View source for Virtual reality

Virtual reality or VR for short usually refers to stereoscopic 3D real-time rendering.

== Art Rules for VR Environments ==
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|[http://www.juantwo.com/ Juan "monster" Martinez] posted this in the Polycount Forum thread [http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138023 Art Rules for VR environments?]
|}

At Playful we are building a VR game with Oculus. Before we ended up with our current art style we tried a slew of different art styles. I've developed on DK1, HDKit, Chrystal Cove and DK2 ( and others )

The biggest challenges are mipping and aliasing. The screen is just inches from your eyes and each camera alias and mips slightly differently. This causes a lot of discomfort. You also lose a lot of resolution with the camera shader used to send a distorted image through the lens.

(Anti-Alias is the smoothing of polygonal edges. Mipmapping is the smoothing of textures as the angle / distance increase from the render camera.)

These are the rules we came up with so far.

* Use Chromatic Aberration to correct color bleeding from the lenses.
* Don't use high frequency detail or noise in textures. Even with mip mapping enabled it just turns into swimming pixels.
* 3D geometry "feels" way better than normal maps.
* Specularity instantly give a lot of interest in VR.
* We used a lot of angular and organic shapes because vertical and horizontal lines would align to the screen pixels and alias very badly.
* We rendered the final image at 2592x1458 then down scaled to 1920x1080 to get better anti-aliasing.
* In Unity we used the 8x Multi-Sampling. (Along with the upscaling.)
* Skyboxes require a special shader to display the same on both eyes/cameras.
* We are working on a shader that fades out texture detail at a distance to prevent mipping / swimming textures.
* You need to maintain 76 FPS for low persistence to activate on DK2. This is a challenge because everything is rendered twice, once for each eye.

I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of stuff right now. If I remember anything pertinent I'll update.

[[image:LuckysTale.jpg|thumb|600px|left|Image by [http://playfulcorp.com/#lucky Playful].]]<br clear="all" />

== Links ==

* [https://polycount.com/discussion/149813/virtual-reality-art-resources-thread Virtual Reality Art Resources Thread] on the Polycount Forum
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbiioTWaY2E Oculus Connect: Learning from Lucky's Tale] presentation by Design Director Dan Hurd and CEO Paul Bettner from Playful at the Oculus Connect developer conference
* [http://www.pixelatedramblings.com/2014/12/the-quest-for-comfortable-vr.html The quest for comfortable VR] by [http://www.pixelatedramblings.com Michael Schenck]
* [http://xin-squared.com/designing-for-virtual-reality/ Designing for virtual reality] by [http://xin-squared.com Xin Xin]


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[[Category:Environment]] [[Category:Rendering]]