Realities.io officially launched its 3D jigsaw title Puzzling Places for Oculus Quest last month – after spending several months in App Lab – getting a hugely popular response from players on the Oculus Store. The studio has now revealed that its first DLC is on the way, tomorrow in fact, introducing the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) Pack.
For all you jigsaw fans who love anything to do with space exploration, the pack will contain four puzzle environments showcasing what living on Mars could be like. These haven’t been scanned from Mars, of course, but locations from the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, US, a project designed to simulate a future Martian colony.
The Musk Observatory: An observatory featuring a telescope, tools, and documentation, as well as dramatic night-time lighting. The module is named after the Elon Musk Foundation for their donation to the MDRS as well as the Mars Society.
The RAM: A repair and maintenance module made out of the chassis of a Chinook helicopter featuring all the things you’d find in a futuristic workshop, including a rover! This puzzle also features the exterior of the module.
The Hab: The habitat module is where the astronauts eat, sleep, shower, and suit up to face the harsh exterior. It features an airlock, a suit prep room, kitchen, common space, bathroom, shower, and simulation station!
MDRS Exterior: Build the entire station with this puzzle! The MDRS features the exterior of the five main modules of the station as well as the Martian surface it’s built upon. Once complete, players can see where the three other puzzle locations are in the station.
This being Puzzling Places, each puzzle can be played in 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 pieces. They’ll also feature their own particular special sound effects for that added sense of atmosphere.
In its review of Puzzling Places, VRFocus said: “Puzzling Places is an enjoyable treat, the perfect way to spend a casual Sunday afternoon. The 3D photogrammetry scans are magnificent to put together and ultimately very satisfying once completed. In combination with the soundscapes, Puzzling Places gives players a really unique experience that anyone can pick up and appreciate.”
Puzzling Places’ MDRS Pack will be available from 21st October 2021, priced at $4.99 USD. For continued updates on Puzzling Places, keep reading VRFocus.
For the creation of the Puzzling Places VR game on Oculus Quest, photogrammetry expert Azad Balabanian became a puzzlemaker while Shahriar Shahrabi worked as a programmer, game designer, and art director.
Puzzling Places is essentially the successor to a 2016-era virtual tourism app called Realities on Steam that was pitched with the line “Explore places that were out of reach before.” Puzzling Places actually started as an accident — a 3D mesh imported into disarrayed pieces on the computer like a jigsaw puzzle. Building from the initial hook for the game, the developers took a prototype to SideQuest, built up a supportive community on Patreon that was ravenous for more puzzles, and finally moved into beta testing release as a debut project on Facebook’s App Lab distribution system. This week, the photogrammetry-based puzzler became a fully released consumer software product priced at $14.99 with plans to hit Sony’s PlayStation VR platform before year’s end. There are 16 puzzles included at launch with difficulties in pieces including 25, 50, 100, 200,400, each with audio soundscapes that fill in as you solve the puzzle.
Shahrabi and Balabanian — two members of the Realities.io team who built Puzzling Places — joined our virtual studio this week to trace the path of the game from idea to realization. We’ve got a full transcript of the discussion below which is broken up into chapters marking the key questions we covered so you can just jump to the part which interests you.
Can you explain how Puzzling Places was developed?
Ian: We’ve got a live interview today with the developers behind Puzzling Places out now on Oculus Quest. Tell us about the app and your path to release. You’ve got a very different story there than most VR devs. Can you explain?
Az: Yeah, I’m Az Balabanian and I’m joined with my friend Shahriar Shahrabi, we’re two developers out of six on the team and yeah, this game is quite a journey. We started as a prototype on Sidequest about a year and a half ago, it was a single puzzle that we released. We were very happy that it was very well received. Eventually we also created a beta for App Lab and it was one of the launch titles. And the entire time we were trying to get on the Oculus store, but our pitch was, let’s say, not being accepted. And eventually after enough people left amazing reviews and talked about how much they love the game and how cool of an idea it was, we were able to launch the full game on the Oculus store.
Is Puzzling Places coming to PSVR?
Ian: Also confirmed for PlayStation as well?
Az: Correct. And Q4 of this year we will have a PlayStation VR version of the game coming out.
Is Puzzling Places coming to Steam or PC VR?
Ian: What about PC?
Shah: We are thinking about PC, we would love to have it on PC. But it’s all a matter of resources and depending on what’s going to happen, our priorities are at some point you would have it on PC, but nothing is decided yet when and where.
How did Puzzling Places start as an accident?
Ian: Tell me that original story about this kind of starting off as an accident, is that correct? Can you explain exactly what happened there?
Shah: Yeah. So this, has something to do with the way we divide topologies and environments in order to have them run performant on a computer. And I was importing them in Unity back in the days, and something went wrong with the import and the pieces were flying everywhere. And I made a joke that we should make a game about this. So people come and fix it for us so that we can continue in development. And it just took a few seconds where everyone was just silent and they thought, ‘but that sounds like a really good idea.’ You know, we have a technology for it. We have all the measures and, yeah then that’s where the first prototype came from. Long time later, we actually just decided to really focus our development effort.
Az: That was back also on, I guess that was a PC sort of prototype and to have something run on Quest took quite a long time. And, so that’s where we are today.
How many puzzles are in the game at launch?
Ian: How many puzzles are in the game and what’s the update plan?
Az: The base game has 16 puzzles all with five difficulty variants, 25 pieces, 50 pieces, a hundred pieces, 200, 400. So it’s very much an accessible game to all in terms of the amount of hours you want to put into a single puzzle. 25 is a great place to start, but we have quite a lot of players that want even more pieces other than 400. You’ve got to have entire range of difficulty variants in terms of content and updates we’ve been developing this game for a year and a half. It’s had quite a lot of updates essentially since the prototype originally. And this is all due to our community helping us and giving us feedback about how they like the puzzle. We have quite a few ideas for the future. None that we’re ready to announce yet, but the way we’re thinking about this as this is the launch of a platform and anyone that has the game will get free feature updates, we will also have free and paid content that will come out. On Patreon over the last year and a half we made about 60 puzzles, one a week even. We want to make more puzzles. Absolutely. It’s just a matter of when.
