Owlchemy’s Andrew Eiche On Steam Frame, AI, Voice Interaction & The Future Of Virtual Reality

One of the first articles on Good Virtual Reality checked in with Owlchemy Labs head Andrew Eiche about the path to 1 billion people in VR headsets. (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/...) VR glasses are incoming from Meta (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/...) and the most comfortable VR headset I’ve ever worn is shipping from Valve, but prices are increasing for headsets from hundreds to thousands of dollars. It’s looking increasingly like VR’s path to sitting on 1 billion heads might happen sometime in the 2030s. Owlchemy made Job Simulator and its most recent project Dimensional Double Shift launched in early access in 2024 with a bold statement about the importance of both multiplayer and hand tracking to spending extended time in virtual reality. On both Android XR and Meta Quest devices, the game could only be played with other people and your hands in the open air. From today, though, controller support is being added to coincide with the launch of Steam Frame from Valve and minutes before connecting with Eiche for our podcast I tested out an intriguing demo of multiplayer without the other human players. “The goal was to create an uncompromising version of multiplayer where you as the single player-player feel very similar to the way that you felt when you were playing multiplayer in, like, a safe synthetic environment,” Eiche said. “A lot of this came from thinking back to playing Unreal Tournament back in the day and being able to set up bot matches with whatever rules I wanted and not having to worry about other people complaining. And then you get to go in the multiplayer match and really test your skills or really like flex that muscle. And so I wanted a similar thing for VR and, especially with VR still in the earlier days, getting people’s schedules together, getting people to play at the same time and getting everybody in that environment can be difficult and playing with randos can be scary. So single player stands as like a third pillar.” Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/...) To fulfill customer orders, I was able to ask the bots for ingredients using my voice and they’d hand them over to me. The feature was far from perfect but there’s still a long way to go in the development of this single-player mode, which is planned for release sometime next year as Owlchemy works to “tame this thing.” I encourage you to listen to my earlier conversation with Devin Reimer at AstroBeam (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/...) who licensed some of the tech he built from when he was at Owlchemy to make Stellar Cafe. That game has some similarities to Dimensional Double Shift — both are now working at the cutting edge of voice interaction with bots - but the two titles also play very differently. With the context that the founding of Good Virtual Reality has some relationship to a disagreement over the use of A.I. (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/...) and with accelerating experimental modding of classic games into VR (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/...) with assistance from agents, my conversation with Eiche ends up revealing an incredibly nuanced take from him over the value of game designers and the future of game development. “AI is never going to be able to tune a game without a human in the loop because games are built for humans,” Eiche said. “You’ll even hear like the super prompter people … eventually just stop telling the machine to adjust it and tell it to give you a bunch of knobs. So you can adjust it and get the game feel. So my recommendation is two things that are gonna win the day. It’s knowing game design and it’s building things that are fundamentally very difficult to write up in a single prompt.” You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism. https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3e... Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/su...)