Unity Labs’ Principal Designer on VR Scene Editor & Overcoming Perceptual Illusions
Timoni West is principal designer at Unity Labs, and she’s been working on creating tools within Unity to be able to create VR from within VR. I first talked with Timoni in October about these content creation tools which were revealed to the VR community for the first time at Unity’s VR/AR Vision Summit in February. I had a chance to catch up with her to talk about creating VR in VR for both developers and non-developers.
I got the first glimpse of what advertising within a VR experience might look like when I saw a demo of some ads playing on the 
Part of the challenge of creating a first-person perspective game in VR is that there are limited locomotion options for moving around in VR in a way that’s comfortable for most people. Damaged Core is a Oculus Rift launch title that uses a unique and very effective locomotion method where you move between different first-person robots as well as third-person security cameras. This ends up being a very comfortable way to provide a lot more agency in movement than most other survival wave VR shooters, and it also has a lot of elegance in that it’d actually be possible to do in a world of AI-driven robot assassins. You can’t hack into every robot enemy, and so you have to strategically move around a battlefield in the right order.
When most people think about the types of things that want to do in virtual reality, then they almost always think of experiences that are from the first-person perspective. But Lucky’s Tale proved to me that there are going to be a whole range of experiences that people don’t know that they want to have until they actually have them in VR. It also proved to a lot of VR developers that not only could a third-person perspective work, but that it could work so well as to be able to cause a fit of VR giggles for how surprisingly compelling and delightful it could be.