Shah: Basically what we agreed on is as far as people are willing to play, people want to play, we will be releasing new puzzles.
Can you explain how the puzzles are made?
Ian: I’m seeing people asking the questions about the way puzzles get made and wanting to understand, is this going to be an automated process in the future that you’re going to have whole puzzles made from whole cities that you can easily put together a Google earth style, or is there a lot of hand human work done in making sure that these puzzles actually come apart and go together in a logical way.
Az: Currently it’s sort of a mix of both. We certainly have a puzzle making engine, which is a pipeline that we developed over the last few years, it wasn’t developed to create puzzles actually, it was developed to make photogrammetry run on mobile devices. And as a result as a by-product, the puzzling came out of it, as Shah talked about pieces being cut and jumbled. For now it’s absolutely hand curated puzzles. These are either scans that we’ve made, or scans that our partners have made. On the automated side, to create the puzzles, that’s an engine that we have that we put it into, but there’s quite a lot of work that goes into like handcrafting a puzzle to feel good for it to look good, for it to have the right pieces and get rid of bad pieces. So that for now is absolutely something we want to have control over, but in the future, let’s just say photogrammetry and scanning is starting to become a bigger and easier thing, more accessible. And would we like to support user generated puzzles, perhaps?
Ian: Do you think you’re going to be able to do a capture with a phone and break that apart in an automated way to have a puzzle? You’ve done some of these captures with drones, right?
Az: Some with drones, some DSLRs, we’ve absolutely done captures with phones, sorry with using the cameras just the single camera on the phone and using a PC-based photogrammetry processing software, like reality capture. So the quality is great. Absolutely. Now, iPhone has LIDAR scanners and whatnot, we have yet to sort of evaluate if that’s at the quality that we would want it to be, but I can see things certainly going that way.
Shah: I know for a fact that one of our Patreon puzzle was made using a phone that was the door from Prague. That was the one I scanned on my holiday using a Google pixel. And the quality is enough for a hundred piece puzzle. Definitely. As far as the technical side is concerned. There’s obviously the photogrammetry pipeline that things that Reality Capture that are quite process- heavy to create good measures, on our side, the type of what we call segmentation, which is cutting these pieces out is something that happens which requires like quite a lot of PC resources, right? It’s hard to run something like that on the Quest, but who knows what’s going to happen in the future and there is a lot of smart optimization there, that we could do. If we see there is a potential for that, or there is something that it was worthwhile to invest our manpower in.
Az: Just like with VRChat, there’s a lot of very talented people that are taking the time to learn how to make things, whether it’s avatars or with worlds. And so there’s a potential to really create the resources, the documentation, the tutorials for people to create the content that they want. That’s not something we’re ready to do yet. Cause it’s certainly something we need to put a lot of effort into, but I can see us going that way.
Are there other ways to change difficulty?
Ian: People are suggesting, having some kind of Easter eggs hidden in your puzzles, like treasure puzzles you find in completed puzzles, find a puzzle box and you get that puzzle. Another person asking whether you’re going to have multiple difficulty levels for the same level. You obviously have the different piece counts, but is there a way to change the difficulty there?
Az: That is one primary way of changing the difficulty. Twenty-five pieces is exponentially less difficult than 400 pieces. We have other difficulty modifiers. There’s the reference photos that you can either hide or remove, but there’s other things we’re also working on there.
Shah: One of the things that make the puzzles exponentially more difficult is if you take out the traditional shape of the puzzle from the corners of each pieces, we had to add that in mainly because we would also like to play the 400 pieces and playing the 400 pieces without that it’s just extremely frustrating. We are tackling some technical difficulties at the moment or technical challenges, not even difficulties to be able to add that back as a setting.
How did you develop the circular shapes to help fit pieces together?
Ian: I don’t know if you saw our broadcast yesterday we were talking about Puzzling Places, but, have you seen the movie Contact? The way the pages lock together that key part of the story there, I was thinking about that with the actual way some of your pieces connect in the corners, did that take some trial and error to realize you have the little circular shapes that show you how the pieces fit together sometimes? When was that added as a feature and was it hard to get there?
Shah: It was pretty early on. We had the idea, we prototyped it and then created a list of documents to kind of establish, okay, what’s the core game loop. And a key part of the core game loop is to recognize the pattern. And one of the things that we realized is that even in a very good potential puzzle location there are areas where there’s not enough pattern, like the sea, the trees, or whatnot. And these pieces become very frustrating. And if you have a puzzle and 99% of it is amazing, you have details on the walls and you can have fun playing, and there are two pieces that are bad as in, they don’t have enough pattern. You would leave that until the end of the game. And you leave that game with a feeling of negativity because you spent 20 minutes trying to find in which orientation this tree is supposed to go in the other tree. We knew we needed to add a pattern of our own, and that’s where kind of the indentation came in. Our colleague Marcel spent a long time on it. We are quite happy with what came out and I think it really helps the game play to one side on the other side it also makes it a bit easier if these patterns are very strong cues. And it might be the only thing that player might focus on a puzzle where otherwise they would have spend more time paying attention to the textures of the locations. So we have started balancing that for the gameplay a bit, to make the patterns that did the indentations a little bit smaller so that they are not the main dominant thing when you’re looking at a bunch of puzzle pieces.
Ian: Because you’re putting together a 3d object there’s things that you kind of would imagine, go together at a certain angle, but they actually go together quite a different angle. And because it’s a 3d object and you’ve got to have a roof to a building going off at this angle, rather than this angle. And it takes some time to get the right sort of lock between the pieces. But when you have the little indentation there coming off, sometimes it helps you line up those pieces in that three-dimensional way.
