Category: HTC Vive Games

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‘Rick and Morty Simulator’: Making Narratives More Plausible through Interruption

alex-schwartzWhen Owlchemy Labs‘ Alex Schwartz saw that Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland was a fan of their Job Simulator VR experience, then he reached out and met up with Justin in Los Angeles. They came up with the idea of creating an interactive Rick and Morty Simulator VR experience that would combine the mechanics of Job Simulator within the setting of Rick’s garage.

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When Alex started adding narrative components to the and discovered a big problem that would immediately break presence. Every character and action needed to be interruptible in order to maintain the plausibility illusion within the experience. Matching expectations is the biggest challenge for creating a highly interactive VR environment, and interacting with real humans means that they should have an appropriate reaction if you try to interrupt them. One of the most complicated new systems that Owlchemy Labs had to develop was a framework that could account for all different types of interruptions.

The result is that Rick and Morty Simulator is one of the most advanced interactive narratives that I’ve seen so far. Their interrupt system seamlessly blends highly dynamic interaction within a narrative structure that keeps the overall experience moving forward in what ends up feeling like a complete adventure within the Rick & Morty universe. There’s still a lot of work to be done in having the characters directly respond and react to your physical presence and action directed at them, and Alex says that this is one of the biggest open problems that they’re working on.

I had a chance to catch up with Alex at PAX West where we talked about how the Rick and Morty Simulator project came about, the importance of interruptions in interactive narratives, maintaining presence within VR, their workflow for writing and collaborating with Adult Swim and Justin Roiland, and some of the open problems that they’re working to solve.

Here are some tweets that document how Alex and Justin first got together.

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The post ‘Rick and Morty Simulator': Making Narratives More Plausible through Interruption appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Iron Man’ Director Jon Favreau’s First VR Project ‘Gnomes & Goblins’ Looks Delightful

Veteran Director of Iron Man, Chef and more recently The Jungle Book, Jon Favreau has now teamed up with veteran VR production house WEVR on a brand new project entitled ‘Gnomes & Goblins’, a realtime VR experience set in a magical fantasy world.

The interest from Hollywood and its key players in immersive technologies seems to be growing apace, with studios and creatives keen to explore the artistic and, of course, financial potential of VR.

The latest convert to virtual reality is Jon Favreau, a Writer, Director, Producer and Actor you will almost certainly have encountered – unless you happen to have sworn yourself off all motion picture based entertainment for the last 20 years. He’s best known for his Directorial duties on films like Iron Man (2008) and The Jungle Book (2016), but you may have encountered his front-of-camera skills in many films from Hoffa (1992) to Chef (2014 – a movie he also wrote, directed and produced). Favreau is one of those sickeningly talented people then, and now he’s turning his attention to VR.

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Favreau’s first project in virtual reality is a new collaboration with Wevr, developers of the enchanting underwater experience theBlu and Reality One. It’s described as an “opportunity to explore an enchanted VR world,” seemingly created by Favreau where you get to meet and “developer a personal relationship” with the worlds characters. Favreau says that he didn’t want the project to be a “passive cinematic experience where people just sit and enjoy it like a ride,” and importantly “where you have the opportunity to explore the same feelings you get while lucid dreaming.”

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Gnomes & Goblins is formed from ideas that Favreau had been toying with already, but it was Wevr’s theBlu as demo’d on the HTC Vive which showed him that VR was the right medium to do the project justice. “I went over to Wevr and tried out theBlu on the Vive. Presence was the most interesting phenomenon when I experienced it for the first time,” says Favreau, ” Knowing that you are seeing something artificial and yet your brain is fooled into believing that it’s real.” As Favreau was looking for an independent collaborator with a “lab feel”, the partnership with Wevr was born.

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If all of this sounds mighty intriguing, you won’t have to wait much longer to see what Favreau and Wevr have been working on for the last year. Gnomes & Goblins is set to appear via Wevr Transport, Steam and Viveport on September 8th in preview form, so you’ll be able to step into the world for yourself next week.

The post ‘Iron Man’ Director Jon Favreau’s First VR Project ‘Gnomes & Goblins’ Looks Delightful appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Pool Nation VR’ Gets NVIDIA Multi-Res Shading Support and More in Latest Patch

Good news for NVIDIA GPU owners today as Pool Nation VR was updated to include support for Multi Res Shading alongside other feature additions and improvements.

See Also: ‘Pool Nation VR’ Review
See Also: ‘Pool Nation VR’ Review

Pool Nation VR is a firm Road to VR favourite, with our own Garret Bullard awarding the title a very respectable 4.7/5 in his recent review, stating that the game is “responsive, looks good, and is great simulation of the game we all know and enjoy. If you enjoy pool and have a friend with an HTC Vive this game is a must.”

Now, the developers Cherry Pop Games and Perilous Orbit have released a patch which adds some significant enhancements to the title. Chief among them is the implementation of NVIDIA’s proprietary Multi-res Shading rendering method. According to the patch notes:

“Multi-Res Shading is an innovative rendering technique for VR whereby each part of an image is rendered at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the lens corrected image. Multi-Res Shading uses Maxwell or later architecture features to render multiple scaled viewports in a single pass, delivering substantial performance improvements in pixel shading. “

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Steam users are already reporting significant performance gains allowing them to ramp up super-sampling by 33% or more, which massively increases the quality and clarity of the visuals in the game.

The developers haven’t stopped there either. Darts is now its own fully fledged mini-game, Skreeball has been improved, and a collection of usability improvements have all made this patch along with a change to the layout of the play area. Cryptically, the patch notes ask “Hmmm… I wonder why we’re readying the map with more spaces and machines” which might suggest there are more minigames on the way.

Hopefully these updates will introduce more people to one of the best VR experiences available. If your interest is now piqued, you can buy Pool Nation VR for HTC Vive on Steam right here.

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