Category: Senza Peso

Posted on

Kite & Lightning’s Senza Peso Now Available for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

Back in August VRFocus reported on Kite & Lightning resurrecting its virtual reality (VR) mini opera Senza Peso for current head-mounted displays (HMD). Today the experience has gone live on Steam with support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Originally debuting back in 2014 on the Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 (DK1), Senza Peso is described: “As a soul transitioning into the afterlife, Senza Peso shepherds you on a spiritual journey through a beautiful and foreboding dark world of lost souls and redemption.”

The experience was a VR adaption of a short film by Cory Strassburger & Alain Vasquez – Strassburger co-founded Kite & Lightning with Ikrima Elhassan – in which viewers become the protagonist and personally experience the metamorphosis from death to eternity.

Kite & Lightning is currently working on multiplayer brawler Bebylon: Battle Royale, which involves babies remote-controlling a vehicle-mounted baby in an arena of death. These vehicles are armed with giant fists which can punch and slap opponents along with other offensive weaponry.

Senza Peso can be downloaded now for free, and for all the latest Kite & Lightning news keep reading VRFocus.

Posted on

‘Senza Peso’ Is A Must-Download Available Now For Rift And Vive

‘Senza Peso’ Is A Must-Download Available Now For Rift And Vive

Kite & Lightning released an updated version of their 2014 demo experience Senza Peso on Steam. If you haven’t tried it, the download is free and certainly worth a viewing on either Rift and Vive.

This is one of the many environments seen in Senza Peso.

The surreal journey down the river Styx is a fantastic sit-down demo VR experience with incredible music. The software was a go-to demo for Rift development kit owners and likely introduced a great many people to VR for the first time.

Senza Peso was shown at some of the earliest big VR meetups by Kite & Lightning before the startup took on some work-for-hire projects. That gave them the cash they needed to make a year-long pilgrimage to Paris for artistic exploration. Ikrima Elhassan and Cory Strassburger, the two co-founders, returned to Los Angeles this summer funded with $2.5 million and an idea to create an expansive multiplayer VR world centered around immortal babies with bad behavior.

You can almost feel the chilly wind blowing during this very memorable environment seen in Senza Peso.

Senza Peso, though, brought the co-founders a lot of early attention in the VR industry and featured some pioneering work using a mixture of captured performances set inside an environment developed with a game engine. All set to an enveloping soundtrack, even on a DK2 headset the experience made a strong case for the power of virtual reality. The experience features no interactivity and it is a bit like the It’s A Small World ride at Disneyland, but instead of a tour of different cultures you get to see different regions of the afterlife.

We highly recommend you give the free experience a try. It’s available now on Steam.