Mad God – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

November 13, 2017

Life In 360°: Mad God

Welcome back to VRFocus where November is well on the way and we’re on the pathway to the holiday season. If you were with us over the weekend you’ll know just how true that is, because Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) revealed details of the Black Friday week deals for the PlayStation VR as well as the PlayStation 4 console and information about the PlayStation Store.

Not only that we have one of our final significant events of the year tomorrow where we’ll be covering all that is revealed at the Vive Developer Conference. So be sure to look out for that.

Until then it’s 360 degree video time once again, and just as with last week at this time we’re starting the week with something that is somewhat creepy and unnerving. There’s no demonic clowns this week though. Instead we’ve something that’s still twisted – but in a very different way.

This time we’ve a short video courtesy of Wevr Transport,, and it features something we’ve not had to date on Life In 360°, stop motion animation. In this video entitled Mad God, which is actually produced by Phil Tippett, the special effects master and Academy Award winner who is known for his work with the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park as well as being responsible for that chess scene in Star Wars: A New Hope. Something Tippett revisited not that long ago with a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign to bring the scene to life once again in the form of an augmented reality (AR) videogame called HoloGrid: Monster Battle.

Mad God was first revealed back at the end of October and we reported on it at the time, however we now have something in 360 degrees to show you.

“I really liked the concept of bringing an art form that has been around for a hundred years and matching it up with this new accelerated world that we’re in.” Explained Kaleidoscope VR’s Mike Breymann at the time. “It allows for discussions around ways of experiencing art and virtual reality. There’s this notion that game engines, rapid advancements in hardware, accelerated graphics and all this technology is somehow carrying us forward artistically, and this experience is in some ways calling all that into question.”

You can check out the unusual world of Mad God below, VRFocus will be back on Wednesday with something very different indeed.

July 21, 2017

VFX Master Phil Tippett Brings His Grotesque Creations to HoloLens in ‘HoloGrid: Monster Battle’

Game studio HappyGiant and Tippett Studio, the production firm founded by stop-motion guru Phil Tippett, has launched HoloGrid: Monster Battle (2017) on Microsoft’s HoloLens platform. First appearing on Samsung Gear VR, the tactical strategy game combines elements of chess, board games, and collectible card games—of course with the grotesque HoloChess-style monsters spawned from the mind behind visual effects of the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park (1993), and RoboCop (1987).

HoloGrid: Monster Battle is now on now on the Windows Store for $4.99, and includes the full gamut of things only currently possible with HoloLens; spatial mapping and spatial sound, gaze tracking, gesture input, and voice control.

“HoloGrid: Monster Battle allows you to see table top games in an entirely new way, mixing digital holograms of chess battle with the real world,” said Brandon Bray, leader of Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality Developer Ecosystem. “It’s amazing! I’m excited to see Happy Giant pioneering the path to bring games to life in your own home.”

According to the press release, HoloGrid was inspired in part by the Star Wars HoloChess scene and created in conjunction with two-time Academy Award winner Phil Tippett. Bringing Tippett’s grotesque creatures to life in augmented reality, gameplay has been compared to card games like HearthStone, but rather set on a grid like Chess where players duel against both AI and real opponents.

The game currently supports cross-play multiplayer between iOS, Android mobile devices and Samsung Gear VR.

“Playing HoloGrid on HoloLens is the ultimate experience. It fulfills the purest vision yet of the game we set out to make, and that I was inspired to play 40 years ago when I saw Star Wars as a young kid,” said Mike Levine, HappyGiant Founder and Creative Director. “Phil Tippett called it “magic” when I showed it to him, and I think that says it best.”

The post VFX Master Phil Tippett Brings His Grotesque Creations to HoloLens in ‘HoloGrid: Monster Battle’ appeared first on Road to VR.

October 30, 2016

Tippett Studio Releases Mad God Stop-motion Animation VR Experience on Wevr

Phil Tippett’s mind has been creating creatures for generations, including the creatures in the Star Wars holochess scene and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. Now he’s created his own creature-filled stop-action animation film, Mad God, and it is coming out in virtual reality.

