Hey Explorers,

as excited about the Vive Index as we are? Thought so! To get ready, we pushed out an update today adding Index Controller (aka Knuckles) support to Realities.
We also upgrade the Unreal Engine version & fixed some smaller bugs. This should also fix the buzzing audio that some of you reported - if the problem persists please let us know!

Happy exploring,

Daniel from the realities.io team

At the end of 2018, Germany's last Coal Mine will end its operations – marking nothing less than the end of an era. We ventured into Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr area, for a final descent more than 1200m below ground, scanning the tunnels of Prosper Haniel to preserve this piece of industrial history in volumetric & photorealistic VR for the generations to come.

GET THE DLC HERE



Starting in lofty heights on the coal preparation plant, users have to find their way to the mining site, passing through the coal mixing dome and lamp storage before descending to the underground train station and from there to the info point and finally, the mining site.
Slightly more linear than our previous pieces, you'll be guided on your way into the mine way by a ‘Kumpel’, a former miner, manifesting as point cloud.

Glückauf! was definitely one of our most challenging production so far. Starting with the fact that none of our equipment is usually allowed in the mine due to risk of triggering mining gas explosions - usually you even have to change your undies to pure cotton ones that don't make sparks. Only after long negotiations a special permit was given under the condition that we had to be accompanied by a group of firefighters and continuous gas measurements. Add to this the huge scale above and the extreme light conditions & narrowness below ground paired with the short time windows, hot & dusty air and extreme light conditions.





Glückauf! Is produced together with German public broadcaster WDR (with whom we already collaborated for the Cologne Cathedral) and is the high end, volumetric part of an ambitious cross media VR project about Germany’s departure from coal mining. The web VR & 360 parts can be checked out here: https://glueckauf.wdr.de/ (German only).

Hey guys,

due to a bug within Unreal 4.18, starting Realities on a Samsung Odyssey resulted in nothing much but very weirdly distorted images. Not too fun.
Community member EZ WIN however rolled up his sleeves and dug out the fix from the Unreal git commits & posted it in the discussion group. No way such an effort can go unrewarded! Fix is in & update is out. You can fire up your Samsung Odysseys and go exploring again without brain braking distortions.

Have fun & big thanks EZ WIN!

The stunning finale of our Terres d'Exploration series is out: Bridge Glacier!
After exploring the caves under Vancouver Island and the prairies of the Grasslands National Park Damien & FX are taking you up into the Canadian Rocky Mountains! Walk along a ridge overlooking the Bridge Glacier, make your way down to the ice field across crevasses and move along the valley back to the base camp.

If you enjoyed exploring all the locations make sure to check out the (french) TV documentary out as well: TV5 online videos

Today we released the first of three locations from the episodes of TV5's documentary series Terre d'Exploration / Uncharted Canada!

>>> download the Terre d'Exploration DLC here <<<

For this episode titled Le Monde Sous Nos Pieds / The World Under Our Feet you will follow the shows two protagonists Damien & FX and speleologist Nicolas Borchers underground inside a cave system below Vancouver Island. Explore dripping stalactites, learn about how erosion formed the cave and see if you can find the skeleton of an unlucky deer who didn't make it out again.



Episode 2 & 3 will be released on April 17 and April 24, first taking you to the Grassland National Park before ending with the gem of the series, the Bridge Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains!

If you want to check out the show head over to TV 5 (heads up, all in French over there):
watch Terre d'Exploration episodes online


Besides the stunning new content there are two things about this release we are particularly excited about about:

Realities is now DLC based!
Besides a bunch of small improvements and upgrades the biggest technical change is that Realities locations are now available as separate DLCs! This is based on the feedback we got from you about disk file size and download size: DLCs will give you more control what locations you keep on your local drive & reduce download times. You don't have to re-download all of Realities if you only want to check out the latest release.
This also means that all old content is transitioning to DLCs. We are currently in the process of moving everything over. Beelitz Heilstätten as well as Death Valley are already available, the others will follow shortly.

The first 3rd party content on Realities!
Why is that special? So far, each of the locations on Realities was scanned by us. While that of course gives us an amazing excuse to travel to amazing places around the world it's also a bottleneck for content creation. Our vision from the start was to enable more and more people to create photorealistic, volumetric VR. So this time, instead of us venturing out we trained FX & Damien, the two adventurers from Terre d'Exploration on how to do the scanning on site and then turned their photos into this experience using our pipeline.

We're working to bring you an improved Realities! Get involved here: https://www.surveymonkey.de/r/PH2957Y

We're working to bring you an improved Realities! Get involved here: https://www.surveymonkey.de/r/PH2957Y

Hey guys,

we just released a new, experimental levitation locomotion! It is inspired by Colin Northways amazing recent work & enables you to navigate our wonderful locations more seamlessly, providing a better feeling of scale compared to teleporting while avoiding a lot of the hickups that sometimes occured for the previous walking locomotion when hitting rough terrain.
Here's how you use it across the different controls:



Go give it a shot & let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Daniel

Hey guys,

we just released a new, experimental levitation locomotion! It is inspired by Colin Northways amazing recent work & enables you to navigate our wonderful locations more seamlessly, providing a better feeling of scale compared to teleporting while avoiding a lot of the hickups that sometimes occured for the previous walking locomotion when hitting rough terrain.
Here's how you use it across the different controls:



Go give it a shot & let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Daniel

Hoooray, the #Dom360 project, which the Cologne Cathedral destination was part of, won the most important German Online journalism award, the Grimme Online Award! To celebrate this we today released an additional location high above the cathedrals altar & with quite a view about the city of Cologne: the central tower!

So enjoy your premier vista point high up in the sky & have fun checking out what else is located around the Cathedral!



Get a sneak peak here

In the backend we also restructured the entire level loading system to work faster & more scalable! So if you are out there, keep an eye out for possible bugs and let us know if you end up in any weird places!

Happy exploring!