Oculus Rift: My first steps into Virtual Reality

As you all know by now I'm into 3D stuff as well next to my music. One of the things that always fascinated me was Virtual Reality. Long time ago I did try one of those VR goggles, but was not impressed by the quality and also a lot of lag on the head movement made me dizzy. Besides that they were ridiculously expensive. Then I read about a project on KickStarter that would solve all this. It look so promising that I decided to join the crowd funding of this project. And last week it arrived, so I couldn't wait to have a go.

What you get is this nice box. It is not the final product yet, but a developers version. It is intended for people to develop games for the Oculus Rift. And yes you guessed right that is the name of this product. In the box are some different lenses so that you can adjust it to your eyes depending on whether you wear glasses or not. Then there are the Goggles and a control box. Installing is simple. You put a HDMI cable from you PC's video card in the box and a USB connection from the box in your PC. Then you install the software and you are good to go. At least. You still have to tell your video card that you have an extra monitor.

Then you start the calibration software. You have to close one eye at a time. Adjust some green lines and then you can test your settings. You are put in a room and you can look around. I was already SO impressed by this. But then I downloaded some demos from the Internet and it got better and better. The head tracking is so superb that it feels SO real. Amazing. And usually I get a head ache instantly from 3D glasses on these new 3D TV's, but not here. It is way better and you can look up, down, behind you. In the end I found some games and I'm totally hooked now :) I can really recommend this. Even though the resolution isn't even that high. 1280x800 divided over your two eyes (so 640x800) each, minus some adjustment I guess. So yes you can see pixels, but once you are moving around or looking around you don't see them any more. Your brain really let's you think you are in another (virtual) reality. More information and pre-orders from here: http://www.oculusvr.com/. I'm sure this will be the future of gaming! Highly recommended.

Space Invaders Project (Part 1)

Last weekend I was playing Space Invaders on my Atari 5200 and I thought: Wouldn't it be fun to model these Space Invaders characters in Cinema 4D. So I downloaded some gifs with clear pixel and redraw them in Adobe Illustrator. After that I gave them some depth with the extrude nurbs function in Cinema 4D. This picture I also used Depth of Field to make it a bit more artistic. I hope you like the picture. You can click on it for a larger version of course.

Here is an overview picture of all the models I made so far. Most of them have different poses. I didn't account for this yet with the colors. I need to see how to animate this later, maybe with pose morphs, but we'll see about that. I do plan a little animation with this in the future, but I need to think it out first :) That is why I called this part 1 and I'm sure part 2 will follow when I have a little more time.

And here is one last picture, just for fun purposes with some rows of the same characters, just like in the game. If you never played Space Invaders before go and look it up. It is still one of my favorite game next to Galaga and Galaxians. All of them are so called 'vertical shoot them ups'. I used to be addicted to them. And this brings me to the thought that I should look up the Galaga and Galaxians figures to of course soon. Ah well. It was nice to spend some hours on a rainy Sunday this way. Now back to music again ;)