OC5 Speaker Spotlight: Brandon Dillon
So far in our OC5 Speaker Spotlight series, we’ve heard from Oculus Rift Product Manager Lucy Chen, Engineering Manager John Bartkiw, and Software Engineer Rémi Palandri, plus Insomniac Games Lead Designer Mike Daly. Today, we sit down with Oculus Rift Product Manager Brandon Dillon, who will join Product Manager Nancy Xiao and Software Engineer Lizzy Donahue at OC5 to present “The Future of Home for Rift: Developer & Roadmap Updates.”
Brandon Dillon: I walked into a VR arcade in an Austin, TX mall when I was a kid in the ’90s. I spent my whole allowance on like one game of Dactyl Nightmare, got really motion sick, and promptly threw up in a trash can. We’ve come a long way.
BD: I’ve been a game developer for years and am always excited about new immersive technology, but I was a big VR skeptic when the Oculus Kickstarter first came out (’cause of the whole “throwing up” thing referenced above). I had a buddy who was normally a way bigger skeptic than I was, but who had recently joined Oculus and kept saying really grandiose things about how amazing VR was. I thought he’d lost it, but he talked me into coming to visit, and I got to check out one of the early prototypes that had positional tracking at high framerate.
That demo was way different than everything I’d seen before. It wasn’t just a neat stereoscopic trick that made me feel slightly nauseous—it crossed this threshold where it successfully tricked my brain into believing what I was seeing was reality. I was a true believer from that point forward, promptly joined the company, and haven’t lost any of that sense of wonder in the years since.
BD: We built some multiplayer prototypes in the early days of Oculus, and we’d just put cubes where your headset and controllers were. But even with just box people, you could tell instantly when a real person was in VR with you.
That sense of embodiment and presence made it feel like the person you were hanging out with was there in the room with you, even with the crudest representation. I knew pretty much immediately that VR was a unique medium for social connection once I realized I could identify different box people based on their body language alone.
BD: I’m a Shigeru Miyamoto fanboy. His games tap into fundamental aspects of the human experience and are always deftly and elegantly executed. At some point, I saw an interview with Miyamoto where he was talking about his advice for other developers, and he said that a good idea was one that could solve many problems—that solving a single problem wasn’t good enough. That stuck with me and has had a big influence on the way I think about what we build.
I worked on Toybox, which was one of our early demo experiences for Oculus Touch, and Miyamoto came by one of our trade show booths to check it out. That was a career highlight for me, and I still have no idea what he thought of it.
BD: I’m personally really excited about the potential for VR to unlock new forms of creativity—we’re already seeing early signs of this. Apps like Medium and Tilt Brush have made 3D art creation easier, faster, and more accessible than tools that came before them, and some of the creations look like things I’ve never seen before. Then you have other surreal phenomena today, like purely virtual Japanese YouTube stars who review VR games. All of these things are being delivered by the first generation of mainstream VR technology. I think in five years, VR will have delivered us new kinds of creative art and experiences that we can’t even really conceptualize today.
