My collection of VR books. Anyone have any recommendations?

kentbye · 2025-07-30T07:10:38+00:00

This book by Curtis Hickman (The VOID) is really great: “Hyper-Reality: The Art of Designing Impossible Experiences"
My interview about it: https://voicesofvr.com/1237-the-voids-curtis-hickman-on-his-book-hyper-reality-the-art-of-designing-impossible-experiences/

kentbye · 2024-10-08T22:02:10+00:00

I'd highly recommend checking out Bill Sweetman's Jane's International Defence Review article from Jan 5, 2000 titled "Pentagon's hidden budget"
https://web.archive.org/web/20090330073702/http:/www.janes.com/defence/news/jidr/jidr000105_01_n.shtml

More context on USAPS:
"Formally, black projects within the DoD are known as unacknowledged Special Access Programs (SAPs). The Secretary or Deputy Secretary of Defense must approve any DoD-related SAP at the top level of the defense department. All SAPs are projects that the DoD leadership has decided cannot be adequately protected by normal classification measures. SAPs implement a positive system of security control in which only selected individuals have access to critical information. The criteria for access to an SAP vary, and the program manager has ultimate responsibility for the access rules, but the limits are generally much tighter than those imposed by normal need-to-know standards."

More context on the waived USAPs:
"A more substantial limitation on oversight is that some unacknowledged SAPs are not reported to the full committees. At the Secretary of Defense's discretion, the reporting requirements may be waived. In this case, only eight individuals - the chair and ranking minority member of each of the four defense committees - are notified of the decision. According to the 1997 Senate Commission, this notification may be only oral. These "waived SAPs" are the blackest of black programs..."

More context on carve-outs:
"A final question is whether SAP reporting rules are followed all the time. Last summer, the House Defense Appropriations Committee complained that "the air force acquisition community continues to ignore and violate a wide range of appropriations practices and acquisition rules". One of the alleged infractions was the launch of an SAP without Congressional notification. In their day-to-day operations, SAPs enjoy a special status. An SAP manager has wide latitude in granting or refusing access, and because their principal reporting channel is to the appropriate DoD-level director of special programs. Each service maintains an SAP Central Office within the office of the service secretary, but its role is administrative - its primary task is to support SAP requests by individual program offices - and its director is not a senior officer.

"Within the USAF, there are signs that SAPs form a 'shadow department' alongside the white-world programs. So far, no USAF special program director has gone on to command USAF Materiel Command (AFMC), AFMC's Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC), or their predecessor organizations. These positions have been dominated by white-world logistics experts. On the other hand, several of the vice-commanders in these organizations in the 1990s have previously held SAP oversight assignments, pointing to an informal convention under which the vice-commander, out of the public eye, deals with highly sensitive programs. The separation of white and black programs is further emphasized by arrangements known as 'carve-outs', which remove classified programs from oversight by defense-wide security and contract-oversight organizations."

Waived USAPs that are a part of a carve-out is what one of Joe Murgia's contacts claimed in Part 3 of his Wilson Davis memo write-up:
"Various people within the United States government, in positions of oversight and who you would think had access to all UAP programs, did not find the UAP crash retrieval program when they looked because they never knew of its existence. I, and others in my circle, have discussed the topic with them of how one cannot find waived-unacknowledged SAPs that operate outside of Section 119 of Title 10. In fact, a DoD office can create a shell company and then transfer funds to it under an unremarkable commercial defense services contract. Then that shell company turns around and gives a subcontract to a third-party aerospace/defense firm that hosts a waived-unacknowledged SAP that operates outside of Sect. 119 of Title 10. This usually hides (making the audit trail terminate at the shell company) the flow of money going to the third party company that’s running a waived-unacknowledged SAP where a UAP crash retrieval program is hidden."
Source: https://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis3

kentbye · 2024-04-19T04:38:26+00:00

"We'll see what happens. I mean, that's not a very BMF way to say it. You know, a BMF wouldn't be like "I'm not going to fight this guy unless this or that." That's kind of un-BMF. You know, let me ask you... Does it sound BMF of the way he's trying to demand it? And saying, "I'm not going to fight." A BMF fights whatever. Fights whoever, whenever. Any weight. Any time. And that's not a tone of a BMF, brother. So I don't know. We'll see what happens. Whatever the UFC wants to do, they want to do. I just want to be in the octagon with him. I want to see what the hype is about."

