Director Jon Favreau’s first VR app is half game, half movie, and only on the Vive
Gnomes and Goblins is being developed exclusively for HTC’s Vive VR system at this point.
“We made a decision to only port to platforms that have the same level of sophistication,” Favreau told Digital Trends. “So we’re missing out on a larger potential audience, but we’re able to push the edge of what the technology has to offer, which is what’s more interesting to us right now.”
What separates this fantasy world from so many others are its inhabitants, which react directly with the user in ways that traditional Hollywood entertainment simply can’t.
That’s part of the challenge for Favreau and Wevr CEO Neville Spiteri, who’s working with the director on the project as part of a 10-man team that includes Oscar-winner Andy Jones (Avatar) and Jake Rowell, who developed the Call of Duty games at Infinity Ward for 5 years.
“We digitally built these characters from scratch with the AI and animation work being developed hand-in-hand,” Spiteri told Digital Trends. “There are layers of key-frame animation, but most is procedural animation derived by a complex AI system.”
Spiteri said Gnomes and Goblins borrows from both the storytelling of filmmaking and the interactivity of video games.
“Part of what’s important for this next wave of VR is rewarding the end user for coming back and re-engaging with the content,” Favreau said. “I’ve noticed that, with a lot of VR experiences, it’s a wonderful thing to experience and maybe I’ll go through it a few times to really understand everything that’s been laid in there, and then I’ll seem to share it with other people who’ve never done it before, and then you leave it on the shelf. You may revisit it later, but unless it’s been updated, you tend to want to look for new experiences.”
As much as the visual design and the task of building believable characters were important in an effort to bring this lucid-dreamlike world to life, Favreau says the team also put a lot of focus on audio to not only help guide people through the experience, but also to make it more immersive.
With Gnomes and Goblins, where a tremendous amount of effort was put into the sound design, we find that in the first time through the experience many people miss a lot of what we had made in there.”
With advances in virtual reality across multiple platforms, including Facebook’s upcoming Oculus Touch, PlayStation VR, and the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 10 mixed reality headsets in 2017, Gnomes and Goblins may well be positioned to expand its footprint down the road.
You can get a first look at Gnomes and Goblins at the Steam store now.
See the full story here; http://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/jon-favreau-explains-why-his-vr-experience-is-vive-only/