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Post Three Redwood Forest Reality

Mindshiftvr
Protege
So, Hallie and I are up on the Sonoma Coast in my friend's home in Timber Cove. We are here because my friend's property has it's own redwood forest and creek in the back. We spent the morning collecting "real" moss and ferns for texture maps and photographing things to put in "Mindshift VR - Meditative Forest".  It is also a great place to work uninterrupted.

When I get together with Hallie we jam for two or three days hard on this project. In total we have racked up at least 200 hours working together and more apart. I know this has been a big learning curve, new working together, managing the high level of detail we are wanting to attain and discovering what works and does not work for meditation vr. We are keeping track of time on tasks so we can estimate how long it will take to build projects for clients.

In the end, we have discovered that meditating in a formal way, sitting doesn't really work out as much as just being in the experience. We are aiming that our final project is relaxing by being in it more then by doing the meditation. In a bid for that we have been developing points of interest and things to do within the world.

We've been getting a lot of interest, so I have been working on the business plan or presentation deck.  You know it is pretty tricky when it comes down to financial projections for virtual reality content. If anyone has a good grasp of the future financial landscape for content developers in VR, I would love to chat.

I am going to have to buckle down and get more up to speed in Unity so I can create more of what is in my mind. Hallie is so advanced it makes me lazy and rely on her, but in the mean time there are a lot of other parts for me to produce. Sound, graphics, research, photography and video. Having been a professional architect, I have a lot of skills in designing navigational clues in surroundings. In fact I think I will write a white paper on the pattern language of navigation in Virtual Reality.

We have learned a lot about the atmospheric nature of making a high level of detail project and how that works with background features. In a real redwood forest there is fog and "god" rays in the mist. After weeks of working on how to create this effect we have come up with a beautiful soothing environment that comes into focus as you move through it.

We are building for the Rift and HTC VIVE, so our next step is to export to Gear VR and see how much we will have to "dumb down" to work.

Well, that is about it for now. Back to work.

3 REPLIES 3

SBarrick
Expert Protege
Thanks for sharing your process @Mindshiftvr! I am having the same struggle "simplifying" the experience from Rift to Gear VR. Other than low poly counts, do you have any tips youre willing to share? 🙂

Mindshiftvr
Protege
Well, I will once we manage to do that. We have not sat down and done a Gear VR export yet.  I don't yet know what we will be losing. I am expressly eager to have the demo portable so we will be doing it soon and I will share what we learn for sure.

aleemhossain
Expert Protege



In the end, we have discovered that meditating in a formal way, sitting doesn't really work out as much as just being in the experience. 


That's a pretty interesting realization! It's less important that the VR experience mirror real life than it is to achieve the result you want.