Mar Gonzalez Franco

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From the course by University of London

Making Your First Virtual Reality Game

16 ratings

University of London

Making Your First Virtual Reality Game

16 ratings

Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality is one of the most exciting experiences that technology can give us. The immersion and presence you can have in VR is quite unlike any other medium. Like many others, you are excited about the possibilities of this new medium and want to get started developing your own VR experiences. This course will take you through all of the steps you need to create a VR game or other project. This is the final course in our Specialisation: Virtual Reality. The previous courses teach you the skills you need to make a VR game. This course brings them all together to create a project of your own. We will guide you through all the steps of a VR project: coming up with an idea, storyboarding, prototyping, testing and implementation. By the end of this course you will have a complete VR project that demonstrates your skills and could be the first step in creating a professional game. We hope this course can be your entry into professional VR development. To help you get started, some good advice always helps. That is why we have interviewed VR experts from all over the world, ranging from technology pioneers with over 30 years experience in VR to the latest cutting edge VR creators. We have asked all of them to give you their advice and we hope it inspires you to become part of the future of VR.

From the lesson

Welcome

This week you will start the process of creating your first VR Game. We will explain the steps you will go through when you're creating the game and you will start thinking of your idea. You will also meet our experts who will be explaining their VR projects and giving advice to you.

Betty Mohler3:16

Gregory Welch5:02

Tabitha Peck2:29

Mar Gonzalez Franco5:08

Susumu Tachi4:20

Larry Hodges2:33

Meet the Instructors

Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan
Lecturer, Department of Computing
Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Marco Gillies
Senior Lecturer
Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London

I'm Mar Gonzalez-Franco.

I'm a researcher at Microsoft Research in the US.

I work with virtual reality.

I have been working with virtual reality for the last,

I think, six, seven years.

I did my PhD with Professor Mel Slater,

who was one of the first people to introduce the concept of presence in virtual reality,

this idea that you feel you're somewhere else and the

place illusion and the things that are happening not real, the plausibility illusion.

So my interest in virtual reality is to understand why we feel it's so real,

why the things that are happening are generating realistic behaviors,

and why when we are inside a virtual body that moves as we move,

we feel it as our body,

a substitution of our body.

I found several experiments.

One of my first experiments was trying to

figure out how the brain really perceives these virtual realities.

If we think about our body, we are multisensorial.

We retrieve information from our sensors,

like if we were a robot,

and different timings with different resolutions and then we put them together.

Interestingly, some sensors are dominant,

for example, the vision.

All virtual reality works very much around the idea that the vision is dominant.

We are visual animals,

and provided that the vision say something,

if another sensory input also agrees,

then you believe it's real.

In this case, it's

the sensory motor contingencies that are generating these very strong illusion.

The fact that I move my head and the virtual world, it's rendered correctly.

So you need head tracking.

That's basic for any virtual reality experience.

The first experiments that I did were kind of trying to

understand how deep inside are we structuring this sensory perceptions.

So you would have your virtual hand

and your real hand collocated in a virtual environment,

and I would basically attack this hand with a knife,

and we would measure the reaction in the motor cortex.

And the reaction was people were trying to move their hand,

and the reaction happened before they knew the urge of moving their hand.

We were using the same techniques as Benjamin Libet,

with the lateralized readiness potential,

which is known to be triggered before the awareness of the action.

And so it means that these sensory inputs are perceived

very internally on a very subconscious way.

So our sensors are providing information in real time,

and our brain is interpreting it as if it were real,

despite we know it's not real on a higher level.

So that was one of my first experiments.

I continue very much working on multisensory integration for a while,

exploring the agency of these virtual bodies.

You can control it.

What happens if you lose control of that virtual body?

It's still your body, but you cannot control it.

So the kind of things that you can do in virtual reality are very different from

any other technology because you can simulate

scenarios that would only happen in a third term pathologies,

like for example the anarchic hand illusion,

in which you can move the hand in one way,

but actually, your hand is autonomous sort of.

This happens to very weirdly.

It doesn't happen to healthy people,

but we can simulate something like this in virtual reality.

And we can think of many ways that virtual reality can alter

perception or retrain perception using multisensory integration.

That's kind of the area I'm more interested in.

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