After building my cardboard headset I downloaded some demo apps to test the whole thing out. One of my favourites has been DebrisDefrag by Japanese developer Limecolor.
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| Shoot the large asteroids as they wander across your path. (Hmm, sounds like an idea for a vector-based 2D arcade game...) Careful -- they're all around you (even above and below). |
I was surprised to find Tuscany Dive by FabulousPixel, a version of the Tuscany demo designed for the Oculus Rift VR system. Makes a lot of sense -- after all, the demo was built to showcase VR. Anyway, this version appears to have been designed for use with the Durovis Dive (also called OpenDive) VR headset, which is basically a plastic 3D-printed equivalent of Google Cardboard.
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| A side-by-side (L-R) presentation of the Tuscany house. These images can be free-viewed using the parallel technique. |
Mobile phones have relatively low-power processing ability (typically a tenth of normal desktop processors, according to my research) so an environment like this, with its high graphics cost, pushes the limits of a mobile phone's electronics. Thankfully the developers have added a tap-to-change-graphics-quality feature. (With Cardboard you must move the headset away from your face and wiggle your finger inside the nose-hole to touch the screen, so it's not exactly convenient!)
The big problem with this demo -- and it demonstrates one of the big technology limitations of cheap VR -- is how to move. The demo has an "auto-walk" feature, where you look downward to enable or disable movement in the direction of view. I found it a pain to use.
Tuscany Dive isn't exactly a game, but it does show the potential for 3D environments like this typically found in firs-person games.
Sisters by Otherworld Interactive demonstrates the application of this very well, in a nice little creepy horror experience.
Many of the other Cardboard apps I've tried are just VR demos but my experiences have shown me that there's a fair bit of potential for making games in this particular area -- especially ones aimed at cheap mobile VR devices like Cardboard or Dive.
The Sisters game made me think of Gone Home, which reminded me that my old Rewind sandbox game concept particularly lends itself to VR implementation. I'd put the game to one side while working on other projects, but these seems a prime opportunity to resurrect it; I've got a load of assets built already. Therefore I'm aiming to release a basic version of Rewind once I've cracked a few tricky problems:
- How to use Unity to construct VR games
- How to control 3D movement with only limited input from the user
Next post: getting started with VR in Unity!