WEIGHTLESS

Created by Martin Schubert with music by Chris Zabriskie

A meditative virtual reality experience for the Leap Motion about inspecting space debris in a weightless environment.

You wake up to the sound of your ship's onboard AI.

'Good morning commander.'

You roll over and yawn.

'Good morning, computer,' you mumble into the ship's dark cabin.

'Shall we start the day?'

'Only if we start it right.'

You engage the start up sequence and the soothing sound of Chris Zabriskie's piano fills the metal and plastic space.

The exterior window shutters lurch into motion and mechanically shuffle open.

Light reflecting off a nearby planet pours into the cabin revealing the space you call home.

You put out your arms and push off gently towards the center console.

A new day.

A new collection of debris to inspect.

A new set of artifacts to discover.

I'm designing around a few key insights:

• I wanted the player to have an experience that's only possible in VR. That means taking advantage of the ability to look around in any direction and having good spatial awareness. This led to investigating a weightless environment that allowed freedom of movement in any direction.

• I wanted interaction unique to the finger tracking of the Leap. Something that could not be done compellingly with a mouse, keyboard or game pad. The idea of gently nudging and inspecting objects in micro gravity would be very difficult with a traditional control scheme but with the Leap it feels really natural.

• In VR, with positional tracking, parallax is strongest in the near range so most of the game's interactions happen within arm's reach. Being able to bob your head around (and sometimes walk entirely around) an object really makes it seem as though it's there.

Instructions

Watch this short 'How To' video to get the best tracking out of your Leap make sure your audio is on!

Best experienced sitting on a swivel chair or standing up (be careful and clear space!).

[R] to recenter

[Enter] in intro scene to start experience

[S] in intro scene to skip intro/tutorial

[ESC] to quit

[F10] to toggle black smear correction (thanks Drash!)

Oculus Rift DK2 and mounted Leap Motion required.

Recommended hardware (developed on):

Nvidia GTX 770, Intel i5 - 4670K, 4GB RAM, Windows 8.1

DirectX 11 required.

Run in DirectToRift mode for best performance.

Mac build is untested (please comment if you try it!)

Thank you to the Leap Motion team for running the 3D Jam and answering all my emails. It was a lot of fun making Weightless and I plan to continue developing it.

And thanks to anyone that gave it a try!

Troubleshooting

If you're getting a black screen on start up but see the details box when you hit space, try launching it with the parameter -force-opengl

Or try setting your desktop resolution to 1280x800

Or you can try downloading the [Non-DirectX 11] version below.

What's New

UPDATE: WEIGHTLESS_IMAGEHANDS

- Updated to Unity 5 and integrated Image Hands asset

- Added chain object to first group of space debris

- Added chain object and smaller chains to the demo scene (accessible by hitting the [S] key at the title screen to skip the intro)