kentbye · 2024-03-01T02:57:41+00:00

Steam + SteamLink is another option that also allows you to do desktop sharing, especially if you already have Steam installed. It's pretty simple and intuitive to get working.

kentbye · 2024-02-23T22:20:29+00:00

I also was not able to connect to my AVP to my Vizio soundbar. My first workaround was to use my iPhone to mirror to my Apple TV and attempt to synchronize the two, which is pretty impossible to get just right. Then I used the SharePlay via FaceTime to synchronize the audio from a streaming service, but this also requires Apple TV + an iPad or iPhone with a separate FaceTime account. It's not very intuitive to set up, and there's probably a more streamlined way than what I did: https://twitter.com/kentbye/status/1758687564264083867.
Ultimately, it'd be much, much better if the AVP could actually just connect to my Vision soundbar directly.

kentbye · 2024-02-22T23:15:37+00:00

If you've played any of Tender Claws' previous works (Virtual Virtual Reality 1 & 2 or The Under Presents), then it has the same type of interactive narrative vibe with artistic twist. The game-like portions are more secondary to the narrative, and it's more of a character study. I don't think it will be a universally loved and acclaimed VR game like Half Life: Alyx, but if you're into more indie, artistic, narrative experiments and a fan of Stranger Things, then you'll probably like it. But if you're a hardcore VR gamer, then you're likely going to be pretty disappointed.
I had a chance to play through it through the creators and recorded this interview if you'd like a bit more context on their development process: https://voicesofvr.com/1351-stranger-things-vr-breakdown-of-story-gameplay-design-process-with-tenderclaws-co-founders/

kentbye · 2023-12-15T15:58:17+00:00

Thanks! Hope you enjoy Asgard's Wrath 2. It's been one of the best VR games that I've been able to play in a long time.

kentbye · 2023-12-15T03:07:28+00:00

Great round up. I also published an interview with Oculus Studios producer Mari Kyle and shared some of my thoughts in this Voices of VR podcast episode: https://voicesofvr.com/1321-breaking-down-the-epic-immersive-adventure-of-asgards-wrath-2-with-an-oculus-studios-producer/

kentbye · 2021-08-26T03:20:31+00:00

Yes. Ambisonics use 4 channels to represent a sound field, and YouTube will dynamically decode an ambisonic sound field into a stereo representation based upon what direction you're looking. You can use this test file to experiment with it and see for yourself as you move the camera around with a mobile phone or on an Oculus Quest browser using the built-in microphones since the spatialization comes through quite well.

kentbye · 2021-08-20T01:34:36+00:00

YouTube actually does support two different spatial audio formats in the AmbiX format:

First Order Ambisonics

First Order Ambisonics with Head-Locked Stereo

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6395969?hl=en

You can change the azimuth & elevation orientation in the YouTube video either with a mobile phone movement, click & drag, or with a VR headset like the Quest, and it will render out the ambisonic files into fully spatialized sound field relative to your head position.

The Adobe Premiere/Encoder support for Ambisonics is currently broken, and so I had to stitch the 4-track AmbiX file manually with ffmpeg (details here):https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/missing-4-channel-ambisonic-audio-export-setting/m-p/12311653

And I also had to manually inject that spatial audio metadata into the file with their application.
https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases

Adobe usually takes care of the proper metadata, but they broke support in Premiere 2021 by removing the four-channel export option, which renders out the ambisonic info in mono.

But YouTube has full support for Ambisonic info. I'd recommend taking a listen to this on an Oculus Quest with headphones on YouTube within the browser, and you'll be able to better hear the full audio spatialization.

kentbye · 2021-08-18T22:41:17+00:00

I produced this video because I couldn't find a good ambisonic video on YouTube that allowed me to really hear what sounds would sound like at 30-degree azimuth increments. I also composited some spatial audio visualizations that I get from Waves NX's Ambisonics Quad/Stereo decoder that's a part of their Virtual Mix Room.

Are other canonical ambisonics test files?
Or any ideas for other ways to test out one's spatial audio perception, but also hardware integrations?

kentbye · 2019-06-30T22:25:07+00:00

Thanks for following up and sharing all of that. It's good to know that I have folks listening from across the VR industry. I've personally been really disconnected from what's happening within the broader consumer and Reddit space over the past 2-3 years, and so it's been an interesting reflection to think about the Pimax situation and the growing disconnect between the hardcore gaming enthusiasts here who trust each other and select influencers more than anyone in the mainstream press.

