that’s a very interesting part of VR, especially from your perspective and your thinking of motorics and everything that is going behind.

Adrian: Yeah. The problem is that one of those experiences are mostly in three degrees of freedom. What does it mean, it only checks the rotation of the heads and things like that.

When we are talking regarding the VR, we are mostly thinking about six DOF, six degrees of freedom. So you could move forward, backward, lean so that’s the whole point of VR. The problem is that you have, let’s say, a lot of cardboard VR, where you could acquire headsets from a supermarket, some kind of plastic asset that you can put your phone in that. And you will think that the VR is that, and its really a bad quality. Ok, it’s the first touch with VR. But the problem is that the people will think about the technology based on that. So it didn’t happen a lot to technology, it’s happening in some other ways to be approachable to people, to know that we exist. But they think still that quality that they tried, let’s say a few years ago when Gear VR was popular. So now it’s completely different. I think now we need to re educate the people regarding the VR and what it is now on the market.

N: You gave me many examples of innovation inside of VR. I wanna ask you how you make decisions, what to innovate next and where to go next?

Adrian: The most important thing is play-testing, so you need to detect the problems that are arising in VR in your experience that you are building. And play-test is something that helps you a lot when you are trying your experience games in VR with real users. You will find out a lot of different things because you can do things in an unlimited number of ways. When you click on an icon on lets say, app, there are not so many ways you can click it. But in VR you can approach it from a lot of different state points. And then you see how the people are reacting to that and detect the problems that are in VR. And based on that you will have a list of problems and then you can see how you can solve them.

A lot of those problems are unique for your experience. Most of them don’t exist in rational matter, you don’t have resources where to or how to solve them and how to be innovative there regarding the solutions and to test with the users. So you are making 5 or 6 prototypes and then you are testing with the users and see what will work the best, and try to get some conclusion from that. And most of innovations come from experimenting like that, so the most critical part is play-testing with different users. Not all the people are the same, they play in different styles, they are of different height. So the height is something that affects the player if you put a button in the game very high, shorter people could not reach it. Those kinds of things you need to think of, not just like you have a joystick, keyboard,mouse but your whole body affects how you will experience the game.

N: Basically everything is about user experience there?

Adrian: Yes, user experience is important. The most important part is that we need to learn about the human body a lot and how it functions, how can we provoke some movements and things like that. I saw a lot of people that have a table in front of them in the game and in real life they don’t have a table but you have some controller that you are holding VR and when you are finishing the experience you try to put that controller in the virtual table and they just fall down. So, this is one of the problems that you have in VR.

N: You’re expecting that the controller to stay there, right?

Adrian: Yeah, you expect that table is in front of you. The immerssivness of VR is really high and this kind of things cause you a lot of problem in the designing of the game and experiences and it also gives you a lot pattern tolls for a trainings, education, it’s proved that VR experiences have a lot better engagement you aimed for trainings and the knowledge you get there is very high so a lot of companies are using VR for training people for different kind of jobs.

N: You mention the users so many times, I wanna ask a question regarding types of the users because there are users that you can test products that are already familiar with VR, how are you approaching the people that have never used VR? Is there a difference for those two groups?

Adrian: There is a big difference and mostly we are testing with the users who didn’t try the VR, why? Because they don’t know anything about VR, they don’t have expectations and you could put a user who never tried VR and see how he reacts. So, it’s important to test with users who didn’t try VR because you will see what they think about interactions. One of the interesting things is that you are using your hands and your body in VR so it’s not requirement to know how to work with the computer, pc or to use the phone. So, you could put the people that never used the computer before and they don’t know how to work in Excel, Word or don’t know how to use a computer, they can use VR and the interaction in VR will feel natural for them. They do not try to click with a pointer on a bottom, they will try to press with a hand. So, those kinds of things are important for the user because the more immersed experience it’s better and it’s more easier for people to understand why we are testing with users who have never tried VR before.

N: I wanna go back briefly to Ubisoft and your place there, you are basically the leading company here in Serbia. What is the innovation process there, what frameworks do you use, just to get a glance of that part of your experience?

Adrian: Yeah, Ubisoft is a group that works on a code development model. So, when you have big projects, that project is developed by multiple studios inside the Ubisoft group which one of the studios is the lead side that manages the product but all together making that product. The products that we are making are mostly commercial let’s say, because in that way you can have stability and the company can be profitable and it can sustain some kind of innovation where you could work and innovate in a lot of different fields. We are innovating in terms of our own engines, game engines that we are using for our own development, the tools that we are using in house, there are a lot of different sections that are developed in Ubisoft.

Ubisoft was also one of the first companies to invest in VR, because innovation is important. So, to be the first in the market, to test the market. Ubisoft was also the first company to publish game on Google Stadia, it’s a cloud streaming platform for gaming that you play games on any device that you have. And actually we are in Belgrade working a lot on Google Stadia and we delivered two games last year in November and December. It was a Ghost trick on wireless and Assassins creed on unity. It’s clearly a completely innovative platform. So, most of the innovation that we are taking inside the Ubisoft are based on new platforms where we are working with first parties in building ecosystem, in building those kind of platforms like VR, streaming platforms, like Google Stadia, Amazon Luna X cloud and there are also block chain initiatives that are coming now, AI and those kind of things where you can innovate.

