Creating Virtual Worlds


In PlanetVRium, there are several “Preferred Environments” to choose from, the virtual landscapes that surround you as you interact with the night sky.  I am the sole creator of PlanetVRium, having created everything in this app that I can, including some of the artwork.  I am not an artist, that much is certain; but I wanted to try to create my own virtual worlds.

These Preferred Environments are just that; virtual worlds that I have created while working on PlanetVRium.  You can see my progression with various personal educational leaps as I learned more about how to use Unity and create objects in VR – spheres and cubes and eventually more-complex shapes.  In the Peaceful Meadow you can see my first “green square floor” which now has a photograph of a field of grass.  This in itself was an early accomplishment: drawing a JPG onto a scaled plane/cube in VR.  In Raft on the Water you can see other things I learned to create – a fish on a capsule, a sphere named “Willie”, logs with bump mapping, and ripples in the water.  It was super exciting and an educational journey for me, personally!

Of course for maximum visibility of the entire night sky, all around, you can turn off the entire virtual landscape.  Or stand/sit atop a tiny platform in Small Spaceship if floating in space makes you uncomfortable.  My personal favorite is Magic Carpet (see below) – where I learned how to place objects all over a 3 dimensional terrain.  This is where the real magic of creating virtual worlds is – placing of hundreds of objects all around – trees, rocks, butterflies, sunlight on a lake, you name it.  And also the ability to create the objects themselves – the shapes, their movements, the colors, everything.  I don’t have any of that magic, but I was proud of the owl that I created.  Obviously other companies have dozens of professional artists, so the objects that I have created look like a child had done it, by comparison.

Floating above the terrain in my favorite environment: the Magic Carpet. I (obviously) created the tree on the left and the owl in the center tree. The rest were assets that I had downloaded.

I’ve had feedback on my Community Hub that my visual assets are horrible.  I openly welcomed those comments, and I responded to the original author and briefly explained what I just mentioned above – that I created much of the artwork myself, and I am not very good.  I am glad that he understood the complexities and challenges in creating this stuff.

Where my artistic contribution comes from is the orchestration of such objects.  Such as creating a bunch of textured spheres for the planets, and moving them around in 3 dimensional space, choreographed to the stories of various Visual Experiences.  Doing this is also a work of art, and it is the unique aspect that differentiates PlanetVRium from other sky watching apps.

So I will continue to push myself and learn how to create this art and improve my skills.  In some cases by improving the visuals on the existing environments, or possibly creating new ones to choose.  And of course continue to push my limits by animating additional Visual Experiences.

As I’ve said a few times before, I hope you enjoy PlanetVRium and thanks for your support!