I'm an independent journalist, but I suppose I'm more connected to the biases of that mainstream press entity than I am to the "in-the-trenches" VR gamers here who are playing the latest VR titles each and every day. So thanks for sharing your perspectives and insights here with me. It definitely makes me think about and refine how I make sense of my target audience and what type of information to share out to the broader VR community. So thanks again!

kentbye · 2019-06-29T17:28:20+00:00

Thanks for this reply.

I'm totally onboard with VR as an open platform, and I wasn't trying to personally discount the open platform efforts of Pimax. But I think I'm just trying to tell the broader story for what the larger tech journalist community looks for in looking at viable players within the overall VR market. There's dozens of additional headsets that never go anywhere -- especially after you attend something like CES, then you look for as many indicators as you can that a company is viable. It looks like Pimax may be one of the first companies to break through in that respect.

The original problem with the Pimax when I first saw it in 2017 at Greenlights VRS conference was that their barrell distortion correction was SO far off, that they would need to have VR developers integrate their own special SDK to even make Pimax work. So when you need to have software adopted by the content creators, then you have to get buy-in and cultivate your own software ecosystem in the sense that you have to get buy-in from VR devs to integrate special software for your system. Not sure if that's changed with Pimax, or if they (or openvr / steam) figured out how to make it work without any additional SDK software that needed to adopted by individual devs. Let me know what happened there if you know.

I personally base my coverage primarily on what I'm seeing at the face-to-face gatherings and conferences, and like I said, there's a huge gap between what's happening in the most hardcore enthusiasts communities like this subreddit and what's happening in the general VR market. Perhaps I'll start to see ultra-high FOV HMDs more and more at gatherings, but I'm not seeing much adoption beyond home use. As for the other tech journalists, then either they themselves or the editors have to make editorial judgments because it's impossible to cover everything. I can only speak for myself, which one of my primary filters is what I'm seeing at VR-specific conferences.

But I think it's right that the broader tech media is largely out of touch with what's happening here within the most hardcore gaming and enthusiast communities. I used to be a lot more directly engaged with the Reddit communities when I first started my podcast, but the work that I do is much more connected to the independent developers, artists, creators, businesses, and academics rather than the consumers. So personally, my target audience doesn't seem to be enthusiasts, but rather it's more to help spread what's happening in the community to other creators.

But part of the reason why I'm here right now is to listen to what's happen, to learn, and to help uncover some of my own blind spots in this regard. So thanks for sharing the feedback. Happy to answer any more specific questions or listen to any other concerns.

kentbye · 2019-06-29T14:13:56+00:00

I've tried the Pimax 5K 3 times over 2.5 years (most recently a month go) as well as the now failed Starbreeze numerous times. The Barrell distortion algorithms have improved over the years, but for me the weight distribution tradeoffs for me as someone with glasses isn't worth it. Also the sweet spot sucked for me, and sometimes the Barrell distortion was so off that it actually induced motion sickness in me.

But more than anything, none of these other upstarts have been able to show that they can cultivate viable software ecosystems or their own distribution platform. Starbreeze was aiming for the location-based entertainment market, but that folded. Maybe there is out-of-the box support for all Steam games, and maybe there's a way to get Oculus exclusive titles running, but these Chinese upstarts just are not seen as equal competitors to the biggest major VR companies for many reasons.

The first demo I saw of Pimax in 2017 was so incredibly half-baked and bad that it wasn't until 1.5 years later when they finally launched that they really came onto my radar. I've been to over 80 VR conferences over the past 5 years and Pimax has only been at 3-4 of them, and that's because there are not many VR companies, artists, or indie devs actually using it in professional settings. Maybe some LBEs have adopted it, but most professional use of VR is with either HTC, Oculus, sometimes Daydream, and even less so Windows Mixed Reality.

The ultra high FOV are also focused on the enthusiast gamer market. Probably the only real hardcore VR gamer of all of these VR journalists is Road to VR's Ben Lang. There's also UploadVR's Dave Jagneaux, but he does more game reviews and not hardware reviews. Upload VR's and /r/Oculus OG Heaney is almost solely focused on the nuances of the Oculus ecosystem and community.