The games that we developed for a Stadia were very challenging because most of the games are developed for a windows with direct X framework for rendering, so it’s a combination of frameworks and for Google Stadia it’s Linux based where you don’t have any games on that almost with a Vulcan rendering framework. So, it’s a completely different technology stack that is not used before in the gaming industry, so everything was new for the team. It was really interesting that the challenge for the team that they like to work for Google Stadia it’s very innovative and there are a lot of challenges, problems that you are solving when that new platform comes.

N: One personal question. Did your paragliding hobby help you with a career in VR in some way?

Adrian: I’m not sure it helps, maybe for some things because you are also learning about different kinds of senses when you are trying to fly so it can help you with understanding mostly your body and how it feels for different kinds of reactions. When you are doing some tricks you are having some G forces affecting your body and you learn a lot about that so we are learning something similar in VR, we are learning also about your vestibular system and how it reacts to motion sickness. So, those kinds of things. In paragliding you are doing let’s say some tricks and field of view is narrowing so this is something that is used in VR for preventing motion sickness.

N: So, you are an engineer in core and I wanna ask you a question: what does it take for a great engineer to become an even greater leader?

Adrian: In the first place you need to start to learn how to work with people. I think that people’s skills are something that is very important for that and you need to be aware of that. You need to provide support and to value the team that you have and to take care about their personal development in a technical sense as well as developing soft skills let say the people’s skills.

One of the things that is very important is to be conscious about your problems that you have and your lack of skills in some kind of field and how to improve that. So, you need to constantly learn new things and to invest a lot in learning about managing, about work with people, not just in technical sense, to learn how to do something in special technology or something like that. It is very important to give feedback and to receive feedback and to learn how to react to it. There is no room for egoism there, you need to be open to accept all kinds of negative feedback and that is important for improving yourself as well as you need to learn how to deliver negative feedback because not all people are reacting the same to negative feedback.

So, those kinds of things are very important and you need to have open communication with all people who you are working with. It’s important to work on their development with feedback because the common goal is all of us to work together, better and to improve ourselves. So, that is why I think it is very important to work on self development, to work with a team and to build them and provide support for them.

N: And with all that said, can every great engineer be a great leader?

Adrian: It depends, someone wants to go in that career path and someone doesn’t want to be a leader. In Ubisoft we have different career paths where you can choose where you can go. You can choose a seniority career path where you are working only on the technical side, you are working just as expert in delivering the features in programming and on other part you can work as a lead programmer, to work more with people, to work on their development.

The problem is that I see in Serbia there is a lot of time mixing lead programmers with a development path in a career. So, you are becoming senior and next to be a lead programer. In Ubisoft I learned that is not like that, you can choose different career paths and the senior can be on the same level as lead programmer, both are important for delivering a product. So, I would say that it’s not the common case to go to the lead programmer and to force that for every programmer. Sometimes it’s good to go in a seniority path and this is also a problem that we have in hiring that we are trying to hire for a position for lead programmer where the people assume that if you are the best programmer in the team you are becoming the lead. It’s not that you need to have some people skills, to work with people, you don’t need to be the best programmer, you need to know enough to handle the people there and to understand about the problem that they are talking about. So, it depends everything on personal preference. So, I would not force someone who doesn’t want to be a lead to go to that leadership career path. It’s very important to know what we want to do and what we want to be and this is something that I see that people are not thinking a lot about, but they think “Okay, to improve my career I need to go in that leadership path.”

N: We started today’s innovation dialogue about the premise that VR is dead because we haven’t been on it’s funeral, I wanna ask you about the future of VR. I’m sure that you are expecting something interesting in this field in the years that come.

Adrian: A lot of companies are investing a huge amount of money right now, it’s not transparent as before but everybody is investing in VR and AR, of course, it’s two technologies linked together. In a long term I expect let’s say that it would be normal pair of glasses that transform into VR headsets as well as AR headsets where they overlay the image of real world and maybe you could use it as replacement for personal computers, laptops where you project image of screen on the wall and have a virtual keyboard and mouse and using devices of personal computer. The problems of course are the phone factors, the quality of displays, the processing power that those devices have. So, those are the problems that we need to be solved for that to be achievable.

I don’t think that we will see that in the near future but we don’t know what to expect because a lot of technology devices that we have right now we would not imagine that to be present and be developed twenty years ago. So, technology is moving faster and we cannot know for sure in which direction the innovation will go. It’s just some kind of estimation of ours, what could happen, what we want to achieve in the long term. Now, we don’t know how to do that but we are slowly working toward that. In the let’s say, short and middle term we will definitely see improvements in the current generation of headsets. There would be more lightweight, it would be easier to set up. Hand tracking is already present, there will be better hand tracking, eye tracking, those kind of, let’s say, devices, gadgets for VR, will be more affordable, the prices are still point for high quality VR. So, I think personally that we will see a lot of improvements regarding the current devices, which are quite good but improvement in every field specifically for VR.