The investor that I’m referencing here is a legend in the investing world named Charlie Munger. If you don’t know him, you might know his partner, Warren Buffet. These investors have beaten that market for decades and continue to do so at the young ages of their 90s.
So what does Charlie Munger have to do with VR development? Well luckily for us, Charlie Munger’s knowledge and wisdom transcends expands far outside of the investing world. He has developed a series of mental models that has helped him navigate the investing world.
The one that is most important for this blog post is called Inverse Thinking.
Inverse Thinking
Inverse thinking is a problem-solving technique that involves considering the opposite of the desired outcome or solution. Instead of starting with the problem and trying to find a solution, inverse thinking starts with the solution and works backward to identify the problem or obstacle that is preventing the desired outcome.
To quote Charlie Munger, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there”.
As an example, we might want to make a puzzle game. When struggling with coming up with new ideas for a puzzle game, we could ask ourselves: “What would make a terrible puzzle mechanic?” Instead of focusing on good ideas, we can now focus on bad ideas.
Puzzles that are unsolvable, making random puzzle solutions or requiring a time limit that can’t be beat would all make for a bad puzzle experience. From inverse thinking, we can then avoid this mistakes and also generate new approaches to our puzzle game.
This approach can be helpful in situations where conventional problem-solving methods have been unsuccessful or where a novel solution is required. Inverse thinking requires a willingness to challenge assumptions, think creatively, and consider alternative perspectives.
VR Development and Inverse Thinking
So how can we apply this to VR development?
If we wanted to make a good VR experience, the question we should ask ourselves first is how can we make the worst VR experience possible?
Well luckily Meta has provided a shopping list of bad ideas for us to use. There is actually a PDF called, Oculus VR Best Practices Guide, which can be found here. It is 40 pages long of great ideas of things to avoid. A short list of some of the ideas are the following.
- Minimum 60 FPS
- Don’t Move the Horizon
- Player Speed Should Be 3 m/s
- Don’t Zoom in With Player View
- Don’t Have Objects Apply Force To the Player
The VR Sickness Lab
With these guidelines of failure in mind, I decided it would be a bright idea to make a small game that explored some of these terrible ideas. I took it as an experiment to really dive in deep and see why some of these things are a bad idea.
The game itself is simple. Looking for inspiration, I stumbled into Fall Guys. Making a small obstacle course seemed easy enough so I could focus on what I really came here to do. Destroy this simple game by adding nauseating features that could be turned on and off at will.
My VR legs have gotten pretty strong, since I’ve been developing VR, but some of these features are pure motion sickness in concentrated form.
Low FPS Simulator
Low and unstable FPS has been shown to cause VR sickness in most users. A minimum of 60 FPS is needed to begin prevention of VR sickness, but Meta actually requires developers to hit a target of 72 FPS. The VR Sickness Lab puts this into practice by activating a ton of Game Objects and skyrocketing the poly-count.
Bumper Balls
One great way to induce discomfort for players is by introducing movement without player input. Consider a non-VR game in which your character might get knocked back when they are hit by a projectile. This knock-back effect in VR can be disorienting and cause motion sickness. To implement this, I simply added moving balls that add force to the player if they run into them.
Fast Move Speed
Meta recommends that players move at a speed that is similar to real world walking speed. This comes out to about 1.4m/s. This one is pretty straightforward to implement and mess up. Just increase the continuous movement speed to an uncomfortably fast amount!
Move Horizon
Moving the horizon can cause users to feel like the ground is unstable and thus, induce discomfort and motion sickness. So if we are thinking about adding some ground vibration due to impact, we might want to reconsider if it messes with the horizon itself moving.
Zoom In On Move
This is the one that I would label as cursed. Zooming in the camera can cause massive amounts of motion sickness. It’s like your eyes have the natural ability to become binoculars… It sounds cool, but the amount of motion sickness this can cause is massive. Try this feature out at your own risk.
Conclusion
If we want to make great VR games, we should try out inverting the problem first. Let’s ask ourselves “what could I do if I wanted my game to fail?”. If we know where our VR game will die, it’ll be easier to just not go there.