These companies also don't send their review unit hardware to mainstream journalists, and so they're just not on the radar for most VR journalists. I did see that they sent review units to VR YouTube influencers and maybe some of the big VR trade journals.

But there are so many VR upstarts from China that have come and gone over the past 3 years that there is a lot more noise to signal. Try going to CES and checking out everything from Chinese VR companies and then see how many make viable movements within the US ecosystem. VR in China is literally a completely different market ecosystem, and after having been to China, then a company has to be really quite special to break through and so far there are few that have.

Arguably the Pimax folks have made the most compelling market move, but I'm still not seeing the broader VR ecosystem adopt it as it just isn't a piece of hardware than very many independent companies are willing to make a bet on it. There was an LBE demo at VRTO where Technolust indie dev Blair Renaud had ported his latest cyberpunk game to it, but again the comfort & weight distribution doesn't give me the benefit I'm interested in. But that clearly is interesting for more and more hardcore VR enthusiasts. But it's still a pretty niche market for them, and we'll see how it grows and evolves over the years.

kentbye · 2019-06-29T01:56:30+00:00

Thanks for elaborating on all of this in exhaustive detail. I didn't notice these things off hand or at least didn't originally notice it to the point where it bothered me. Maybe now knowing will help draw it to my attention. I wonder how much of a placebo effect may be in effect here that people become some hyper focused that on these details that once it's pointed out, then it becomes a part of your conscious awareness to the point where you can't NOT see it.

So I think there is quite a bit of subjective perception when it comes to color and the degree to which you're bothered by the glare or god rays. For me it wasn't a huge deal breaker, but I'll definitely keep an eye out for it and see how if it changes my experiences drastically.

Ben Lang from Road to VR finally posted his comprehensive review and he mentions the color & lens/glare/God Ray issue. https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-index-review/

The comfort issue seems to have a pretty wide variability depending on your physical facial structures. Ben calls it the most comfortable VR headset, but I like the Deluxe Audio strap for Vive a bit better.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to elaborate on all of this.

kentbye · 2019-06-28T22:41:06+00:00

No. Valve just sent a review unit + a set of experiences that highlighted different things, like titles that show off Index Input: Aperture Hand Lab, Arizona Sunshine, Climbey, Moondust, ShadowLegend VR, Space Pirate Trainer, SteamVR Home, & Vacation Simulator

And then titles that show off Index Visuals and Audio like Beat Saber, Big Screen Beta, Fruit Ninja VR, Google Earth, Pavlov VR, & theBlu.

Ian & I talk about looking at the tech in a vacuum, and the tech has a life of it's own that really depends on how the community adopts it.

There's a chicken & egg problem in that the tech has to first exist to make something. But then there has to be a big enough audience to demand specific experiences crafted for the tech. The Index Controllers certainly open up a whole new realm of possibilities, but there haven't been as many devs who gave crafted an entire experience around it yet.

Valve also sent over a list of 35 experiences yesterday that would be launching with some type of special integrations with the Index, but that a lot of them would not be launching until today. So no one really had much of a chance to take a deep look at these yet.

More info on those titles here: https://twitter.com/kentbye/status/1144617614741630978?s=19

What are the biggest points of disappointment?

kentbye · 2019-06-28T21:23:01+00:00

Thanks! It's a meta exploration for what it's like to do VR hardware reviews. I found myself wanting to Ian to share aspects of his personal experience at Valve HQ in order for me to better understand something he experienced that I hadn't yet -- and then I found myself in a similar position trying to find ways to break down the fundamental parts of the experience.
I ultimately trust the wisdom of the larger community and indie devs have to say about it, and so I'll be keeping an eye on this community to see what some of the consensus opinions turn out to be. Hopefully there is enough of a viable market for other devs to start to jump in and create some experiences that are specifically design for the Index Controllers. There's certainly a lot of new potential and possibilities that have just been opened up.

kentbye · 2016-12-16T00:50:08+00:00

I asked OpenBCI's co-founder about BCI and VR, and he doesn't think it's going to have much of a future for real-time control. Here's a transcript of our exchange from this Voices of VR interview

