Last night, David Wyand gave a talk on Turtle VR and the technology behind it at TorontoVR. He gave a summary of using UE4, Coherent UI, Google Blockly, Oculus DK1, and Razer Hydra in producing the code block programmable drawing application.
Photo by UnrealEngineTO
The event was packed as Oculus came by to demo their consumer Rift and Oculus Touch. It looked like most people played Bullet Train, a demo made by Epic using UE4.
The Vive preview version of Turtle VR was also available for attendees to try out thanks to Globacore.
Last night, David Wyand gave a talk on Circumpaint, UE4, and the Oculus Mobile VR Jam at TorontoVR. He gave a summary of the VR Jam, and talked about the challenges in creating a Finalist VR Jam entry using Unreal Engine 4.
Photo by Stephan Tanguay
About 60 people attended the event at the Globacore headquarters, which included a talk by Denis Lirette about Globacore’s newest game, Power Core VR.
Brad Herman, Head of DreamLab at DreamWorks Animation, and one of the Oculus Mobile VR Jam 2015 judges, had some nice things to say about Circumpaint over on his web site:
Circumpaint is pixel art painting with your head. At first I was not expecting much, if I want to make art I would really like to use my hands. I ended up animating a pixel dragon breathing fire, it was silly but cute. It made me laugh and want to play a bit more. The developer clearly understand the limitations of trying to paint with your head, I appreciate the choices that they made to deliver a surprisingly satisfactory experience.
Circumpaint, my GearVR Mobile Jam app entry, has made it through to the finalist stage. Yay! Out of the original 122 app/experience entries, 24 made it through to the final judging.
You can see the entire list of Jam finalists here:
The GearVR Mobile Jam 2015 submissions are now closed and voting has begun. I’ve submitted the final version of Circumpaint, an app that lets you paint and animate on a dome that surrounds you, and would love it if you could go vote for it:
The following video is part of the final submission and demonstrates creating an animation in Circumpaint:
Creating Circumpaint was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Game Jams are all about the trade offs between features, bugs, and time. There is never enough time. If there is enough interest in Circumpaint from the community or judges then I’ll look into releasing it on the GearVR store as a full application. But for now, sleep…
A look at the dome you paint on, and the user interface. This is the lowest resolution for the dome.
Circumpaint supports both the GearVR touchpad and back button, as well as the Samsung EI-GP20 controller. Using the controller provides a number of painting shortcuts.
The Paint tab provides everything you need to paint and animate. From here you may also change the dome’s resolution at any time.
Two images created within Circumpaint, flattened out into image stripes. The left one was created at the lowest resolution using the C64 palette. The right one was created at the highest resolution using the N64 palette. Within Circumpaint these images surround you, and you turn your head to to check out all of the details.
For the last three weeks I have been working on an application for the GearVR Mobile VR Jam, titled Circumpaint. This app allows you to draw and animated in 360 degrees on the surface on a dome, with you at its center.
May 4 was the Milestone 3 deadline, which required a video to demonstrate your work:
Another week to go until the Jam is complete and the app will be made available for everyone with a GearVR to try out. Polish, polish, polish! More screenshots from previous Milestones are available on the Jam’s hosting site, ChallengePost:
We had a great time demoing Here Come The Dead at the TAVES Consumer Electronics Show on November 1. We were part of the TorontoVR showcase that included other local developers in a corner of the New Technology area. About 75 adults tried the game over the seven hours we were there. Enjoy the following highlight reel from the show!
Gnometech will be attending the TAVES Consumer Electronics Show on November 1 as part of the TorontoVR community showcase. We’ll be giving demos of the new Unreal Engine 4 and Oculus Rift DK2 version of Here Come The Dead to all TAVES attendees (admission required). How many zombies can you take down before time is up?
The first Oculus Connect was great fun! I met new people and talked about our favorite subject. Ironically, travelling to California allowed me to meet more VR people here in Toronto.
There were some great talks by icons of the game industry. It wasn’t possible to attend all sessions as many went on simultaneously. I look forward to watching the videos.
On Saturday night, I gave a demo of Here Come The Dead to the Oculus Developer Relations group. I had rewritten the demo using UE4 during a 3 week crunch to get it ready for DK2. As I was the last to demo for the night, I was able to make use of the conference hardware to show off my demo level to some other attendees until they kicked us out.
Oculus Connect 1 was a great opportunity to talk with like-minded people, and I really feel energized about continuing work on my games. I look forward to the next Oculus Connect!