Az: I think I know exactly the piece, in fact, you’re thinking about if it’s like in the 25 piece of the Kushiyaki restaurant, the one in Japan, there’s the yellow awnings and then on the edge and the corner, there’s a corner piece of yellow that also has the wall. And we watch a lot of people play this game and they always get the awning correct until that last piece, which has quite a lot of like side wall to it, and they’re like, how does this fit into the yellow? And they realize that, oh yeah, it’s not a flat puzzle, you actually, it goes inwards.
Can you explain the audio design of Puzzling Places?
Ian: Exactly what I was thinking about. You’ve got such playtime with your puzzles to be able to know that sort of thing, kind of like people who know Beat Saber getting played, what song a person is playing just by the way their arms are moving. The more playtesting you can do the better your decisions are about how these things actually work. In the comments one person was also mentioning audio. Let’s talk about the audio design and really share what you were doing there.
Az: The audio is probably one of the biggest parts of the game that we don’t really have a good way of advertising or marketing to people because it’s like, how do you describe immersive soundscapes that play from specific parts of the puzzle? I mean maybe just that way, but the way this actually all came about was when we first were working on the first prototype, the monastery from Armenia, we had recorded ambisonic recordings throughout the entire location. And that’s one of the reasons why we even used it as the puzzle for our prototype, because we had great audio hotspots that once you would finish a part of the puzzle would start to play and you can sort of put your ear against it and hear the life that’s happening in there. And so we sort of progressed on that idea. In fact, we have an incredible audio designer, Pierre-Marie who joined us from Ubisoft. He played the prototype and he said, I love the audio of the game and I was really wanting to help you improve it. And so he came with a lot of ideas, just looking at this reminded me he suggested the idea that the last piece would just be the special thing that has this incredible audio experience around it. You have the final thing you want to put it in. It should feel amazing. And it’s things like that really built on top of each other. The audio is one of my favorite parts of the game, because once you finish the puzzle, or even during it, you can just explore the place by listening to it. And there’s certain sounds also that don’t come from the puzzle, but come from the environment that every time fool me into thinking that they’re coming from outside of my window, they’re like really excellently mixed and mastered that, even with the Quest’s external speakers, they do an incredible job at immersion.
Ian: I love that description of the near final piece where you’re working on the last piece. How recently was that added?
Shah: The idea for the ending was very early on, but we just never had the resources to work on it because also to test the ending of the puzzle, you have to play the puzzle. Right. So every time I wanted to test something and I was like, oh gosh, here it goes. So that’s why it kind of left until the end. And I remember for the beta prototype it was, confetti’s coming off, and it was so unmatching, it didn’t fit anything, not the sound design, nothing, but it just communicated, okay, it’s finished. And we had the idea regarding also the sound design, that there is a philosophy to how you start with kind of nothing. You’ll start with kind of chaos and you put all that together. And the more you put pieces together, the more you learn about the location.
Now, our sound designer, Pierre-Marie. He also completely reflected that in the audio that you start with the bland audio of only the sound of the wind or ambient sound. And then he builds this acoustic landscape. Which is his personal take on the location and that’s what makes it so enjoyable for me because every time I’m experiencing how he would interpret this location. We have these museums and is it like a party going on or children running around? So he recreates his thing and the closer you get to the end you get to that point where now you have a concrete thing. So this last piece is you recreate that whole thing, not in a sense you finished a puzzle, but you got to know the location. You now know how the stairs are connected, where the walls are, where the paintings are, and also the sound. To answer your question, to get to this point, although we had that conceptually to really come up with a concrete plan of how do we do that? This took a year, which is very interesting because right now if I look at the solution we have, I think, well, obviously this is good. Like obviously this is what we should have done from the beginning. But to get here, we did so many bad takes or takes that just didn’t work out. Didn’t communicate. And what we have right now was maybe three weeks before we went gold, the final touches done. Three weeks, something like that. But I’m really happy with that because that was the last pain point for the team for what are we going to do with the end?
Will Puzzling Places support hand tracking?
Ian: How are you guys on hand tracking? Where are you with that and how does that relate to the development of your overall user interface?
Shah: Hand tracking was prototyped internally, we never released that to our testers. At the time it felt very disconnected, when you introduced this embodiment in VR, I think you need to do it right. We want people to get into this meditative flow and everything we designed is there to minimize the amount of noise in our communication with the player and maximize the amount of signal and with hand tracking if you’re doing something and it suddenly disappeared it generates some visual information that doesn’t mean anything to the game. So we love the idea. I love using my headset without my controller, because it’s always hard to find a controller when you put it down. And it’s like, oh God, where was that? At the time it didn’t feel solid enough without us putting a considerable amount of development time in it, but it’s something we’re all interested in. As far as the UX, we did try not to shoot ourselves in the foot and we did try to set up the UX in a way that you can play the game from beginning to the end with a single click. Basically every time we were on a crossroad of design, are we going create some sort of complicated gestures with a controller or some sort of complicated input method to simplify, for expert players a certain action. We decided to split that context to a different tool. So we have this concept of different tools that makes it easier to just use a single click. And with that, I would say hand tracking compared to some other games, should be relatively easy for us to implement if we can sort out the design part, because the game can just be played with a single click
Az: When we first released our prototype, we saw quite a lot of like completely new VR users playing the game and this sort of being a pivotal first VR experience. That’s something that really stuck with us that the entire game can be played with one hand, you don’t even need your second. You could just point and pull pieces or with the same button, grab them and put it together. And that was something really important to never really get rid of. So absolutely that’s the pivotal design principle and maybe hand tracking can fit it.
Ian: We were talking about the different apps that have force- pull actions to reach for objects that are on the other side of the room and target them with a simple action, bring them over. And it seems like that’s a feature that’s going to get a lot better as soon as the headsets have standard eye tracking across the board, games, like I Expect You To Die or even Half-Life: Alyx where you’re looking at objects all around you. It can take a few tries to sometimes grab some of those items. And with so many little pieces all lined up in a row in Puzzling Places, it could be sometimes hard to grab the right piece you want to every time. Are there ways to improve that over time?
