Emma Withington reports on a demo for the upcoming Everest VR…
Only 4000 people in the history of humanity have reached the peak of Everest and now you can be one of them. Created in a partnership with the visual effects team behind the Everest movie, Solfar Studios and RVX have brought together the best of gaming and movie tech to create an experience like no other– Everest VR.
You know a VR experience is good when you are legitimately concerned that if you sneeze you might be buried by an avalanche…
I made my way to the Royal Geographical Society in London which, incidentally, is where – fun fact alert – the name for Mt. Everest was decided in 1865. The demo was taking place in an illustrious room that oozed history; the walls entirely consumed by bookshelves and dusty tomes. The large empty space in the centre of the room, occupied by a well worn rug, was where I would be climbing Mt. Everest.
Everest VR is a room scale experience which involves full body movement. This was to be my first time trying the HTC Vive, Everest VR’s launch platform. I gear myself up, the headset goes on and I take hold of the two handheld controllers, which naturally become an extension of your hands as you become immersed in the experience – the forefinger rests comfortably on the trigger and your thumb rests on the circular pad on top…
I opened my eyes and everything was dazzlingly white. As the snowy haze cleared I looked around and I was in one of Everest’s highest camps – I turned and was faced with a towering peak. That alone was breathtaking enough for me to stand in awe for a short time before remembering that movement is, in fact, required. A group of mountaineers occupied the camp and, with the curiosity of a neanderthal, I began reaching out and trying to touch them with my gloved hand…(nope, you can’t grab them).
Being room scale VR there are faint lines resembling a square as to how far you can go before you make yourself look like a nonce and go flying backwards towards your PC. These don’t, by any means, invade your experience and once you’ve explored and wandered in one area there is a teleport mechanic which enables you to aim elsewhere on Everest – if the targeted aim highlights blue you may move to that spot. This is particularly useful if you only have limited space to work with.
The experience is not hinged on the idea of progression or a levelling system, but creating your own experience of climbing Everest. Immersing yourself in the landscape and how it feels – of course reaching the top is the ultimate goal, but you are not given quests to complete or a reason to rush through for the sake of achievements. To reach the top there are items you can pick up which prompt climbing stages – I discovered an oxygen mask in the camp and used the trigger to pick it up…
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…me? Suddenly I was soaring in the air above Everest as a soothing documentary style narrator told me more about the area I was about to climb, while showcasing a fantastic birds eye flyover view. If you’ve ever dreamed of flying, it was an incredible feeling; I would recommend Everest VR for that sensation alone. Even though I was rooted to the ground in reality, I felt myself adopting a stance to balance myself, as if I was floating on an invisible disk. These instances occur sporadically throughout Everest VR as wonderful and informative cutscenes.
All went black, in the darkness a zip appeared in front of me – it appeared I had been sleeping in my tent. I unzipped my way out of the tent and night had fallen…
I picked up a headlight and joined my mountaineer friends as we began a climbing instance. The sky was peppered with billions of stars and the snow glistened in the moonlight. It didn’t take long before the ground beneath my feet began to feel like snow while traversing Everest – soft, uneven, and crisp as you place yourself firmly in to the landscape. The minimalistic, atmosphere driven sound design is wonderful. As I ascended with my virtual climbing team the sound of snow crunching beneath my feet, distant echoes, the light howling of the wind passing between peaks and whispering in my ears, sent chills down my spine…The tactical use of an open window nearby might have had something to do with that too – which, by the way I would strongly suggest doing, I can honestly say I forgot I was indoors as time passed by.
I clipped myself onto a safety line and shimmied – wobbled – along a narrow ledge, my heart stopped as snow fell away into the maws of Everest. I continued toward a rock face, using the triggers to grab hold of the ascending lines and pulling myself up the ledge. Once I was up, I waved to one of my mountaineer pals and I was then on the home run to the top; holding a Black flag with the word Everest emblazoned on it in white. I felt a strong sense of achievement, of triumph…I stuck the flag in, I had done it! I took this opportunity to look around me in absolute wonder, fascinated and tingling with adrenaline.
The dulcet tones of the Attenborough-esque narrator returned, “People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron…If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.” – George Mallory.
Everest VR is brought to you by Sólfar, a pure VR studio founded in October 2014 by: Dr. Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, Reynir Hardarson, and Thor Gunnarsson. All previously a part of CCP Games, founded by Reynir in 1997, and Dr. Kjartan was the lead game designer of EVE online. After readjusting to the erudite surroundings, I sat down with Reynir to discuss Everest VR.
‘We saw VR was coming and we decided to go back to the trenches, do something really new, small, and with full creative freedom.’ says Reynir Hardarson – Co-Founder and Creative Director of Sólfar – on starting up the small, focused company. ‘Initially, when we first saw VR, we thought it was going to be a gimmick and interesting as a novelty, but when we saw the room demo with Oculus in 2014 I realised that it was much more than that; it gives you the ability to create dreams and situations – which is something very magical’.
