波士顿的VR Game Jam

Over the last days of May and into early June, over 50 people from in and around the Boston game community gathered together for a VR game jam. The event was organized by Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs in conjunction with devs who saw VR demos back at Steam Dev Days and wanted to do a VR Jam. So Valve and Unity went out to help. The purpose of the jam was to expose developers to positional tracking and low persistence.

在5月的最后几天到6月初，来自波士顿游戏社区内外的50多个人聚集在一起参加了VR游戏大赛。 该活动由Owlchemy Labs的Alex Schwartz和Devin Reimer以及开发人员共同组织，这些开发人员在Steam Dev Days上观看了VR演示，并想做一个VR Jam。 因此，Valve和Unity出去提供帮助。 卡纸的目的是使开发人员容易受到位置跟踪和持久性的影响。

To enable this, Valve brought along some prototype headsets with positional tracking using desktop IR cameras. A couple of us from Unity went along to provide support and witness the creativity of the community first hand. The event gave us all a chance to test the excellent new SteamVR Unity plugin being developed at Valve.

为此，Valve使用台式红外摄像机带来了一些带有位置跟踪功能的原型耳机。 我们几个来自Unity的人一起提供了支持，并亲眼见证了社区的创造力。 该活动使我们所有人都有机会测试由Valve开发的出色的新SteamVR Unity插件。

The participants split up into teams, some with just a couple of folks, others with full teams comprising programmers, artists and designers. There was only one rule – teams had to hit 95 frames per second (the refresh rate of the Valve prototype hardware), or their demos wouldn’t be shown at the showcase.

参与者分为团队，有的只有几个人，有的则有由程序员，艺术家和设计师组成的完整团队。 只有一条规则-团队必须达到每秒95帧(Valve原型硬件的刷新率)，否则他们的演示将不会在展示板上显示。

Getting 95 frames a second in 2 days was a huge challenge, and I can honestly say I wasn’t the only person to be surprised at the number of teams that succeeded, as Chet Faliszek from Valve put it: “All of the devs using Unity hit the frame rate. It really is a testament to Unity that people could deliver that high perf requirement in that short a time frame.”

在2天之内每秒获得95帧是一个巨大的挑战，坦白地说，我并不是唯一一个对成功的团队数量感到惊讶的人，正如Valve的Chet Faliszek所说：“所有开发人员都在使用Unity达到了帧速率。 这确实是Unity的证明，人们可以在很短的时间内实现较高的性能要求。”

One team built a simulator where the player was a giraffe, reaching its head through windows in a home searching for tasty treats to eat. Another team developed a playfield full of block buildings populated with small screaming humans and giant kaiju punching bags to give the player a sense of what it is like to be a giant robot with telescoping arms.

一个团队建立了一个模拟器，其中玩家是长颈鹿，通过窗户在家中的窗户寻找可食用的零食。 另一个团队开发了一个操场，操场上到处都是砖块建筑，里面挤满了尖叫的小家伙和巨大的Kaiju沙袋，使玩家对拥有伸缩臂的巨型机器人有什么感觉。

A further project involved using the rotation of the player’s head to cause a sea snake to swim underwater, a potentially nauseating experience, but with the positional headsets this sort of head movement seemed robust and the devs could keep the headset on for a long time without any ill effect.  Additionally, one of the most simple, yet fun, games at the jam was made by a single person to simulate heading a goal in soccer – a game that yielded many calls to “beat my high score” during testing.

进一步的项目涉及使用玩家头部的旋转使海蛇在水下游泳，这可能会令人作呕，但是在使用头戴式头戴式耳机时，这种头部运动似乎很健壮，并且开发人员可以长时间不用打开头戴式耳机。任何不良影响。 此外，最简单却有趣的游戏之一是由一个人制作的，用以模拟足球进球的方向–该游戏在测试过程中发出了许多电话，要求“击败我的高分”。

There were many times we were asked what a particular group should do, and the response was always the same: “I don’t know, and in fact no one knows yet what works in VR. So make something crazy and weird and lets find out how it feels in that world.” In so many ways, we are still in the very early days of VR, and we just don’t yet know enough or have enough experience to know what works and what doesn’t.

很多时候，我们被问到一个特定的小组应该做什么，而答案总是相同的：“我不知道，实际上，没人知道在VR中什么有效。 因此，请使某些东西变得疯狂和怪异，并让我们了解一下那个世界的感觉。” 从许多方面来看，我们仍处于VR的初期，我们只是了解的不够多，或者没有足够的经验来了解什么有效，什么无效。

From my point of view, we are looking at a new era, similar to the push for 3D gaming in the 90s. Those early games are very primitive by today’s standards, and yet those early lessons are still with us and continue to inform game design. I believe the new wave of positional VR hardware is another huge step forward, and it will take years before we know collectively how to use it in the best way.

在我看来，我们正在展望一个新时代，类似于90年代3D游戏的推动。 从今天的标准来看，那些早期的游戏是非常原始的，但是这些早期的教训仍然存在，并且继续为游戏设计提供信息。 我相信新的位置VR硬件浪潮是又一个巨大的进步，而且要我们集体知道如何以最佳方式使用它还需要很多年。

I was happy to see so many newbies to Unity pick it up and be able to produce content right away. Additionally, it was great to see seasoned professionals be forced to think through their design in a new way, knowing that they did not have a clear picture of exactly what it would look like during game play.

我很高兴看到这么多Unity新手能够使用它并能够立即生成内容。 此外，很高兴看到经验丰富的专业人士被迫以一种新的方式来思考他们的设计，因为他们没有清楚地了解游戏过程中的模样。

Earlier this year, at the Steam Dev Days, Alex and Devin from Owlchemy Labs gave a talk on authoring for VR, called Wild West of VR – Discovering the Rules of Oculus Rift Development. Go give it a watch to get a jump start on issues related to authoring.

今年早些时候，在Steam Dev Days上，Owlchemy Labs的Alex和Devin发表了有关VR创作的演讲，名为VR的狂野西部-发现Oculus Rift开发的规则 。 赶快给它一个手表，以快速了解与创作有关的问题。

Also, for an understanding of what the current challenges are, and where the current state of the tech is at, I recommend also watching Michael Abrash from Valve’s presentation: What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years.

另外，为了了解当前的挑战以及技术的现状，我建议您还观看Valve演讲中的Michael Abrash： 两年内VR可以，应该并且几乎肯定会发生什么 。

And for what will hopefully be a continuing and engaging discussion on VR authoring, join us in Seattle this August for our Unite Conference, where I will head a panel discussion titled The Reality of Authoring on the Virtual Frontier. In my imagination, the Future of VR is amazing, so let’s all work together to make it reality!

希望继续进行有关VR创作的有趣讨论，请参加我们今年8月在西雅图举行的Unity大会 ，在那里我将主持一个小组讨论，题目为“虚拟边界上的创作现实”。 在我的想象中，VR的未来是惊人的，因此让我们共同努力使其成为现实！

翻译自: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/02/vr-game-jam-in-boston/