Shah: If you have bunch of things next to each other, your brain can distinguish them very easily because they are in different depth layers, the moment you project them on 2d you have the issue that they’re overlapping and the image looks very busy or chaotic. To solve that we started to come up with mechanics like the grouping functionality, so that there are no overlapping pieces. And interestingly enough, we found that also helps with the UX. If we can help the player to organize the environment in a way that pieces do not overlap in depth. That helps a bit with the phenomenon you’re talking about, where they’re going to have an issue. A lot of people play very chaotic. And I do have that the entire time in the back of my mind, how do I improve that so that they have clear speciality, that’s the staircase, that’s the bridge. And there is clear distances between them so that they can easily pick it up. Like designing an environment where people just like cleaning it up. But it’s very difficult. One of the things that I would like to work more and more on so that the players have a more organized environment because it makes the playing experience in my opinion, better. But some people just like to play more chaotic. And I think there’s nothing we can do about that one.
Can you have models with animated portions?
Ian: Asking whether you can have animated parts of the models if you have a stream, you could show an animated stream, with water actually running through it, or whether anything like that as possible, or whether the puzzles sort of need to say static.
Shah: First of all, on PC, almost anything would be possible. One of the main questions we need to answer is how high quality would people like to have their puzzle and how much would they like to pay for it? And that obviously also affects our frequency of releases. If you’re going to focus on a single puzzle for a very long time, we can do amazing things with it. How is the return in terms of the value it creates for the people? Are they going to be exponentially enjoying the puzzle more? Or is it just a tiny bit better for weeks of extra work that you put in?
Az: Do they want to play more puzzles or do they want to play less puzzles that are perhaps more interesting. I’m sure there’s a balance between the two. That’s gonna be our next year for us to figure that out. We learned a lot of things from Patreon. We had a lot of players that loved the Sidequest prototype. All they kept asking for us was more content and they were telling us, we want to give you money. How do we give you money? And we’re like, first of all, thank you. And second, I don’t know, maybe we create a donation box or we also even considered Kickstarter. We were trying to figure out how are we gonna fund this game development up until it’s out. And so Patreon was something that was suggested to us because it was like, it’s not a Kickstarter, there’s a lot of failed Kickstarter, especially with games. Patreon is slightly less committal. You can do incremental sort of releases and people are just there to support you. And so at the time we were essentially testing a lot of puzzles. We made a few. Because of COVID and travel restrictions, it was almost impossible to really get anywhere so we just dug into our own archives, contacted friends, we downloaded and bought things from Sketchfab and, Patreon sort of became this place for us to test ideas, test puzzles that perhaps are not at the really high quality scale as the puzzles that are in the launch, both the puzzle that were in the beta app, as well as the full game, all of these have incredible audio, right? We couldn’t do incredible audio design for every single week of a test puzzle. That’s also the reason why we haven’t released those Patreon puzzles. We didn’t want to have the pressure of having them be so polished that they have to be in the game that are going to be afftecting reviews. That was a sort of a way for us to test things. We have plenty of ideas that we want to create more puzzles and we will find ways of making them more interesting. And this is just definitely the beginning when it comes to what sort of puzzles you will be able to play in VR.
Are you going to be able to show some things at 1:1 scale?
Ian: Scale. Are you going to be able to show some full scale things over time?
Az: We knew this was coming that’s probably like the biggest, biggest ask.
Shah: This is the biggest ask and also internally we discuss this every few months again and again. That’s why when people usually ask, we also don’t give an answer. What I could see potentially happening at some point is if we have one location that we try out at some point, but again, this is not just the technicality of it of can we get this to look good? There’s also a lot of design questions, which the team needs to decide, which we haven’t really got to that decision because every time we decide to talk about it, we say, okay, what’s more important right now? Like the future of Puzzling Places we are really excited about, for example, playing around with multiplayer and stuff like that. Where if given any time of course, or any contractual obligations we have to any given platform, those would come first. We have to decide internally a bit more on that.
Will you support Quest’s AR Passthrough API?
Ian: What about passthrough while we’re on that subject?
Shah: Never tried it.
Az: Yeah. We never tried it. This was also a recent sort of update in the last, what, month from Oculus. So I think it’s funny cause like we spent God, how long did we spend on the environment design of this game? The environment design predates the Sidequest prototype itself, back when we had the SteamVR demos, but I think it technically absolutely can work with pass through. And perhaps that’s also a precursor to like an AR version of Puzzling Places, which it could absolutely work like that. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot is like, okay, when Apple releases something why not have Puzzling Places on it, you don’t need the environment. You just can have the pieces in your room and you can puzzle them together. Perhaps you could do multiple people in your room.
How are sales going?
Ian: You guys are painting this picture of having to focus so much on the task at hand, which is releasing the game for people at home. And you had to prioritize pretty carefully to get everything in place for that launch. Do you have your first sales numbers in and is the VR market as big as you’d hoped?
Shah: So far so good. Yeah. Yeah. So far so good. Like the reviews right now are 130 or something like that, all five out of five. Uh it’s. Yeah. It’s pretty incredible. We are all very happy. I think looking at the initial sales and stuff like that, we are happy with it.
Az: It’s been less than 24 hours. We don’t even have real analytics to look at but even just looking at Patreon, which like this whole Sidequest Patreon, we had in total 1700 people that have supported us on Patreon that downloaded puzzles and played puzzles, having to initially set up like a developer account, even with all that overhead, there was quite a lot of people that were willing to do that to play more puzzles. I think we had 40 to 50,000 downloads of pre-launch of both the Sidequest prototype and the App Lab beta. I think this is gonna appeal to quite a lot of them. I think the bet we’re also making is the players that we have now in VR, a lot of them are gamers, however, VR is becoming cheaper and cheaper and just with the last year or two with the Quest and Quest 2’s launch, we’ve seen the people in our player base completely be a different player base than what we consider to be a VR a user, we have parents, we have grandparents, we have younger people. These were not the hardcore VR people of 2016 and 2017. So that’s probably going to be the type of people that are going to buy VR over the next two to five years. So is Puzzling Places a game for them? We certainly hope so. And that’s certainly how we designed the game to be approachable.
