Freefly VR Interview: I, For One, Welcome Our Mobile VR Overlords

We at CGTrader have a tremendous amount of faith in virtual reality being the next big thing. And without a doubt, mobile VR will be the one to introduce the most people to this new technological era. That's why we had several questions to the developers of the snazzy Freefly VR mobile headset and they agreed to tell us about our glorious future.

Proteus VR Labs: How did the company get established? How did Freefly VR came to be?

Several years ago I ran a blog that focused on 3D technologies. One day I was sitting at my desk at virtual reality production company Inition when I read about the Fov2Go project – an open source VR kit that offered templates to attach to your phone to convert it into a simple VR headset.

Their demo, Tales from the Minus Lab, allowed the viewer to look around the scene by utilizing the gyroscopes and accelerometers within the phone to track the direction of the viewer‘s head and render the scene accordingly. This fascinated me. As someone who was disappointed that the VR future predicted in the 1990‘s never happened, I was so excited to finally experience VR for myself. However, only a simple viewer for the iPhone 4 was available to buy at the time, and nothing compatible with my Google Nexus 5. This was also the time when 3D printing was becoming affordable and I realized a case study to highlight how 3D printing meant people could own products that had yet to be produced would make a great article for my blog.

Having met Nick Allen, founder of 3D Print UK several months previous at the inaugural 3D Print Show, I approached him with the idea and he in turn put me in contact with an industrial design company called Luma-ID. Several emails and renders later, out popped a beautifully crafted, 3D printed VR headset for my Nexus 5; we fondly called it the Claw. Of course, the article never materialized – we were too excited about developing the product further for others to enjoy. We naively thought we could launch a Kickstarter campaign within a few months. Little did we know that it would take 18 months of prototyping, testing, finance raising and branding to launch our first commercial product – The Freefly VR.

We founded Proteus VR Labs with seed investment and go together a development team with the aim of creating the most comfortable mobile powered VR headset available that also offers a huge field of view. If we had known the hurdles and challenges we would have to face, we would probably have shied away from launching the business, but we are glad we did. Our first public showing was with Icelandic singer Bjork at the MoMA museum in New York and Freefly VR is now available all over the world both in major stores and online.

We are now focusing on further product development, and growing our content division for mobile powered virtual reality experiences.

What do you think about the future of VR?

I am cautiously optimistic! Having ran a 3D blog for a few years, which mainly focused on 3D television and cinema, I have deliberately been not too evangelistic about virtual reality to avoid the poor, misjudged predictions like thosse about the 3D entertainment industry. I don‘t say that in a negative way, in fact, I think the more cautious and keen to be guided by real user behavior, expectations and demands we are, the more likely we will be to avoid those mistakes.

There are various predictions about the value of the market with one analyst claiming mobile VR will be 20 times larger than PC/console-based. But like with most things, growth will be determined by content. A few years back, I watched a talk by the Oculus Rift guys and they recalled how the Sega Megadrive was a commercial failure before Sonic the Hedgehog was released. After the release, people bought the Megadrive simply to play Sonic. VR headsets are already selling well, but there will need to be the Sonic moment for VR to explode and then to be used consistently afterwards by mainstream audiences.

Social VR is a trend we are seeing that could be the next form of social interaction and entertainment but only if it doesn't try to simply replicate what the likes of Facebook already do well. I recently visited the Liverpool offices of vTime, makers of one of our favorite apps, and left convinced this form of VR will be a strong driver for mainstream usage.

By social VR I don‘t mean glorified chat rooms – social VR refers to any VR experience that can be shared with others. There is nothing more exciting than witnessing an adventure or event or playing game, even a linear one, with others. People like to engage with other people; we only have to see the popularity of the likes of Facebook and dating apps to see that, so VR will extend on this.

What we have found at Freefly VR is that people are less concerned with what we call complete immersion . People are very used to be always connected and multi-tasking, so VR experiences that can be played in the real world are likely to be incredibly popular when the technology allows.

What do you think about the future of mobile VR HMDs?

I feel the future of mobile VR HMDs will be mostly influenced by the innovations of those behind mobile operating systems, the mobile phone companies and content creators, rather than the headset manufacturers themselves. Here are Freefly VR we are focussed on making sure headsets are compatible, affordable, lightweight and can closely match the PC based systems within a reasonable price point.

It is still yet to be seen whether mobile VR will head towards integrated solutions – that is, rather than putting an adaptor on your existing mobile phone, you purchase an all-in-one solution with a dedicated screen and operating system. There are a few available now, and the advantage to these is that they are designed with VR in mind, so can offer more fluid experiences as the internal gyros and accelerometers can be cranked up and are not under the constraints of the mobile operating system. However, this puts the price up and can quickly become out of date as mobile phones become increasingly powerful and people get free upgrades every couple of years.

Personally I believe it will be the mobile phone companies that will integrate the tech needed for fluid mobile VR experiences, and the mobile VR HMDS will predominantly be slave devices as it is very difficult to override multiple Android operating systems and configurations of which there are thousands. I say Android because there the iPhone system offers a wonderful opportunity to create a headset that adds tech to increase fluidity, but I suspect that is likely to be done by Apple themselves

What will be the next big thing in mobile VR?

