Hugh Hancock

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• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Well, serious answer to this question: one of my borderline obsessions in VR is the physicality of the experience, engaging large muscle groups and proprioception, and so on. As a result, even though it's not intended as a fitness game,...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  VR arcades are very much already a thing. There's one in Edinburgh, and I've had a good dozen licensing enquiries from other VR arcades around the world. Whether, in the long run, they'll be successful is something I'm not sure...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Chances are that the form will evolve in broadly the same way as conventional eSports in that regard. (Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live in a world where the phrase "conventional eSports" has meaning :) ) Most...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  You may find this startup very interesting: https://www.virzoom.com/ It's a piece of cycle-based hardware used as a VR fitness gaming platform....
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  You'll train your arm strength for the same reason that DOTA players get good at stutter-stepping to block creeps: because the requirement is built into the game's rules. Speaking as someone currently actively developing a melee-based VR game, there is...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Interesting points, and thanks for expanding! On the subject of the competence of your opponents: it's worth noting that the most successful VR melee combat simulator so far, GORN, has completely, laughably incompetent opponents. That seems to have been part...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Oh wow. That's a fantastic use for the technology....
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Rehab: oh, that's exciting - most of this I knew about already, but I hadn't considered the uses of VR in rehab. Very, very cool - that could be huge....
• Posted Are VR esports going to become a thing? to Charlie's Diary
  h2{font-size: 150%; font-weight: bold;margin-top: 30px;} ul{font-size:medium !important} This is a guest post by Virtual Reality developer Hugh Hancock, creator of VR horror RPG Left-Hand Path. In the discussion of my last post, Philippa Cowderoy and Geoff Hart brought up an...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  A lot. A lot. It's already been significantly improved - the number of people who experience nausea with the Vive is very small, for example. It's night-and-day compared with phone-in-headset VR or earlier generations of the Oculus. Gabe Newell is...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  As a keen esport player and also someone who has played a lot of VR games that require precise, forceful movements, I don't think this will be as much of a problem as you believe. One of the most popular...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  Visualisation is something that's going to be massive in VR. You can do SO much by just taking something that was on a screen and transferring it to a navigable virtual space, let alone getting more sophisticated. So this looks...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  I completely agree. I make games and game-like experiences in VR for the same reason Charlie writes books: I love telling stories and creating worlds. The money's also nice, but I'd be doing this anyway. If you're looking at VR...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  Elite: Dangerous is actually hugely popular in VR. You don't hear much about it because the discussion is limited to ED boards and subreddits rather than the main VR ones, but it's a pretty significant draw. RTSes less so, largely...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  Stereo depth perception - this is particularly interesting! What sort of cues can VR devs use for people who don't have stereo depth perception? I'll bear it in mind in future games....
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  Interesting question! Let me think about that - those thoughts might turn into a separate post!...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  Ah, yeah, I didn't cover the wonderful world of VR sex peripherals in this article, but I believe there's a lot of active development going on there too :)...
• Posted From Here To The Holodeck to Charlie's Diary
  h2{font-size: 150%; font-weight: bold;margin-top: 30px;} ul{font-size:medium !important} People sometimes ask me why I'm so keen on VR - keen enough to drop a 20-year career to move into it - and I always give the same response. "I get to...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  I don't have any specific replies to make here, but just want to say that I'm loving the comments! Fascinating stuff....
• Posted Burn The Programmer! to Charlie's Diary
  h2{font-size: 150%; font-weight: bold;margin-top: 30px;} ul{font-size:medium !important} This is a guest post by Virtual Reality developer Hugh Hancock, creator of VR horror RPG Left-Hand Path. I've always had a problem with Arthur C Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  Agreed. I don't think it'll replace all travel, and probably not travel-for-negotiation. However, travel-for-collaboration - design meetings, review meetings, anything where people are already working together and just need to be in the same space to collaborate - that it...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  Yes, it's going to be fantastic, and apps for precisely that purpose are already beginning to appear. Also consider, for example, fog of war. There's no reason the GM can't see the whole table whilst the players only see what...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  Iiiiiinteresting! Given that, I would assume that these days there are quite a number of Vives and Oculus Rifts sitting around in various large three-letter agencies......
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  Sub-milisecond latency is only relevant on the rendering end. Positional lag on other players due to network issues doesn't affect nausea. The idea of having meetup / conference / collaborative VR apps available isn't theory. It isn't a pipe-dream I...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  Well in that case, let me start by saying that on the DRM-and-VR issue, I don't know my stuff. I know it's happening, but I've been working 14-hour days building VR experiences during all the time it's kicked off, so...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  I'd actually prefer not to comment on that in case the Wrong People end up Google searching one day. I'm, false modesty aside, an expert on both VR and advertising-style persusasion, so I have some pretty solidly grounded ideas on...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  It's a totally different experience having a conversation with someone or someones in VR to using a Slack channel. They're not really comparable at all. A better comparison might be Skype compared to VR, but again, the experience is very...
• Posted Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope. to Charlie's Diary
  h2{font-size: 150%; font-weight: bold;margin-top: 30px;} ul{font-size:medium !important} This is a guest post by filmmaker, author, entrepreneur, and now Virtual Reality developer Hugh Hancock. Virtual Reality's here. Woo. Yay. More tech toys. The UK just voted to leave the EU. Trump's...
• Posted Three Unexpectedly Good Things VR Will Probably Cause to Charlie's Diary
  h2{font-size: 150%; font-weight: bold;margin-top: 30px;} ul{font-size:medium !important} This is a guest post by VR developer Hugh Hancock, creator of Vive horror/RPG Left-Hand Path. OK, at this point we can call it. VR is definitely here, it works, and it's not...
• Commented on Rise Of The Trollbot
  Amusingly I nearly used Goonswarm as example #2 in the second "The Trollswarm Cometh" - not because their tactics in EVE were particularly troll-like, but because the "swarm" mentality worked so well....