Will you support puzzles like a concert venue that could have an audio cue of a band playing nearby?
Ian: People asking about whether you might support, ads or product placement, like someone paying for a sponsored location to be shown in there. There was also asking about whether you might have a concert venue, with the band playing music nearby?
Shah: That sounds fantastic. Never thought about that, but it sounds fantastic. As a matter of fact, in Berlin, there’s the concert house, which has been scanned and also already cleaned up, it’s an amazing set of models. One of the founders was working archeology. I’ve been painting reconstructing persian palaces since I was 15 for fun, Az is going around the world capturing cultural heritages and the things that he did in Armenia. We are very passionate about historical locations that have a certain story. And one thing we would love to do is use our platform of photogrammetry to bring these locations to people who otherwise would not meet them and to share some of, let’s say, earnings to them. So we have talked about potentially doing things like donations and sharing some revenue with, potentially, cultural heritage sites so that, they can get some money to maintain the location, for the next generation so that they can also see maybe outside of Puzzling Places. Nothing concrete yet.
Az: Photogrammetry and 3d scanning is not all that common everywhere. It is in certain circles, but it’s not like every concert hall has a scan of it or every archeological or cultural heritage sites has it. It’s slowly starting to become more and more popular. Especially with museums starting to digitize their collections. I think Puzzling Places can certainly be an amazing sort of platform and opportunity for us to work more with museums. We’ve focused on places because that’s in our name, Puzzling Places, but we could puzzle quite a lot of things. People have asked us, okay, can we import just 3d models instead of scans? Sure, absolutely. But part of what makes this game special is they are real life things, real life places, and also sometimes real life objects.
Ian: The last comment I’m seeing here says it would be awesome if we could walk through the locations.
Shah: This was the scale again. We can spend five and a half hours talking plus and the minus of walking around. What I can say is if they have access to a Steam realities app launched 2016, I think.
Az: Yes. It was one of the launch apps of SteamVR.
Shah: Yes. Has one-to-one locations where you can walk around, I think we have almost 10 different locations. Yeah. Darn amazing. That can give a feeling of what that could be, if Quest wasn’t Quest and we had more time, but we will see in the future, maybe by Quest 5.
Az: It’s the first ever app that our company created and it’s meant to be like a incredible showcase of photogrammetry quality and exploration, sort of a non-linear experience so that you can go places, see them and learn a little bit more about them. And it’s certainly one of the higher quality photogrammetry things that we’ve done even compared the scans that you’ll see in Puzzling Places. Puzzling Places is the spiritual successor to it because it helps people go places and learn more about them and with just a different game mechanic.
Puzzling Places takes jigsaw puzzles in a new and clever direction by offering up multiple difficulties of some highly textured and interesting 3D scenes, making for an experience that’s better than either physical 2D or 3D puzzles in almost every way.
Puzzling Places Details:
Available On:Oculus Quest, (PSVR coming in 2021)
Price: $15
Developer: Realities.io Release Date: September 2nd, 2021 Reviewed On: Oculus Quest 2
Gameplay
The concept is simple: the game includes 16 puzzles at launch, all of which can be fractured into 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 pieces. All scenes are based on photogrammetry—a technique for taking high resolution photos of a thing and stitching them together to make a 3D model—so puzzles have an extreme lifelike quality to them that wholly artificial objects typically don’t. Click the pieces together in any order you like and voilà: you have a detailed little model of something cool in front of you.
In Puzzling Places you’ll be able to build things like millennia-old temples in Armenia, a delicate and expressive Japanese kimono, and a densely-packed drawing room in Sweden that, when pushed to the max 400-piece difficulty becomes a smorgasbord of chairs, rich tapestries, and all sorts of finery that may take you literal hours to assemble. Playing Puzzling Places really can be as simple as clicking a large stretch of beach together like a Hot Wheels tracks, or going in to match miniscule bits of houses that all look very similar.
Image courtesy Realities.io
After the tutorial, the game invites you to run through a few 25-piece puzzles first to get your legs. Beyond that, you won’t hear a peep out of the game, even as you head on to more difficult puzzle configurations. Although the full gamut of puzzles available at launch feels fairly low in number, all puzzles have been thoughtfully fragmented from 25-400 pieces so you can play each level as if it were new. There’s multiple hours of puzzling here and Realities.io promises more is yet to come post-launch. A bit more on difficulty in Immersion though.
Anyway, here’s a great mixed reality look at what it feels like to build in Puzzling Places, courtesy of Fabio Dela Antonio:
The first time I played @PuzzlingPlaces it was still in beta, and it’s now available on the Oculus store so I had to try recording it in #MixedReality again. There were a few video artifacts, but the game ran perfectly and it has so many new puzzles now 😃 #OculusQuest2#VRpic.twitter.com/WFB6gYsi0a
Like conventional puzzles, you’re not only tasked with matching the crenelated edges of each piece, but also keeping tabs on the image’s different textures and how they align. An efficient puzzler tends to group pieces and solve the most obvious bits first, which thankfully is an uncomplicated thing in Puzzling Places since you can easily summon pieces from the puzzle backboard and either leave them anywhere in mid-air, or return them to any spot on the board you want. Once you create your system for sorting pieces, the real challenge begins and you’re forced to examine every aspect of the piece, looking for more context clues like stitching patterns, shadows from buildings, and logical flow from one to the next. Is that a bit of chandelier, or maybe a chair leg?
