- Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Enabling Influencers and Sharing.
I hope you're having an awesome Connect so far
and thanks for tuning in.
So in this talk,
we are going to dive into how sharing with others
is a really important part of the VR experience,
how to make your game watchable,
and accessible for folks who might not be wearing a headset,
and finally, a peek at some new features
that we're going to be releasing soon
to help even more folks discover your app.
My name is Greg Smith,
and I'm a product manager on the VR developer team
here at Facebook.
My team's focus is to help developers
promote their apps by building human connections
between users inside
and outside of VR.
So let's get to it.
To tee up what we're going to talk about today,
it's really important to understand
that our users really care
about sharing their VR experience
with the people around them,
and kind of think about it:
VR is a magical experience,
especially when you put on a headset
and experience it for yourself.
That said, for many potential users,
the first time they experience VR
may be on a 2D surface,
either via casting, livestreaming,
or video on demand.
So the question then is:
how we can make these first impressions of VR
and potentially your app as great as possible?
One of the ways that our users share is via casting,
either to the Oculus app or from iOS and Android
or to Chromecast devices,
and since the beginning of 2020,
over 30%
of monthly active users on average
cast every month,
and this grows to over a half of users during the holidays.
And here is an example of casting in action
in the Oculus app on iOS and Android,
and if you have seen this before,
you may notice something might seem a little bit different.
More on that a little bit later.
Now, casting is a great way
to get a wide range of users showing off
your experience to their friends and family,
but how you can set up your experience
so that influencers can showcase it
to their large audiences?
We're gonna talk about a few techniques
that you can use to make sure
your game or experience is watchable
and insuring that the folks watching it
have all the context that they need
to understand the magic that you've created.
When you're setting up your game for influencers,
the first step is to get your app ready
for Mixed Reality Capture, or MRC,
which enables folks to create videos
of themselves appearing inside the VR world
using only a typical streamer setup
and a well-lit green screen.
In April of 2020,
we released a free tool for everyone that--
between studios and influencers can use
to create MRC content,
and this works with Quest, Quest 2, and PCVR,
including Quest and Quest 2 + Link
for supported games.
Now if you're looking to tap into
more of a core audience--
a gaming audience rather with livestreaming--
strongly consider having a PCR--
PCVR, wow...
version of your game. [laughs]
So livestreaming is longform content
with a heavy reliance
on a broadcaster interacting with their audience,
as well as high-end visuals.
Now, existing broadcaster tools on the PC
are very well set up for this,
and you don't have to worry about battery life
when you're plugged into a PC.
Finally, MRC is ready to go
for supported PCVR games
including Quest and Quest 2 + Link
that integrates easily into popular broadcasting software.
Now, apart from including MRC into your app,
it's important to think about how you can make it watchable.
For someone not in a headset,
what information do they need to understand your experience
and want to participate in it themselves?
What if they come in,
and you're already part way into the action?
One of the big advantages of MRC
is that it spins up a second camera in your experience,
which means you can control what is displayed on that camera
without impacting what the player sees.
So think about what context you might wanna add
or what you might want to take away.
It's also important to think about
that actual influencers who will be creating the content
around your experience.
Is your game or experience better solo or with others?
Does it work great in a small space
or should you have them in a larger studio?
How do players move around your world?
In the case of MRC, it's important to think about
when you have controller-based locomotion,
that you don't create this kind of ice-skating effect
with it appearing like a player is just
kind of skating across your environment.
You could probably give them rollerblades,
but I would not recommend doing that,
and it's just in general very useful
to try creating this content yourself
so that others-- so that, well, one,
you'll understand how others are creating content around it,
but also you may create some really cool stuff yourself.
And when this all comes together
with a great set of influencers,
a thoughtful design,
it can really help make your experience
even more fun and approachable.
So we're gonna actually check out a clip
from a studio session with The Warp Zone,
as they play a completive game of Real VR Fishing
to see how this all comes together.
- Brian, talk us through your fishing strategy, bud.
- Yeah, what's going through your head?
- So I'm jiggling the bait here to get him interested in it.
- [laughs] - Yeah, yeah.
- Every fisherman knows,
you gotta kinda, like, tease the fish.
- You gotta jiggle the bait. - You gotta jiggle the bait.
- Yeah, you gotta jiggle the bait.
- He's gotta think it's real.
- Come on, buddy.
- Didn't have it. Did you not ever play?
- No. - Oh, you got it, you got it!
Okay, all right! - All right, easy does her.
Easy does her! - Easy does her!
- Oh, oh, pull to the right! both: Pull it to the right!
- Here we go. You're bringing it in.