Until now, mobile VR has always been a hack – phones were never originally designed to be virtual reality devices and with that in mind, it is amazing how immersive the experience can be thanks to the growing amount of clever developers out there.

I am always inspired when I what independent developers are doing at events like VRLO.

On the software front, without a shadow of a doubt will we see advancements in latency, that is how quickly an image is rendered on the screen as you move your head, and the lower the better, of course. Consistency is also essential.

Putting the Google Daydream announcement aside for now, we are very curious to see what Microsoft Flashback will bring. It pre-renders all possible frame views and stores them in the phone‘s memory resulting in Oculus Rift standard fluidity even for low-end phones. Ideally, you want less than 20ms latency, which is very difficult for phones to handle, so we are tracking Microsoft Research‘s news with anticipation.

AMD has a great eco-system called Liquid VR which aims to update graphics tasks fast without waiting for other processes to finish as well as overriding the display configurations in a process known as Direct-to Display.

Input is another big thing for mobile VR. Right now, the options are limited to gaze control and simple selection via touchpads. This limits the scale of interactivity. At Freefly VR we include a Bluetooth controller with the headset, and an increasingly growing amounts of apps are taking advantage of the extra buttons available. The next stage will be gesture control. Daydream has announced a new controller as part of its program and companies like Sixsense, Leap Motion and Structure have already released proof-of-concepts. Some developers like MACRON are even showing how the front-facing camera can be used in image recognition.

There will be asserted efforts to reduce the sense of motion sickness and already we are seeing great progress here. In fact, the Ajoy Fernandes and Steven Feiner at Columbia University Engineering's Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab have addressed the problem with a simple field of view trick.

We have probably reached the limit in terms of mobile phone display resolution at 4K, although we might just get 8K phone screens in a few years for ultra real VR. Mobile VR will always struggle is field of view. Freefly VR has one of the highest field of views on the market, but if you want greater immersion, companies like Star VR are using two screens to support up to whopping 210 degrees. Of course, this won‘t be possible for mobile VR, but we are working on techniques to increase the field of view even wider.

I think the major future feature of mobile VR will be the utilization of features specific to mobile VR. I expect experiments in location based VR. In fact, the Austin, Texas start up RadioSense has already proven the concept of inch-accuracy GPS positional tracking. Health is a hugely growing market, and there is no reason why the step count, blood pressure, temperature and pulse measurements taken by phone sensors can‘t be presented in virtual reality.

I expect we will see further user generated experiences as millions of us already like to create and share photos and videos. The Ricoh Theta is a 360-degree video-and-stills camera that has widely outsold expectations, but it still at a price point not acceptable for the mainstream. So expect to see phones with inbuilt 360 degree cameras that can take images that can be instantly uploaded to social media sites.

What is the most inspiring VR app out there now?

Gosh, you want just one! If I really had to pick one, I would say is the Guardian VR app that puts you into a prison cell, explaining the psychological damage of extreme isolation. I like it because it features very powerful elements of storytelling and empathy that can only be achieved in VR, along with a slow pace which is more suited to the medium of VR.

What do you think about the future of mobile VR gaming?

I don‘t believe mobile VR will become a strong gaming platform like the Playstation VR, Rift or HTC Vive due to the way mobiles are currently used for casual gaming. That said, games like Hardcode prove how compelling multi-player VR can be when you can interact with and play with or against others in the same virtual reality space.

Also, social gaming is highly popular on Facebook, and as we expect to see a closer integration between Facebook and virtual reality, we could soon see tournament-style Candy Crush Saga and popular slot machine gaming promoted to friends through the website.

If gaming is to take off on mobile VR, the games will need to be designed with how people game in mind. We don‘t expect to see people using mobile VR headsets in public - with the exception of long-haul flights - so for home use, where most people will be seated on a sofa, the action will need to be contained mainly in front of the viewer as they are restricted in their movement.

I think mobile VR will end up being less for gaming and more of a media consumption device. TV companies such as NOS in Portugal, Discovery in America and BskyB here in the UK are shooting hundreds of hours of 360 content to support existing programs so I can imagine there will be more supplementary content to TV shows ("be a star on X-Factor!").

What do you think about peripherals for mobile VR?

I feel there maybe a closer connection to people‘s PCs. Most mobile VR activity won‘t be mobile in the sense – it will be done at home sitting on a sofa, possibly in front of a laptop. Therefore, Proteus VR Labs is investigating the possibilities of utilising the webcam to offer a limited form of head tracking.

Input will be essential, possibly via in-built microphones as well as gesture control and positional systems like Vico VR.

We are seeing some very interesting peripherals like the new 360 chairs such as Roto VR. They might seem gimmicky at first, but having tried them, I saw how they can be very useful. The beauty of mobile VR is in its lack of wires, so a chair that offers more freedom than a sofa really enhances the experience.