By default a few reference images taken from different angles are placed down by your feet, but if you’re looking for a real challenge you can turn them off and attack each puzzle without truly knowing the end result.
Image courtesy Realities.io
There are two tools in the game to make things easier, although they’re really more suited for users attacking advanced puzzles since so much can be done by hand. Tools include ‘Grouping’ and ‘See-through’, which let you respectively group pieces together for better organization, and temporarily render pieces invisible so you can work on obscured parts like interiors. You’ll see those projected on the backboard where you can select and summon it to you just like you do with a puzzle piece. Neither of the tools felt vital to puzzle-solving though, as I almost immediately forgot them as I went on about selecting, organizing and piecing together scenes naturally.
Thankfully, pausing and resuming a gameplay session is simple. It remembers every time a piece is moved thanks to the local autosave function. You can also save up to four profiles so you can share the game with friends and family too.
Immersion
Ok, I said it was better than physical 2D and 3D puzzles in almost every single way, although it notably lacks an inherent tactility that you might find important to the whole process of building things with your own two hands—or rather, two egg-shaped hands. Although realism suffers a bit here due to abstract hand models, pieces do ‘chunk’ together automatically when you fit them close enough, and that on its own is pretty satisfying.
Not as satisfying as picking up a piece and fitting it together, but on the flipside you also never have to worry about breaking a nubbin that’s supposed to slot in just right, or losing a piece. The game even encourages you with sound effects once you’ve reached your penultimate move, and gives you a tiny celebration once the last piece has been fitted.
Image courtesy Realities.io
Puzzles are impressively detailed, and are also variable in size. At first, playing through the 25-piece difficulty level I thought not being able to inspect the creations in greater detail was a missed opportunity. You can’t just zoom-in and make the puzzle bigger to see more. Puzzles physically scale according to difficulty though, so you’ll get a good and thorough look at each scene as you muck through piles of stones and golden relics galore in the 400-piece range.
Environments are fairly plain, offering either a grassy reed motif by default or a skybox with variable color themes which you can change via the Color-Picker tool. You’ll find that next to the other two puzzle-solving tools on the backboard.
Because your puzzling environment is so plain—probably to not step on the toes of its unique and detailed photogrammetric puzzles—the game has ostensibly focused on audio to bring you closer to the essence of each puzzle. Various parts of the puzzle trigger an audio cue, like when you hear sprinklers turn on once you’ve slotted in the golf course at the lighthouse on the Biarritz puzzle. It’s charming and immersive, although the ambient sounds personally became a little too repetitive and distracting for me during longer sessions.
Comfort
As you’d imagine, the default control scheme is extremely simple. The Index finger trigger pulls double duty and works for both selecting and holding pieces, which can be a bit tiring if you’re going in for a long session. ‘Tiring’ is a relative term, I guess. You may not be used to holding your arms out at 45-degree angles for 30 minutes at a time, but that’s what it takes to play. I didn’t have issue with it, but it’s fair warning just the same.
I wish the grip button was used for this because of common design conventions, however the game reserves this in a grip-the-world style locomotion method (also gripping B+Y works here too). I didn’t particularly like the locomotion implementation here since you have to physically depress each controller’s grip button to move anywhere, as opposed to naturally gripping one and moving forward like in many games that use the convention.
Still, Puzzling Places has a good range of options when it comes to how you want to play so you’re not forced to move about virtually if you don’t want to. You can remain seated and select and summon pieces from afar, stand for greater maneuverability, and room-scale to you can physically walk up to pieces on the backboard and grab them naturally. You can also select a 360 mode that takes the backboard and wraps it around you, making it so you don’t need to flip through the backboard menu tab in larger puzzles. In the end, Puzzling Places is one of the most comfortable games since every movement you make is 1:1 with the real world.
Puzzling Places Comfort Settings – September 2nd, 2021
A good puzzle needs to create an impeccable mixture of bemusement and joy. Looking at first like an almost impossible challenge, slowly but surely giving up its secrets in a fun yet challenging manner. If you’re looking for that in virtual reality (VR) then there are a number of titles to choose from. The latest for Oculus Quest, realities.io’s Puzzling Placescombines classic jigsaw entertainment with gorgeous photogrammetry models, making it one of the finest examples.
Thanks to early access and being able to sideload onto Oculus Quest, Puzzling Places first arrived on the scene in 2020 before its appearance as one of the debut App Lab titles in early 2021 brought it to a wider audience. And it’s rightly built up a bit of a following because what it does, it does well, without all the fluff usually associated with a lot of VR gaming. Much like Cubism, which solely focuses on a simple, mindful experience; Puzzling Places is about sitting back and enjoying a good old-fashioned puzzle.
You’re presented with 16 puzzles in the official launch version, a mixture of big, wide-open landscapes and cosier interiors. What sets Puzzling Places apart from your average jigsaw is the fact that these are expertly crafted 3D models of real places, with so much detail that you can get in close and in some cases even step inside the buildings that make up the puzzle.
A normal 2D jigsaw might be made up of 1000 pieces but here it’s a little different, catering to all skill sets. Each puzzle has three difficulty levels, depending on whether you want 25/50/100/200/400 pieces. That maximum of 400 might not sound a lot when compared to a 2D puzzle but rest assured it is no easy feat, especially when sat in the middle of all those little 3D chunks. Sure, those 25 and 50 settings are fairly quick and easy but split a model into 400 and you’re going to be there for a good hour or so, twisting and turning each piece to see if that rock matches another.
Puzzling Places does thankfully have plenty of settings so you can tailor your puzzle session accordingly. Ideally suited as a seated experience where you can get comfy on the sofa, for those puzzle heathens who want to stand there’s a 360° puzzle piece shelf mode that wraps all the pieces around you instead of all in front. The mode is really good on the 400 piece difficulty paired with a swivel chair, as it makes locating pieces a little easier.
