A tap on Gear VR’s touchpad and a rapid animation sequence zoomed me next to the vehicle, the motion contextualizing the quick reorientation of my viewpoint, unexpected but not uncomfortable. Gazing at the nearby Batmobile, a reddish light bathed the area. Omnipresent bat noises were conspicuously absent throughout the demo, but the atmosphere was so rich I could almost hear the echoes of my breath in the dark expanses of the cave.
The mottled stone platforms rising out of the inky depths to hold his tools and treasures above the darkness, form ever following function. I stood in the Batcave, this reflection of Bruce Wayne’s true self, his real home. The actual experience was more technically interesting than any amount of canned animation, but the visuals alone were quite compelling. Holy virtual reality, Batman! What is an animated, stereoscopic, 360° version of The Animated Series opening sequence doing inside a Gear VR? Guns and fists no match for him, for he is the night! A lightning bolt frames his vigilant form as he surveys his domain for the next threat. The two angular goons believe they’d gotten away with it, and were about to escape with the loot, but the ominous motif of Danny Elfman’s score signals their greatest fear. Midnight on the roof of the Gotham National Bank. So I expected Otoy to show me something awesome, but I wasn’t prepared to see this. X.IO-some cloud… thing?-allegedly does with arbitrary executables what I assumed was literally impossible.
Octane Render, Otoy’s hyper-realistic GPU-based rendering plugin, seemed only interesting to architectural visualization firms and digital pinup artists.
Their Brigade ray-tracing engine was fascinating but seemed almost mythological to me ray-tracing in general seemed irrelevant to PC users for another couple of GPU generations and only majorly disruptive to VR when coupled tightly with perfected eye tracking. I had been following Otoy very casually for something like four years, yet I still didn’t know exactly what they were up to. I’m not the excitable type, but I felt like the elevator was vibrating at some impossible frequency as I rode up to Otoy’s demo suite at Oculus Connect. Less certain was how they managed to pull it off. Road to VR guest reporter Nate Kozak fills us in.Īt that moment, two things were certain to me: Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995) is still the best incarnation of Batman, and a strapless Gear VR loaded with Otoy’s navigable 18k cubemaps will be one of the best tools for VR evangelism. Otoy’s new VR-focused content tools open the door to creating your own navigable VR worlds in stunning detail. An unlikely combination of one of the most iconic interpretations of the superhero comic and cutting edge rendering tech come together to create one of the highest fidelity mobile VR experiences to date.
0 kommentar(er)