- Pull to the left! Pull to the left!
- Good! Good, Brian.
- Nice and easy, nice and easy. - You said this was relaxing!
- You just wanna-- wanna settle 'em in.
- Oh, oh, oh, oh, bring him in! Bring him in!
Catch it!
Yeah!
Wait, show behind you.
- That's a fish right there.
- This is insane.
- Okay, awesome. That was really fun.
So in this case,
while the game didn't have a lot of physicality,
the larger studio space opened up more opportunities
for The Warp Zone folks to play off of each other
and created some really fun emergent moments.
So sometimes mixing and matching
and kind of playing opposite to what you think might work
can create some really cool opportunities.
Okay, so we've talked about
how you can use Mixed Reality Capture
to support influencers,
but now let's talk about how you can actually integrate it
into your experience.
Last year, we introduced Mixed Reality Capture
for Oculus Quest, and delivered APIs for Unity,
Unreal 4, as well as our native SDK.
Since then, many games have integrated MRC,
including "Beat Saber," "Superhot," and more.
These games have used MRC
for everything from trailers,
influencer videos,
and even major live broadcasts.
Now, in terms of the actual integration,
you'll be spinning up a second camera
in your app while MRC is active,
and it's actually oriented to the same spot
as the physical camera in the real world,
which allows us to composite everything together
and really create that magical effect.
And if you're using Unity or Unreal 4,
a lot of that heavy lifting will be done for you.
Our team has also done a lot of work
optimizing the MRC camera to really minimize
any performance trade-offs that you might see.
And this fall,
we are going to be adding GPU boosting on Quest
while MRC is active
for Unity and Unreal 4 titles,
and in 2021,
we'll supporting our native SDK as well.
There was also, at the previous Connect,
a pretty detailed talk about Mixed Reality Capture,
and I would highly encourage you to watch it.
You can find that as well as information about our APIs
on the Oculus developer's site.
Including Mixed Reality Capture in your game
is a great way to start supporting influencers,
but now I'd actually like to pivot a little bit
and discuss some new ways
that we're enabling sharing on Oculus,
enabling you to tap into an even wider pool
of potential sharers and promoters of your content.
So first, we've added record while casting
to the Oculus app,
enabling our users to create and share videos of your experience
directly from your mobile device.
Let's check it out.
So with the push of a button,
a user can easily record videos
up to 30 minutes in length,
which are then saved to their device
to make it easy for them to edit and share it
with the folks they care about.
We're also working on boosting the resolution
when casting to the Oculus app
to ensure that these videos look even better.
Apps that have enabled casting and recording
as part of their app submission
will get this automatically,
and if you already have something in the store,
you already have done this work.
And this is an opportunity to take advantage
of that huge group of users that are already casting,
especially with the holidays coming up
to help them share what your app is like
with the folks inside the room and outside the room.
And we're going to be initially rolling this out
in the next few weeks.
Okay, here's something
that I'm really excited to share with you:
spectator mode.
So what you're watching now is a prototype
of a controllable third person camera
inside "Dead and Buried II,"
except the user controlling the camera
is not wearing the headset.
So spectator mode enables users
in the Oculus app on iOS and Android
to control a third person camera
around a developer-defined anchor point in VR space
just using gestures on the mobile device,
and really giving them a chance to participate in the action
even if they're not wearing a headset.
And users can basically rotate the camera
around a developer-defined anchor point
kind of in a sphere,
and they can zoom in and out
based off of a radius defined by the developer.
Additionally, developers can define multiple anchor points
that users can innumerate through
to really enable you
to present your experience in the best way possible,
and it can also unlock new ways
for folks to engage with your content.
And the great news is,
if you've already integrated Mixed Reality Capture
into your application,
you're already 80% of the way there,
as spectator mode uses a lot of the same APIs
as Mixed Reality Capture.
This feature is going to work out of the box
with record while casting,
which enables you to tap into
that huge group of casting users,
which again, on average,
30% of monthly Quest users since the beginning of 2020,
and it goes to over half during the holidays.
We are going to be publicly releasing APIs
and rolling this feature out in the coming months,
so stay tuned.
Before we finish, I'd like to highlight a few key takeaways.
First, if you have not done so already,
take advantage of Mixed Reality Capture in your app.
There's benefits today,
and you can set yourself up well for the future.
Next, think about how
you can make your game watchable
and what information you might need to convey
to someone who's not wearing a headset.
Finally, try creating content yourself.
It helps you understand how influencers
might be creating in your app,
but also you might create something
pretty awesome yourself.
All right, that's it for me.
Thank you so much for tuning in,
and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Connect.
See you around.