Sólfar teamed up with RVX, the visual effects team behind Everest (2015), after being blown away by their creation of Mt. Everest using stereophotogrammetry techniques with over 300,000 photos (a computer analysis which reconstructs 3D coordinates from photographs). ‘This is really the reason why we decided to make the project. We were visiting the team while they were making the movie who were showing us the dailies and rough cuts, which were amazingly well met, and then they showed us how they did it. We thought they had only made a part of the mountain, but they had actually made the mountain in full 3D and we were like, wow, this is the perfect thing to take to VR!’
The team also asked themselves the question, would this even be possible? ‘The difference between Everest VR and regular computer games is that normally you would use procedural textures for mountain ranges, but in Everest VR you have to have each pixel in the correct place and it’s a massive amount of data – just the texture memory alone was 12 GB during development!’ Using Granite by Graphine Software resolved this problem for Sólfar, allowing them to compress the texture data, and enabling mainstream and cross platform usage.
Dadi Einarsson, the Visual Effects Director from the movie Everest, went to Mt. Everest, ‘he took helicopter flights; some of the imagery used in the stereophotogrammetry was what he captured. The film crew did a lot of consulting with expert climbers, including people who had been to Everest, however, we also did some consulting and testing of our own for Everest VR to see whether the things we were doing were accurate according to the experts. They gave us weirdly positive feedback about the experience! Meaning it must be close enough to the real thing to get the green light and the thumbs up from people who have actually been there.’
Sólfar began full development work on Everest VR in October 2015, after first deciding on how they would tackle such a task, ‘We started thinking about how it would work – how will we make this? should we make it a game? An experience? Flying, skiing, paragliding? In the end we decided we would treat the mountain with respect, it is after all a dangerous and holy place. In reality and in Everest VR the Sherpas do a ritual before each expedition to the goddess Chomolungma – Everest’s Tibetan name meaning, ‘goddess, mother of mountains’ – asking her permission and forgiveness for the expedition, in which they will be piercing the mountain with sharp objects; spikes on their shoes, ice picks, and so on… Everest has an amazing poetry surrounding it and we want to keep that feel, alongside the fact that people have lost their lives climbing the mountain, it’s a serious place.’
Of course, the question that always comes up regarding VR is whether or not you will feel any motion sickness. While there were issues during development with motion sickness for Everest VR, this has been resolved. The experience now runs at the required 90 fps, which you mustn’t dip below (excluding PSVR, for which the minimum is 60 fps). This is necessary for VR to run smoothly without producing juddering images and prevents motion sickness. ‘This is the most important problem, it has to be flawless’ says Reynir, ‘some people call it the elephant in the room, but we say kill the elephant – we can make content without making people sick. You have to think differently about games on VR, it’s not about travelling around at great speed and neglecting these issues, but what you have in front of you and how you can present that.’
Psychologically speaking Everest VR is the first VR experience where I’ve genuinely felt like I’m in an entirely different environment. Being in a location that actually exists makes what you are doing a plausible idea to grasp; this could be real. As you shuffle along the ledges and approach rock faces, you feel the presence of what’s in front of you. A dawning realisation of the power of the brain and how influential visual perception is, physically and emotionally. You can’t bring yourself to try walking off a ledge, or see what happens when you put your body through a wall, which is something that wouldn’t normally concern the mind of the gamer – you are normally on the outside of the world, looking in. It’s very different being placed in the world itself, ‘There’s something so compelling about the experience, being able to walk and look over the edge. People don’t try to walk off the ledges – even though it is not possible to fall in Everest VR – or put their heads through the walls. Nobody does it, and the reason for this is that we see the wall in front of us and feel the presence of the wall and the resistance. It’s a sensation that’s difficult to put into words..!’
I asked Reynir what he would like people to take away from the experience, ‘like George Mallory says, there’s no real point in the experience itself, but there’s something so compelling about it and this translates into how we try to pace it. We’re not actively telling you to look for things, it’s about being in the moment and enjoying your personal experience of Everest rather than scoring points and trying to get to the next level. It’s an experience for everybody, we want to create a sense of awe and wonder, of being in the place – something beautiful and spectacular. With this kind of VR it’s closer to controlling your dreams.’
This kind of physical and visceral experience truly becomes a part of your memory, for me it feels like I’ve been there, it’s truly bizarre. I now have a greater sense of the scale of Everest. I will never look at it in the same way again. Everest VR generates an overwhelmingly positive rush; I climbed Everest and now I can do anything. It makes you want to take on the world, go on adventures and explore. Mallory was right ‘What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy’. Now you can feel this sensation too, no matter who you are, or your capabilities. Achieving the impossible starts here…and boy, does it feel good.
Everest VR is to be released at the end of the year on the HTC Vive in time for Christmas. If you’re concerned it’s a HTC Vive exclusive, fear not, Everest VR is not platform exclusive and will make its way onto the other available VR platforms after launch.
Emma Withington – Follow me on Twitter.
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