REALLY F🔥CKING MAD BIRDS

Is it possible to scare yourself?

Creepy VR Experiences have always stood out. Watching YouTube Videos of people running into walls to get away from a VR monster is quite amusing.

This one never gets old:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qydSKppGRD8

This inspired us to create a creepy VR Experience of our own, and what started out as a VR Experiment has become a high performance game both in and out of VR.

Through a ton of unit testing we found a nice balance between performance and quality. This involved building, rebuilding and then building once more until we could honestly say we had the best approach for what we were trying to achieve.

As you can see in the demo video above, the weapon is shooting fireballs which render lights in WebGL. Lights can be expensive and we found that for the most part 6 lights worked pretty good for what we wanted to do. It also has the familiarity of a 6-shooter pistol which also made sense.

We made the bullets reusable because the lights were attached to them and we needed to reuse the lights. This in itself forced us into creating a unique weapon. Now all we needed was a villan character of some kind.

Fear of Birds

I realized after playing Farpoint VR for a few weeks that I was becoming a little bit braver around real life bugs. Could we apply the same principals here and cure me of my bird phobia?

In this case, “NO” it did not work.

So to answer my previous question: “Is it possible to scare yourself?”

Yes it is! Even having developed the game and all it's components from scratch I managed to scare myself and not just once but quite often still.

I know what you are probably thinking.. maybe we used something like a Shoebill Stork?

© Image provided by Wallpaper Cave

When actually it is closer to this:

So really what it comes down to is performance is key in VR. If an experience is loose and fluid and natural feeling, you start to let go and forget about the hardware strapped to your head.

And what doesn't exist in our true reality?

1. Jank
2. Low frame rates

Eliminate those and things get real.