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I was listening to some demoscene music, and I began to imagine a demo for the music in VR with lights around me and a series of dancing objects, all with some positional tracking, like being there. And I started to think, wait... Oculus Quest could be a great platform to do this! I do not have one, I do not even know if I'm going to buy one, it was just an idea that I found interesting, besides that, we would have the advantage of being a closed platform, with closed specs, that we could push the limits, all this using a new way to show demos... VR !!! The only problem would probably be the store .... I do not know if it would be easy to make a demo available in the oculus store ... https://developer.oculus.com/distribute/latest/concepts/publish-quest-req/ But it will probably be easier than putting a demo on the Apple App Store LOL

not sure what the Oculus Quest is exactly or how it differs from the rift and the vive but there already been a few demos made / ported to VR.

I agree in princinple that roomscale VR demos could be really cool but I see a a few problems here. You can't really control the camera so it's hard to do good editing in VR (Navis brought this point up in some talk). Also, if you aren't using Unity or Unreal Engine, getting started might be tough. Enjoy those Android NDK builds :)

Finally, the platform is owned and controlled by Facebook. I can't speak for others but for me this is a big no-no. At least you can still "sideload" binaries without submitting them to their store.

But what do I know? Maybe Quest will be the next Amiga.

@psenough it's a standalone platform running an android fork

Another thread about VR here https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11542&page=1
The Oculus Quest being a standalone platform with positional traking, would be a nice platform if someone would like to do something demo related in VR.

That's great - did you watch the rest of our talks where we point out all the things that are annoying with VR? :)

VR Troopers could be a great name for a future demogroup.

I think VR is a great medium for refreshing the scene and making demos that are more of a personal experience again. Of course as people have said you've got to drop any notions of a traditional camera and putting all your visuals in the user's sightline. Forget all that. I really think of it more as making an installation piece, and instead of a modern timeline setup go back to the older way of presenting demo fx: a build up from nothing to a constant point. Let people stay in your demo as long as they want. Plus you have real spatial audio which, apart from a direction pointer, will push people to use dedicated soundfx elements to their soundtracks. (shoutout to jco for really pushing that, so many modern pc demos are losing a lot of their dynamic connection without it)

It's a neat little machine, the tracking is amazing, sideloading apks is easy too

@gargaj no, but I would love to view anything related to VR demos, just paste here the links please... :)
@ham lol
@4mat Exactly!
The moment I was in love with demoscene, it was when I alone saw in my room, on my pc the Second Reality with headphones ... I was blown away. It was a personal experience.
With VR I had again that WOW factor, I bought a few months ago the PSVR for PS4 and found it spectacular the problem is that to make something for the PSVR you need to have a SDK?! I don't know... It's not easy.
In VR many of the current stuff as just "Experiences" aka Demos.
The concept of a VR Demo could even be slightly interactive, with position tracking, and using the VR hand controls during the demo, like a interactive music video.
If well made, the companies that make the headsets, would certainly love to have these demos in their catalog, and if some good demos begin to appear, they would probably even sponsor or promote VR demo competitions.

@garjag Great talk! Both talks were great!

Having tried The Goggles now myself, I have to say I'm impressed! The tracking works rather well and the camera passthrough is helpful despite its awful quality. The GPU still seems very underpowered (or maybe the demos were just playing it safe) so yeah there's some graphics programming challenge here :)

Even though the device is actively cooled I suppose the programmer still needs to worry about thermal limits. You could consider this an extra challenge, but it seems like a hindrance to me. Maybe demos are short enough to not run into this problem?

The tiny speakers produce a loud but a very thin sound, so most people watching the demos would miss all frequencies below 100 Hz or so. Chiptunes would play just fine though.

I'd like to experiment with a small demo but all the options (using Unity, porting my C++ code to GLES, or using WebVR) seem pretty bad. WebVR looks like the path of least resistance but of course its featureset is limited. Why is demomaking so difficult?

@4mat thanks for the shout :D indeed I'm trying too make SFX and sound sculpting beyond music more relevant in demos - there is so much untapped potential. VR could be a great platform for that. Imagine 1000s of ridid body cubes dropping on a surface around you, with each collision emitting a properly localized and dynamic impact sound... I've been considering adding game audio tech to demos in order to pull stuff like this off, but it becomes so much more interesting in a VR context, due to its intrinsic interactivity and immersion.

How FIR/HRTF-based positional audio could be pulled off with that many sound events is another topic... but an interesting one!

I have been dabbling around with an Oculus DK2, but with all the setup overhead and cable chaos, maybe standalone platforms like the Quest could make VR more relevant. Haven't tried it yet, but feeling tempted.

Depends on the chiptune ;)