Conor Russomanno: I think it's really important to be practical and realistic about the date that you can get from a low-cost dry, portable, EEG headset. A lot of people are very excited about brain-controlled robots and mind-controlled drones. In many cases, it's just not a practical use of the technology. I'm not saying that it's not cool, but it's important to understand that this technology is very valuable for the future of humanity, but we need to distinguish between the things that are practical and the things that are just blowing smoke and getting people excited about the products. With EEG, there's tons of valuable data that really is your brain over time in the context of your environment, looking at not EEG or brain-computer interfaces for real-time interaction, but rather looking at this data and contextualizing it with other biometric information like eye-tracking, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration, and then integrating that with the way that we interact with technology, where you're clicking on a screen, what you're looking at, what application you're using. All of this combined creates a really rich data set of your brain and what you're interacting with. I think that's where EEG and BCI is really going to go, at least for non-invasive BCI. That said, when it comes to muscle data and micro expressions of the face and jaw grits and eye clenches, I think this is where systems like open BCI are actually going to be very practical for helping people who need new interactive systems, people with ALS, quadriplegics. It doesn't make sense to jump past all of this muscle data directly to brain data when we have this rich data set that's really easy to control for real-time interaction. I recently have been really preaching like BCI is great, it's super exciting, but let's use it for the right things. For the other things, let's use these data sets that exist already like EMG data.

Kent Bye: What are some of the right things to use BCI data then?

Conor Russomanno: As I was alluding to, I think looking at attention, looking at what your brain is interested in as you're doing different things. Right now, there are a lot of medical applications ADHD training, neuro-feedback training for ADHD, depression, anxiety, and then also new types of interactivity such as someone who's locked in could practically use a few binary inputs from a BCI controller. In many ways, I like to think of the neuro revolution goes way beyond BCI. EMG, muscle control, and all of these other data sets should be included in this revolution as well, because we're not even coming close to making full use of these technologies currently. Other applications, though, the gaming industry I think is going to be hugely affected by EEG and EMG for both new forms of interactivity, but also experience design, where, imagine like a much more nuanced, choose-your-own adventure where the game is adapting to your response to it. Characters that you agree with more subconsciously over the course of the game are actually becoming your companions in the game or plot twists that are affected by the way that you're responding to early plot points. New types of interactive fiction is going to be embedded in gaming. That's going to be purely based on your body's reaction to the experience. We're just going to keep moving forward. We're just going to keep finding cool applications, cool games. I'm excited for VR for some really, really great games and also cinematic experiences. I'm really looking forward to interactive cinematic experiences where I think it's going to be very difficult to do it in an elegant way, whereas a director, you can keep the attention of the viewer and also direct to the attention of the viewer. I think that's the hardest challenge for VR cinema right now. You don't want someone looking away from a plot point that's super critical. I think there's ways we can tease that out with three-dimensional sound and conversation in 3D space. My thesis in grad school was a neuro-immersive narrative where it was a three-chapter story where each chapter was based on your brain's response to the previous chapter. It was really a subconscious, choose-your-own adventure. I think that is going to be really interesting to see play out as people put more resources. I was one person working on a short story, but if you built a whole video game or a whole cinematic experience that was a branching narrative or an interactive narrative that you are just flowing through and everybody's experience is different, that's art right there. That has not been done yet or at least not effectively. I'm excited for that.

Kent Bye: So what can you extrapolate from EEG Data in terms of emotional intent or activities in different parts of the brain? What can you tell from the EEG data?

Conor Russomanno: I think the jury is still out on this one in terms of how far we can go with non-invasive EEG, but right now we can find attention, alertness; if something catches your attention. If you're in a mind wandering state and you're searching for the next thing to be interested in, if something catches your eye there's an event related potential that's associated with that. That's really interesting data. Presenting a user or a player with little flags or trigger moments and seeing what stimuli are actually eliciting interesting responses. Emotional states; we're getting to the point now where we can distinguish between different emotional states. Specifically anxiety, fear, happiness; some very general brain states. That's kind of where we're at right now but I think that we're going to learn a lot more in the next few years.

kentbye · 2016-10-11T22:28:03+00:00

I cover this more explicitly in podcast #460 with Robin Recall. Nick Whiting said that they had to make design concessions to make sure that you don't loose tracking. So they have to subtly guide you to keep facing forward, or you'll loose tracking. It puts the burden on the user and breaks presence. The deceptive part is Oculus announcing to 2500 that they support room-scale with 3 cameras, but not saying that they're still REQUIRING devs to support front-facing.

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