OC5 Speaker Spotlight: Rémi Palandri

In today’s OC5 Speaker Spotlight, we chat with Oculus Software Engineer Rémi Palandri, whose OC5 talk “Reinforcing Mobile Performance with RenderDoc” will teach devs how to make the most of performance improvements across Oculus Go and Project Santa Cruz.

Rémi Palandri: Unity rollercoaster apps on the DK2, of course :D

RP: In early 2015 before I worked at Oculus, I got to see a beta version of Dreamdeck on a prototype Rift CV1 (called Crystal Cove back then) behind closed doors at GDC. It completely blew my mind. If you can transport anyone in a virtual world that feels real, you get to do lots of things, including connecting people.

RP: I joined Oculus because I wanted to advance the field of VR. I don’t think there is a better place to go do that. Lots of companies do VR things, but our one and only mission is VR, so obviously there will be more focus there.

I also very much like the “let’s ship and learn” approach to product development. VR is very early in development and still imperfect. It would be easier for us to just stay out of the general consumer industry and wait until we have better tech, but we don’t. We ship. Although VR isn’t perfect yet, we believe that today’s experiences bring true and meaningful value to our customers now. I know they do, as I see people across the world using our products in their current state and returning to them day after day, month after month. We can also learn from their likes and dislikes, and we can make VR better even faster. I think that’s the right approach.

RP: It’s probably between Kalpana Chawla, who went from being a woman in a small town in India to a US/Indian astronaut flying on the Space Shuttle (for a long time, she was also a flight instructor at Palo Alto Airport, where I learned to fly), Elon Musk (that dual booster landing of the side cores of Falcon Heavy), and John Carmack. Engineers usually choose between being specialized in one field and staying in that field or being broad across many fields but not as knowledgeable about specifics. John never really chose and is both, which is very impressive to me.

In general, sheer will, hard work, and straight-up refusal to accept failure in the face of really hard problems are things that impress me. SpaceX didn’t decide orbital-class boosters were too hard when their first three Falcon rockets crashed—they energized their team, swore they’d make orbit, and launched (this time successfully) a fourth time.

RP: My family back in France uses Rift fairly heavily to do VR flight simulation on X-Plane 11, where they encounter lots of specific problems that I hope we can start fixing as soon as possible (although five years from a hardware standpoint really isn’t very far at all). To start, it’s hard for them to read the detailed high-frequency information on the plane’s multifunction displays, which I hope we can mitigate using technology like Half Dome’s varifocal displays linked with eye trackers on top of higher resolution screens. Input is also non-optimal as Touch isn’t great for precise hand manipulation—having some sort of hand tracking would help operate small 737 buttons more effectively and realistically, while Touch could be used to operate the plane’s flight controls. Having a realistic avatar system using body and face tracking would also be amazing for virtual multi-crew operations. I would love to help fly complex approaches in real time in the same cockpit as my family and feel like we’re in the same environment, even though I physically live on the other side of the planet and only see them once or twice a year in the real world :)

I look at the next five years as a step forward towards the VR augmented future, in which two universes fully coexist: the real world and the virtual one. People will work, have friends, visit places, and generally live in both of them. One world’s reality, however, won’t be bound by the pesky laws of physics such as gravity (so annoying, right?). In consumer technology, there are seldom complete breakthroughs, just years and years of iterative improvements towards an end goal. The next five years, just like the last five and the next 20, will advance us towards that goal.

I am certain that the next five years will meaningfully change the way we use VR, and I’m looking forward to seeing what possibilities it unlocks.