P-171: MountainTop: Oculus Rift/Virtual Reality Demo Part 1

I have decided to make a very simple “virtual environment” for the Oculus Rift. This will be used primarily for testing the Rift, The OpenVR sdk, and any other software and hardware issues that I might have when setting up the Rift.

In addition, I intend to use it to experiment with the all-important sense of “presence” in a virtual world. I want to learn how to truly capture that sense of immersion, and creating visually striking scenes should be a good way to do that.

My first virtual environment will be a Mountain Top. I can experiment with weather effects, view distances,  and if I have time, I can create objects and buildings as well.

I have also added a character I made in Mixamo Fuse, along with some basic AI, into the world.

So far the project is very basic, but I intend to add new features when I have time, including support for the Awesomium T3D Kit, which should allow me to browse the web from inside the virtual world.

I also added my Phoenix Model from P168, which, at over 100,000 poly’s, was difficult to export, but it seems to render fine in the engine. Blenders .DAE exporter seems much more reliable than others that I have tried, it could even handle high-poly models such as this with no hangs or crashes.