Mindfield Games
Virtual reality needs specialists. Enter a Helsinki startup made for the job
Unlike most Finnish game startups, Mindfield isn’t focused on free-toplay entertainment. Instead, it’s pinning its future on virtual reality games, leading with the intriguing Pollen, which is billed as a firstperson exploration game and features tremendously atmospheric environments. Co-founders Ville Kivistö and Olli Sinerma tell us more.
Why did you choose to specialise in VR game development, with Oculus Rift?
Ville Kivistö Well, it’s just such a big leap, compared to any other device. It’s like going from…
Olli Sinerma …board games to digital games. That’s the sort of step it is. When you first experience modern VR, it makes quite an impression. Is it difficult to keep that momentum going, to keep feeling that excited about VR?
OS Well, there is new stuff coming out all the time, and the fun thing about VR is that nobody really knows exactly what is going to be its killer app. And it might be even something that has never been done on any platform whatsoever because it’s such a giant leap.
VK Whenever I play a game using a traditional flatscreen, especially if it’s some firstperson game or a driving game, I feel like I’m missing something because I’m not using Oculus. For me, that’s the thing that really nails it.
What sort of challenges are you coming up against in the process of developing Pollen?
OS Motion sickness is one of the biggest issues, of course. It’s something that hasn’t been experienced in gaming before – previously, when people got sick of your game, it didn’t mean what it means now [laughs]. So finding the cure for motion sickness is the biggest thing. The game is fun, the story is really engaging, and the motion sickness needs to be killed out of it.
VK I’m quite happy with how far we’ve come in solving that puzzle. We’ve made a lot of progress in the past six months.
OS We’re learning things from other developers all the time. The virtual reality community is really great – everybody’s helping each other a lot, so we are advancing at a very fast pace. Also, Oculus has pretty much the smartest guys in the gaming world, such as Michael Abrash and John Carmack. If anyone can do virtual reality, it’s the guy who founded Id Software and created Quake [laughs].
How big do you think VR will be once it’s widely available commercially?
VK In ten years, I think it will be huge. I want to work in this area of technology for the rest of my life.
OS It’s a really interesting area to work in. Partly that’s because the technology and the interface haven’t been finalised, and even though everything will get better with every generation, these things won’t be finalised for a very long time. Is it simply impossible to say what VR will be like in, say, ten years’ time?
VK The analogy I would use is that the Oculus Rift is your old black-and-white feature phone. If, ten years ago, someone asked you what your mobile phone would be like in ten years’ time, you probably wouldn’t have described the iPhone. And the same applies to VR. The future is really hard to predict.