The Ghost’s Spotlight: oVRshot, Microsoft Maquette and The Great C

Today I inaugurate a new column of this blog called “The Ghost’s Spotlight” in which I try to put the spotlight on some interesting VR projects that I tried or that I got to know. In the posts of this series, I would just talk you briefly about one or more VR projects, to let you know about them, but without getting deeper into details.

You may wonder why I took this choice: well, I’m a lot busy. Being a blogger and trying also to grow a consultancy company ain’t easy at all and requires a lot of time. Unluckily I am not able to sleep 2 hours a night like some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, so I have limited time to do all that I want to do. My to-do list in Asana is growing day after day, and now I guess it occupies half of the memory of the whole Asana’s servers (sorry, Asana, your cloud bills are my fault).

This means that when some VR indie devs write me an e-mail asking for a review of a game of theirs, I usually answer “I don’t know if I have the time” and in the latest times what happens most frequently is that later on I never manage to find the time to review it. Writing a review is time-consuming because I have to find the time to try the game, produce and choose the multimedia assets, write the post, market it, etc… And you know that I really can’t write a short post: when writing my first impressions on Magic Leap, I said myself “I tried it for just 30 minutes, the review will be short for sure”. 4000+ words later, I realized that maybe I have a problem in writing short posts 😀

The fact that I can’t give visibility to interesting VR projects hurts, especially if they are produced by indies that are doing everything they can to market their games. To them visibility means living or dying and every bit of visibility more matters. I have been (and still are) on the other side of the fence, and I know how it is difficult to get the attention of journalists… and so everytime I can’t help them, I feel really bad. I usually help them by sharing a trailer on Twitter, but Tweets’ lifetime is very short and doesn’t help much.

Even talking about projects by big companies, sometimes I would love to just tell you some first impressions I had, to advise you to try them because they are wonderful… but I can’t find the time.

So, in the end, I had this idea: why can’t I just point you to the various projects and write some short first impressions on it? This way I can talk to you about them without having to get crazy to find the time to write a full-fledged review for every experience, and the resulting aggregate post can be long the same so to make happy my inner writer. And so I’m trying to create this “The Ghost’s Spotlight” series, in which once in a while, I present you one or more VR projects that I just want you to notice for some reasons: because they are great or because the devs need the support of the community or whatever reason. I will just give you some first impressions or a copy of the press release and nothing more so that at least you know that they exist and maybe you will try it. This doesn’t mean that I’m not writing lengthy reviews anymore… every time I will decide what to do with every project that I should review: writing a long review, writing a short review, sharing just something on social media or discarding it at all. It will depend on what my crazy brain will decide and on how much time I will have.

I hope that this also helps in ticking away some entries from my Asana’s list…

So, that’s it for this long introduction (that was necessary to explain this new kind of article)… let’s dig into the 3 interesting projects of today!

oVRshot

oVRshot is an action VR game made by indie game studio Window Licker Games. It is a game that features multiplayer matches that have to be played by two teams of 3 people, each one armed with bow and arrows, that have to fight to win the match. What “winning” means depends on the type of game you are playing: when I tested it, it meant gaining the domination of various map points for your team for the maximum time possible, but now there are also other gaming types like capture the flag.

You enter the game and you have to decide what class of player you want to be and based on that class, you have special abilities (special super-powers) that can help you in attacking better your enemies or defending the points of your team. Depending on the special abilities you will choose when you will re-spawn, you will have a different identity in the game: I mean, if you choose abilities that are better for attacking, for sure you won’t stay still in a point defending the domination points, but you will become a predator of your enemies. The weapon that you have to fight, instead, is always the same, that is bow and arrow, for all the players… and we know how it is cool using bow and arrow in VR.

The graphics have their own very essential and futuristic style, that personally that I don’t love… but this is a matter of taste.

I enjoyed my time inside oVRshot: shooting other players was nice and I had fun by trying to win the matches. Of course, some coordination with team members was necessary to not lose immediately, this game requires some strategy. I also appreciated the division in classes of the players… it made it more intriguing.