But as any puzzle master knows, whilst you might be working on one area other pieces can appear for another. So there’s a handy grouping function just for that very task. And it’s needed, because there are points during the harder puzzles where you can just feel lost, and nothing seems to match.
Whilst you imagine Puzzling Places to be a stationary experience it doesn’t have to be, with locomotion controls to grab and move the environment if you really need a different perspective. In reality, it became the least used feature purely because you can grab and move the constructed model however you see fit.
When talking about VR there’s always that question of immersion, how well does a particular experience involve and ground you. Puzzling Places mainly does this by putting you inside a very gentile, pastel-coloured world surrounded by said puzzle pieces; very relaxing and idyllic. It goes a step further by adding soundscapes to each of the puzzles, so you might hear seagulls by the beach or the knock of pool balls in the pool room. The feature is subtle yet very well executed, breathing life into these stationary creations.
However, Puzzling Places isn’t quite perfect. The blobs for hands just look really weird considering the attention to detail found in the rest of the videogame and the pointer that stems from said blobs is a bit temperamental. It’s not always there, so when you’re trying to grab one puzzle piece out of hundreds it can be a bit hit and miss.
Even so, Puzzling Places is an enjoyable treat, the perfect way to spend a casual Sunday afternoon. The 3D photogrammetry scans are magnificent to put together and ultimately very satisfying once completed. In combination with the soundscapes, Puzzling Places gives players a really unique experience that anyone can pick up and appreciate. Hopefully, those 16 puzzles will be expanded upon to aid longevity and hand tracking would be nice as well. Another little cracker of an indie VR videogame.
Not all virtual reality (VR) videogames have to be energetic and heart-pounding, there are those that take a far more casual approach to immersive gaming, one of which is Puzzling Places. Released via SideQuest in 2020 before making its way to Oculus Quest’s App Lab earlier this year, developer realities.io has announced that an official launch is imminent, set to take place in a week.
Puzzling Places is a heartwarming, tranquil puzzle title evoking classic jigsaw sessions; just with a very modern twist. It wouldn’t be VR if the jigsaw puzzles you had to solve were flat, instead, you’re presented with highly detailed 3D models of realistic locations from around the world. Each building and area has been painstakingly recreated using photogrammetry so they look 100% accurate no matter how close up you get.
The videogame isn’t just about putting puzzles together made out of exquisite external locations either. One of Puzzling Places earliest examples, Tatev Monastery, requires you to build the inside as well. Whilst the new Hallwyl Museum Pack is entirely interior, featuring four of the incredible rooms turned into puzzles. Additionally, as the puzzles some together audio tracks are dropped in to make the setting even more lifelike.
Since its App Lab launch back in February Puzzling Places has received over 700 reviews, highly praising the relaxing experience. Each puzzle can be as easy or hard as you like, grabbing each 3D piece to carefully examine and spin around, working to several 2D images to help with placement.
For those already acquainted with Puzzling Places, the launch will feature 16 brand new puzzles with each puzzle being playable with five difficulty variants (ranging from 25 pieces up to 400 pieces). These are split across four “puzzle packs”, three of which have been revealed so far; Hallwyl Museum Pack, Armenia Pack and the Biarritz City Pack.
It’s not just Oculus Quest that’s getting the Puzzling Places treatment. The developer has previously confirmed a PlayStation VR version is on the way, due to arrive by the end of the year.
Puzzling Places is set to launch on 2nd September 2021 for Oculus Quest. For continued updates, keep reading VRFocus.
Puzzling Places is already on Quest via App Lab, Facebook’s unmoderated outlet for Quest games and experiences, however now developers Realities.io announced the 3D puzzle game has been officially accepted to the Oculus Store.
The developers of the photogrammetry-based 3D jigsaw puzzle game announced the news yesterday in a Tweet, stating that the game is targeting a Fall 2021 launch window.
We have an important announcement to make…
Puzzling Places is accepted to release in the Oculus Quest Store!!
If you own a Quest, you can check out the game on App Lab or SideQuest right now, which in its prototype form includes six freebie puzzles. The developers are currently supporting their work through Patreon, which includes access to many more puzzles.
Realities.io say there is still plenty more to announce about the game leading up to launch including upcoming puzzles as well as more content partnerships.
The game is also set to arrive on PSVR sometime in the winter of 2021. Check out the trailer below to see the game in action.
Realities.io’s Puzzling Places virtual reality (VR) jigsaw title is going from strength to strength in 2021. Having originally started as a SideQuest title in 2020 the videogame was one of the first to arrive for Oculus’ new App Lab a couple of months back. A PlayStation VR announcement followed in March and today the studio has revealed Puzzling Places will be an official Oculus Store title later in the year.
We have an important announcement to make…
Puzzling Places is accepted to release in the Oculus Quest Store!!
In a Tweet, the team confirmed that: “Puzzling Places is accepted to release in the Oculus Quest Store!! We’re targeting to launch this Fall!” This makes it one of the first App Lab titles to confirm a transition to the official store, enabling it to be more easily found by Oculus Quest owners looking for puzzle videogames.
The current App Lab version has six puzzles of varying difficulties to complete, from the basic ‘Ice Cream Stairs’ consisting of 20 pieces all the way up to Market Square in Gliwice and Tatev Monastery which both contain 200 pieces. But there are more available through Realities.io’s Patreon with a total of 38 jigsaw puzzles. The studio hasn’t said if the Oculus Store version will add more content or features but that’s highly likely. For the PlayStation VR announcement, Realities.io did mention there would be more content as well as a multiple difficulty feature for each jigsaw.
Great if you’re after a fairly casual, laid back VR experience, Puzzling Places‘ jigsaws are all in 3D. Consisting of a varied assortment of pieces, each puzzle is a hyper-realistic miniature of a real-world location which have been scanned and created using photogrammetry. You’re given several 2D images of the location taken at different angles to aid in piecing it all back together. As you do so the puzzle is brought to life thanks to audio record at the location, further immersing you in the experience. Some of them like the Tatev Monastery even have an internal scan so you can step inside the puzzle.
