Reality. In VR. That is my ultimate goal, to create the most realistic virtual experience around the viewer. That would be so cool! The best VR app ever. The universe, all around you. An experience where you cannot tell what is real vs. simulated, like The Matrix; the actual “matrix” around us.
But, alas, there’s only so much you can do to create “magic”, especially working solo. There are many different kinds of magic – creative artwork, or poems… videos, or music. Any canvas where skilled artists from all genres display their magical powers.
The 1976 album, Rush 2112, contained an entire 23 minute vinyl side telling a musical story. Other musicians of course had done the same, such as Queen or The Who. The point of my story however is that the main character in that musical story discovers an ancient guitar buried in an underground cave. A strange device which had completely disappeared, along with all forms of music, in a futuristic world. For him, the plucking of each string was musical magic, which had never been heard before, by him or anyone else in this society. The story continues and it’s one of the best albums ever.
To me, “magic” is the ability to create something wonderful and different. Whether it is music, or video, or in my case, a Virtual Experience in my VR app PlanetVRium. I am trying to create my own artistic impact on the world. If you’ve read my other blogs, you may have seen a reference to playing drums when I was younger. Or an early 2D video game attempt in the 70’s, on an Apple II. I enjoy the challenge and excitement of creating something new and magical to me. I always wish I could do better – like rendering the clouds or the Aurora Borealis in VR. That would be amazing, but it is way outside my skills.
In any case, PlanetVRium is my pi`ece de re’sistance. I came up with the idea. It evolved over many years but it all started with drawing the stars in the night sky. I know, it seems pretty boring, just a bunch of white dots in VR. But there was so much involved with just doing that much. Each white dot in the sky has a brightness, and of course its location in the sky. But each location changes based on latitude, longitude and time of year relative to Earth’s orbit around the Sun. And all this involves a lot of math that I had to research, such as vectors or mapping astronomical coordinates, influenced by space and time, to corresponding X,Y,Z representation. And I wanted to be as accurate as possible; simulating the actual night sky with everything properly placed.
And once I had the first few white dots, I immediately wanted to draw lines connecting them. I wrote the code to draw the stars which make up Orion and see the lines connecting those stars. Initially it was a mirror image of the expected result due to errors in my math, but still an awesome early achievement for me. Displaying the lines of the constellations. Again boring stuff, but magic to me at the time.
And of course I wanted to tell my story, like always. I guess that’s the purpose of these blogs. I had dots, and lines connecting them. Cool, what’s next? Reacting to the controller buttons to enable these lines. And code for showing spheres orbiting other spheres in VR. Or creating water ripples. Each step was fun and exciting.
I tried some of my own artwork. Also working with textures. One of my earliest creations was wrapping a capsule shape with a JPG of a fish. I still have it in the game today, as seen to the right. I came up with the idea of floating on a raft, in the middle of the ocean, which would be perfect for night viewing, with zero light pollution. I created the logs of the raft and their texture, including learning about bump mapping to make the flat image appear more 3D-like.
Or creating my own JPG, from scratch, to create an owl in VR. I am horrible at freestyle drawing, but I can stich together basic shapes and images found on the web to make a new picture. And then there are my simple early tree experiments, a cone or an egg on top of one of the aforementioned logs. I later imported free 3D assets, such as rocks and trees, or the animated shark. Each was a learning step on my path to releasing PlanetVRium.
Creating a game is a lot of work. And the code mentioned above is only part of the situation. There are other basics necessities in the application such as menus and user customizations. There’s also the legal stuff like taxes and business license. And then there is website maintenance. And storefront experience and marketing. All the research. Everything needs to be done. Thankfully I did have some help along the way, but 99% is just me. Still each new achievement felt great and worth the effort.
For me, the various elements in the application code ultimately became tools in my virtual toolbox. I could turn the stars on or off as part of creating a scene. I created a story and visualized it by making objects appear and move, choreographed to my voice as narration. Telling a story which was hopefully educational, the viewer learning something new, in an exciting new format.
I had to temper my creativity vs. my ability to create the objects in VR. I felt that one of my earliest stories was “simple” enough to animate. This ultimately lead to my first Visual Experience: “What is a Day and What is a Night?”. This story describes the orbital and rotational periods for each planet, flying through the Solar System in VR. It was hard work. Hundreds of hours watching and listening to the same thing over and over, critiquing and fixing every little issue. And this was only one, there are now a half dozen Visual Experiences in PlanetVRium. For me each is essentially an animated 3D video, that you just sit and watch, but each pushed me to create new tools or new pieces of artwork. I wish I could get more interactivity with the user. I guess that’s future work 🙂 !
