VR HTC Vive is incredible.

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Part of my job is model making, the other part is how to implement these models and animations into a real time environment.

What does this mean? Basically I get to make and play with toys all day in a virtual reality world.

This week I have been building a magical forest with a Stone hedge structure at the center. You can walk around the environment and interact with objects and explore the scene, it's fun stuff.
Built in the Unreal Engine, it has real time effects and environmental lighting. The great part is that I'm currently testing the software with the new HTC Vive hardware!



I was very impressed with the Oculus DK2 as the start of the year but it still had some some major issues. The main one being the screen pixelation was terrible but the potential was huge. Everyone saw it, and jumped on the VR hype train. Nearly at the end of the year was are about to get a serious wave of new VR software and hardware.

Is it the future though?

Maybe a few year ago I would have said yes, anime such as Ghost in the Shell made the divide between man and machine so tight it was hard to tell it apart. But that was just wishful thinking, in reality we still had a long way to go.

So we got the new HTC Vive set up in a walkable 12 foot enclosure and we booted up the Titan X system..


I wasn't ready for the future.

The quality of display, resolution, frame frame and game ergonomics just melted my mind. I swam in the ocean next to a full size whale and attempted to fix an Aperture robot from the Portal video game series. It seriously was breath taking.

You can watch the Portal demo video here:

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

Read a detailed review here from Business Insder:

http://www.businessinsider.com/htc-vive-virtual-reality-demo-first-impressions-2015-7

And watch TheBlu demo here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFKbL-GU-_U



Maybe this is just a passing fad, a whim on the breeze of technology but I truly believe that this is the start of something magical and world changing with applications in every part of daily life.

Where we go from here is only limited by our imagination.














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