Puzzling Places is one of a growing number of Oculus Quest apps benefiting from App Lab, with more and more added each day. The transition to the main store isn’t as easy but this process should become a more current occurrence as the year progresses. In the meantime, Oculus Quest owners have the v28 update to come, adding Air Link, 120Hz support and more.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Puzzling Places as further improvements are made, reporting back with the latest updates.
UK-based RiVR is a specialist in creating photorealistic virtual reality (VR) environments for a range of organisations including fire and rescue services and the police. Based in Warwickshire, the team has begun a project close to their hearts (and location) by uncovering and mapping the secret tunnels of Warwick for everyone to explore.
Image credit: RiVR
The project is the brainchild of Warwick residents Joe and Alex Harvey – Production Director and Creative Director at RiVR respectively – taking their knowledge of photogrammetry to scan the tunnels. This was not only to preserve part of the historic town’s heritage but to also allow people to head down and see the tunnels for themselves, all in VR.
“Our passion is anything to do with cultural heritage and being able to use what we have learnt with photogrammetry to do something in the community while preserving history in the local area and further afield,” said Alex in a statement. “In Warwick, there has always been the myth or the pub story of the tunnels of Warwick – a bit like most towns that have these ancient tunnels.”
So while locals do know the tunnels exist, little is known about what condition they might be in and where they lead. Initially, Joe and Alex teamed up with local historians Jim Griffin and Peter Chapman to pool information. Griffin and Chapman shared a newspaper cutting from the 1920’s saying there was a tunnel off a well in Jury Street. “About six months ago, Joe arranged for safety equipment to be put over the hole and Jim volunteered to explore down the tunnel,” Alex continued. “With a laser scanner and a GoPro 360 camera, we documented it so people can actually experience it at a later date.”
Image credit: RiVR
“More recently we went down again with the Tech Rescue team from Leicester fire and rescue service. We put GoPros on them and they went further into the hole and filmed more footage for us,” Alex explained. “You have to traverse down the well and you go through this hole in the rock and then to the left-hand side there’s one tunnel that leads back up towards the house’s basement, then straight ahead of you (facing towards St. Mary’s Church) you can go about 10-15 metres until the tunnel turns off to the left then there’s a partial collapse a further 10 meters down that way, but we ran out of safety line on the G-saver to go any further on this attempt.”
You can see this process in action in the video below. RiVR hasn’t said when this project would likely be made available to the public but the team is also working on some others. Developer Realities.io has been in contact with the team to utilise scans in its 3D jigsaw puzzle title Puzzling Places. “We are in conversations with the church regarding this idea, as we want to take any money made from the game and donate it to St. Mary’s Church,” the brothers note.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of RiVR, reporting back with progress on these developments.
Today in a slew of indie game-related announcements, Sony revealed that 3D jigsaw puzzle VR game, Puzzling Places from realities.io, is now coming to PSVR. Here’s the official PlayStation webpage.
Puzzling Places is a laid-back puzzle game in which you manipulate real-life 3D objects and locations that have been exploded into dozens of pieces and then gradually stitch them back together. The puzzles themselves are based on photogrammetry data of actual buildings and locations from the real world that were 3D-scanned specifically for the game.
You can try the beta version of Puzzling Places right now for free on Quest via Oculus App Lab, or subscribe to their Patreon for access to additional monthly (or weekly) test puzzles. It’s still unclear what the exact payment model will be for Puzzling Places on PSVR, but I’d expect a flat fee price to download the entire game is likely.
According to the PS Blog post there will be “a whole bunch” of puzzles at launch with “a lot more content” to be released after release—so take that for what you will. Every puzzle is scaled to different difficulty levels, such as only 50-pieces for something quicker and easier, or if you want way more to really challenge yourself.
There is no release date yet for Puzzling Places, nor a price, but it is expected to hit this year. Perhaps around the same time the game will reach 1.0 status on other platforms as well.
Let us know what you think of Puzzling Places and if you’ve tried it out yet on Quest for yourself.
Puzzling Places by Realities.io might have been available as a sideloaded Oculus Quest app for a year now but it has been gaining traction of late. After being one of the launch titles for Oculus’ App Lab, today the developer has revealed Puzzling Places is on course for a PlayStation VR launch at the end of the year.
Best described as a meditative virtual reality (VR) 3D puzzler, the studio takes photogrammetry scans of beautiful places around the globe and turns them into hyper-realistic miniatures for you to reassemble. In a recent PlayStation Blog post, Daniel Sproll, cofounder of Realities.io revealed that: “Puzzling Places was a result of a total accident – An error in our pipeline caused the pieces of one of our Photogrammetry models to be jumbled up which sparked a brilliant idea to, you guessed it, puzzle the pieces back together!”
Gameplay works exactly as you’d expect a puzzle to work, you’re presented with a jumbled up selection of pieces to put back together, with some handy 2D photographs taken from various angles to help you visualise the final 3D model. As you do so this miniature world is brought to life thanks to an immersive soundscape, hearing the bustle of a town or squawking seagulls at a beach.
The current Oculus Quest version in App Lab contains six puzzles each with a set number of pieces like Market Square in Gliwice (seen below) which has 200 pieces. Realities.io plans on expanding the gameplay possibilities whilst developing the PlayStation VR version, enabling each puzzle to have multiple difficulties depending on how quick or long you want to play. Puzzling Places will also get more puzzles to solve upon release.
Long term fans of Puzzling Places will know that Realities.io has been funding the project through Patreon, with backers able to access a total of 38 jigsaw puzzles which have come from 3D scans made by creators from around the world. Some of these may well come to the PlayStation VR version or the studio could have new ones planned, we’ll have to wait and see.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Puzzling Places, reporting back with further updates.
Puzzling Places is accepted to release in the Oculus Quest Store!!
Puzzling Places is accepted to release in the Oculus Quest Store!!