There are two main downsides of this game:

1. The bow mechanic. While shooting with a bow in VR is always cool, continuously having to load arrows and shooting them can be tiresome for the arm in the long run. Furthermore, the shooting mechanic is implemented in a way that is difficult to shoot with precision;
2. There are few players online. This is not the devs’ fault, of course, and it is common to many VR games. The devs have also been very smart to add bots to the multiplayer sessions so that you are always able to play even if you can’t find other 5 players to play with.

The game is still in early access, and you can find it for the fair price of €9.99 on Steam. If you like the idea of playing it, buy it so to solve the issue number 2 of the few online players 🙂

Microsoft Maquette

Microsoft Maquette is the ultimate VR tool by Microsoft to prototype fast in VR. It has a very clean interface that reminds a bit the one of another cool product used to create thing fast in VR: Google Blocks. On your left hand you have a set of tools (many more than in Google Blocks) and with your right hand you can select and use these tools.

What can you do with Maquette? Well, it is made to create prototypes fast, so it is not a modeling program, it is a prototyping program. It lets you:

• Add basic primitives to the scene (cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, etc…);
• Add 3D models imported from your collection or from online repositories like Google Poly;
• Write text;
• Draw straight lines;
• Draw free-form lines in 3D;
• Move, Scale, and Rotate all the elements in a very easy way with its bimanual interactions;
• Color the elements;
• Erase things you don’t want;
• Take screenshots of your awesome work.

There’s also a “scripting” feature to add basic interaction functionalities to your creations, but it is currently grayed, so it will only come up in the future.

Maquette is fantastic because it is really easy to be learned (I learned how to use it in few minutes, without reading any tutorial) and so it can be used by anyone, even by people that aren’t technical and don’t know how to code. This way, UX designers can work in VR to prototype fast VR scenes and applications. Look how I used it to prototype a little man, immediately after having installed and launched the app.

Maquette is a great tool to prototype for VR in VR. It offers you the ability to create scenes very fast, using a few simple but very effective tools. The interface feels very natural and it is fantastic that it is integrated with various external ecosystems: for instance, it is possible to import in Unity the scenes that you create with Maquette, so that you can import them and then let a Unity developer add the logic for the interface that you have just created and then use it inside a real VR app.

I strongly advise to give it a try: it is currently in a closed beta round… but if you go to Maquette website and give Microsoft your e-mail, it will give you automatically a key so that you can download it for free on Windows Store. It works with all headsets and that’s another great choice by Microsoft.

The Great C

The Great C is a great storytelling experience that you can find on SteamVR since October, 9th 2018. It is a real-time rendered animation movie based on the eponym short story by the American writer Philip K. Dick. The plot is as follows:

Years after a catastrophic incident, a powerful AI-driven supercomputer called the Great C rules over the remnants of humanity. Each year a nearby village is forced to send a young person on a pilgrimage to “report” to the Great C – a journey from which no one ever returns. The Great C follows Clare, a young woman who finds her life upended when her fiancé is summoned for this year’s pilgrimage.

The production is a high-quality one and the graphics are very well made, also considering that it has to be a real-time production, so it can’t have the details of pre-rendered environments. It is also a very long experience: the story lasts 37 minutes and it is maybe the longest storytelling experience I have tried in VR, after Miyubi. Anyway, since the plot is very interesting and it is very emotional, for me the time has flown away fast. VR is great at amplifying emotions and this story is able to foster in you anger, fear, love, sadness and a whole set of emotions that will keep you attached to your headset to discover how the story will end.

There are few downsides:

• The graphics are nice, but the people seem a bit characters made with play dough;
• The “cinematic-mode” can trigger motion sickness (but you’ll be warned in this sense when selecting it);
• The “cinematic-mode” features fast camera changes and camera movements that are great for a standard movie but feel very strange in VR. Thanks to this experience I’ve discovered that the framing of classical movies can’t work at all in VR: as John Gaeta said, you can’t port the cinema grammar to VR, they are too different.

Anyway, I liked The Great C a lot. If you are interested in it, you can find it on Steam for $5.99.

I hoped that you liked this new format of talking about VR apps… if this is the case, let me know so that I will continue using it and if this is not the case, let me know the same so that I will stop. And if you are unsure, let me know how I can improve it. Cheers!