Tippett Studio is announcing today that Mad God will be released in VR on the Wevr Transport platform on the Samsung Gear VR. That’s a new store where you can access 360-degree videos and other VR content. I recently visited Tippett’s madcap workshop in Berkeley, California, where he showed off another digital project, the monster game Hologrid: Monster Battle.

Mad God immerses viewers in a dystopian subterranean netherworld featuring delightfully grotesque characters, all straight from the wonderfully twisted mind of Academy Award winning visual effects craftsman Tippett. Using photogrammetry to translate physical stop-motion animation into the VR landscape, the Mad God experience is a new twist on VR animation.

Mad God

Tippett’s new film is another advance for VR, which is moving into uncharted territory when it comes to entertainment. The darkly beautiful Mad God is what happens when you merge the brilliance of a renowned veteran effects artist with the century-old technique of stop-motion animation and transport the whole thing into virtual reality.

The idea of introducing Tippett’s unique vision into a 360-degree immersive setting was spearheaded by Mike Breymann of Kaleidoscope VR, a fan of both Tippett and the original short film version of Mad God.

“I really liked the concept of bringing an art form that has been around for a hundred years and matching it up with this new accelerated world that we’re in,” Breymann said, in a statement. “It allows for discussions around ways of experiencing art and virtual reality. There’s this notion that game engines, rapid advancements in hardware, accelerated graphics and all this technology is somehow carrying us forward artistically, and this experience is in some ways calling all that into question.”

When approached about adapting Mad God into VR, Tippett didn’t hesitate.

“I started trying to figure out how we can do this,” Tippett said in a statement. “The whole thing was shot stop-motion on tiny sets, so it has a very visceral photographic handmade look as opposed to the cleanliness of so much of the VR content that’s being produced with computers. What really excited me about the whole VR experience was how different it is than cinema. I see VR as something completely different in the way that literature and cinema have, over the years, really honed narrative storytelling to an art specific to the form. And the minute you alter the format and approach, it changes everything.”

Phil Tippett creates his creatures by hand.

This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on VentureBeat.

October 28, 2016

Wevr and Tippett Studio Bring VR Animation Mad God to Gear VR

Award-winning virtual reality (VR) studio and distributor Wevr has collaborated with Tippett Studio on the release of Mad God, a VR stop motion animation that originally premiered at the Kaleidoscope World Tour earlier this year.

This is a VR version of Tippett’s 2013 short film Mad God, a dystopian subterranean netherworld featuring delightfully grotesque characters.

Mad God Still 4

In a Wevr blog post Mike Breymann of Kaleidoscope VR explained about the projects creation: “I really liked the concept of bringing an art form that has been around for a hundred years and matching it up with this new accelerated world that we’re in. It allows for discussions around ways of experiencing art and virtual reality. There’s this notion that game engines, rapid advancements in hardware, accelerated graphics and all this technology is somehow carrying us forward artistically, and this experience is in some ways calling all that into question.”

Tippett then goes on to reveal how they went about creating the VR version: We replaced the sky and the ground digitally,” Tippett says. “And then we had twenty something of these characters we call the shit men. They’re small six inch stop motion characters that are made out of foam rubber with articulated skeletons and they are covered, I took cat hair from my vacuum cleaner at home and put that on their surface so every time an animator touched them it would disturb the cat hair. So the contour of the characters crawling all the time creates the kind of otherworldly distance.”

Tippett Studio may sound familiar to VRFocus readers as its helmed by Phil Tippett, 2-time Academy Award winning Visual Effects Supervisor and Director who’s worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, Robocop and The Force Awakens. Earlier this year Tippett Studio launched a successful Kickstarter campaign of augmented reality (AR) game HoloGrid: Monster Battle, inspired by the Holo Chess scene in Star Wars.

Wevr co-founder and EVP Anthony Batt added “We have long admired Phil Tippett’s brilliance and were honoured to help introduce his unique vision into VR. Mad God is an experience unlike anything else out there. It redefines what is possible.”

Mad God is available through the Wevr Transport app which supports the Samsung Gear VR and HTC Vive headsets. For all the latest VR news, keep reading VRFocus.