o use their own imaginations in the experiences.”
Not surprisingly, open-ended VR games like Owlchemy Labs’ animated Job Simulator also proved to delight kids by letting them do things that they might not be able to do in real life like work in an office or become a gourmet chef or an auto mechanic.
Along with confirming the popularity of Minecraft-type experiences, the study also provides insights that help dispel the notion that VR is an anti-social, solitary experience detrimental to kids’ development.
“We’re finding the opposite,” says Yamada-Rice. “In pairs, children are really chatty and engaged with each other.”
For each pair, one kid would have the VR headset experience while his or her friend watched on a separate screen in the room. According to Yamada-Rice, children without the headsets added to the experience by shouting out things the other child might be able to do. Or from a tactile, physical place, they would sometimes run behind their VR-immersed friends to touch their backs.
“Just how tactile kids want to be with content is really interesting. Compared to adults and parents, who are a bit cautious with VR at first, children run all over the place,” says Yamada-Rice. “But in terms of content development and health and safety, do you want them to move around that fast, or could this potentially throw them more off balance?”
Balance is one of the more obvious and immediate health and safety issues developers need to sort out, notes Yamada-Rice. “Kids are used to reaching for things because they’re at adult height. But even when you calibrate the VR experience for kids’ heights, if they do lose their balance because they are very much engaged in the space, they might try to use virtual objects to steady themselves, which are obviously not there, so it’s problematic,” she says. “So keeping the interactive content down a little bit lower, where they don’t have to stretch, could potentially solve the issue.”
Between first and third
Digging deeper into VR as a more social outlet, Climax Studios is on the verge of releasing what is perhaps the industry’s first VR experience to include a companion app, Lola and the Giant. The mobile VR experience for kids and families is slated to launch exclusively on Google Daydream. It is a first- and third-person VR adventure game where you experience the game’s epic journey as both a little girl with a mysterious power and as a powerful, stony giant. The company’s 11th VR title is particularly unique because it includes a companion app that allows another player to assist the VR player on their journey.
“We wanted to create a VR game that could be experienced by everyone, not just the user in the headset. We feel this is an important step to ensure the growth of the market,” says lead designer Matt Duff. “In the development process, we started to discover that one of the negative factors of VR was people mentioning the isolation of it, not only for the person inside the headset, but for the other people in the room, too,” he says.
Thus the companion app was born. Duff says it serves as a magical window into the same world as the VR player. “You see what they see, except you have your own unique controls, like the camera. You can move the phone using the gyroscope, and that moves the camera for you, but not for the VR player and vice versa. The VR player can move their head around and the companion app isn’t affected.”
The ability to have first- and third-person perspectives in VR, notes Yamada-Rice, is a feature kids have been asking for. “Children are saying it would be nice to be able to switch from third person to first, which is something they can do in Minecraft,” she says.
As far as providing two-player interaction in Lola, Climax developed a small hint system, where the person using the companion app can tap anywhere on the screen to make a giant arrow appear, which also appears in real time in the VR headset. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Hey, come over here, or look over there,’” notes Duff.
Lola is expected to launch as one self-contained premium adventure download divid