This blog is the brainchild of a few estonian VR developers (see below) who met recently in Tallinn at the Night of Games (MängudeÖÖ). After a great evening of networking and Oculus demo sessions it was clear that the estonian VR scene needs a proper home. And so EEVR was established. This site will do its best to keep up with all the local VR-related news and happenings. This might include some new tech gadgetry from a near-by startup, a game demo from an unknown developer or a scientific study from one of our universities. Since not everyone in the world speaks estonian language though, this blog shall contain mostly english-compatible material.
First, a quick review of VR-related content from the Night of Games event. Mario “Zuurik” Saarik entertained the crowd with some well-known demos, including Black Hat Oculus, Lava Inc, Dreadhalls, Pixelrift and a nasty surprise (which was of course Alien: Isolation). Some were presenting their own work, like a western-style bar shoot-out called “Better than life” (GitHub). The guests also had a wonderful opportunity for a quick haircut thanks to Erkki Trummal and his “Guillotine Simulator” (the most famous estonian VR experience to date?). Another big surprise was “BMX Ride“, a VR-enabled bike game, that apparently is also developed right here in Estonia by Rando Tkatsenko. Stay tuned for an in-depth review.
Further back you could see Filipp Keks putting people through their paces, literally. He was showing a simple survival game, where you run through a sci-fi tunnel. The really interestin bit was the running – this was achieved not via a controller, but with actual running in one spot. Filipp’s program then read out the vertical movement of the Rift IR LEDs and fed that info to the game as forward motion. For such a simple hack it worked amazingly well. Although a few people managed to hit the wall while running. Overall a great event with tons of content, props to the organizers at level1.ee!
What next? Our FB community is live and we are in the process of organizing EEVRs first meet-up for devs and other interested parties.
Date: 28th november.
Place: Tallinn, Estonia.
Schedule: Some presentations, some demostrations and the viewing of the first Virtual Reality Awards (submission deadline for your creation is november 9th!).
About the authors:
Mario “Zuurik” Saarik is a gamer and hardware engineer with too much ideas in his head. Fortunatelly he also knows how to make them a reality.
Madis “Mad” Vasser (MadVR) is a psychology MA with a keen interest in using VR for experimental research and non-gaming purposes.
