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Starship Commander interview: Talking your way through the VR galaxy

Conquering space using voice commands puts this new interstellar game at the top of the VR mountain.

Chris Jarrard

October 22, 2018 1:35 PM

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While VR software is still in a relative infancy, a few forward-thinking development studios are working to pave the way for how we use the technology in the future. One of the most promising projects slated to arrive in the near future is Starship Commander, a new space game from the folks at Human Interact. We got a chance to speak with Alexander Mejia, Creative Director at Human Interact, about what makes the game stand out from the crowded lot of VR space titles while we were at Oculus Connect 5.

Mejia starts off by touting his studio’s work on the game and how the tech world has responded to its novel use of voice commands. Unlike the shaky implementations of old, Starship Commander allows player to converse with their ship and NPCs with the use of everyday speech. Rather than relying on stiff, precision commands, the game use the power of the cloud to make interactions resemble normal human conversation. The power of large neural networks allows the game to interpret your speech and translate it into a usable input for the game, even if the developers did not explicitly build the game to match your exact speech patterns.

Human Interact hopes that the ease of input entry can help Starship Commander become that first VR app that breaks through into the mainstream. For more gaming and games industry videos, including convention coverage and in-depth developer interviews, be sure to follow both Shacknews and GamerHub.tv over on YouTube.

Chris Jarrard

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.