Had a stressful day? You can now unwind with a butterfly-spotting immersive game from New Zealand.

Observing moths and butterflies in the Amazon rainforest over a five-day period; Watching the environment around you change through cycles of sunshine and rain, as the day turns into night, and cycles back into dawn.

Flutter VR aims to be quite meditative, helping users wind down at the end of a busy day
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If that doesn’t sound like the most thrilling virtual experience, it’s because it’s not meant to be. Rather, Flutter VR aims to be quite meditative, helping users wind down at the end of a busy day.

“Feedback we received from users is that they play our games to relax, so we decided to design the experience around taking a moment for yourself,” explains Emma Johansson, Creative Director at Runaway Play, the New Zealand-based studio behind the game.

Founded in 2010, her company started out as the games division of factual television production company Natural History New Zealand and previously developed casual games for Facebook and mobile around similar nature-based themes such as Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary, Flutter: Starlight and Splash: Ocean Sanctuary. This is, however, their first foray into VR, and Johansson is excited.

“We had to rethink the way we traditionally design a game and learn how to design for VR,” she says. “Because the VR market is at its infancy we felt that there was no right or wrong way to approach the production. No one is an expert in this field yet so it was really refreshing to be able to approach a game project with fresh wide eyes. This allowed us to be curious, dream big and take risks.”

But it was far from a smooth ride: Performance was a huge challenge according to Johansson, since the game takes place in a rainforest, the team wanted to create a very dense feel for the environment, but at the same time had to work with a very limited polycount, constantly going back to optimize the environment to look right while keeping an eye on running a steady high FPS (frames-per-second) rate.

“It was also important for us to make the world feel like it reacted to your presence and the Daydream controller allowed us to add the feeling of being able to reach out and touch that world,” she continues. “We made the environment change with weather and transitions from day to night. The behaviours of butterflies and moths are different depending on daytime or night-time and there is a Capybara living in the forest that reacts to your presence and actions. We wanted the player to feel like they existed within the world but were not fully controlling it.”

It became even more important that the mechanics made intuitive sense, and they found that user testing was extremely important even during the prototyping stage to see what made sense and what didn’t.

It’s all too easy for us as developers to design for the world we are accustomed to living in. It takes effort to go beyond that
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“We considered our audience’s lifestyle and thought hard about when and how they would play this game. We decided that we wanted Flutter VR to be a game that you can log in to at the end of the day, so we designed each day to take around 20-30 minutes to complete and after each day we give the player an option to logout and come back later or to keep playing.”

Accessibility was the backbone of the design process, with the team going out of their way to include often-overlooked groups of users. It is targeted at a female audience in particular, but was also tested in conjunction with rehabilitation organisation Southern Rehab, who helped to calibrate the game in terms of reducing motion sickness effects and increasing relaxation through the use of a soundtrack evoking ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response).

Accessibility was the backbone of the design process
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Runaway is an example of how diversity and gender equality in a studio can be successful
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Johansson is proud to be part of an all-female leadership team at one of New Zealand’s biggest studios, and believes diversity in the workforce translates into better and more inclusive content too:

“Runaway is an example of how diversity and gender equality in a studio can be successful and that’s something I’m really proud to be a part of,” she says.

“It’s all too easy for us as developers to design for the world we are accustomed to living in, in the way we are used to experiencing it. It takes effort to go beyond that, but we believe it’s worth it. Game audiences will benefit and grow, and VR as a medium will benefit and grow, too”

This article was originally published on VRScout

Flutter Through The Amazon In VR With This Google Daydream Game via @alicebonasio https://t.co/SjbWLmrlBd pic.twitter.com/G4UPBcW2q0

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 29, 2017

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to get a foothold in the growing Mixed Reality spectrum and enhance their brand strategy with immersive technologies. 

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Fluttering Through a Forest in Virtual Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

VR is so compelling because the experiences are incredibly intense. In a world so full of distraction, putting on that headset demands our full attention, and most of us just can’t cope with that for too long.

VR is so compelling because the experiences are incredibly intense
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But that’s something that a young Stockholm-based games studio is betting they can change with their newly released title, SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix. With an estimated 5 hours of VR gameplay, SVRVIVE is one of the longest VR experiences in the global market, and although it looks incredibly slick, it took them only 6 months to build.

With around 5 hours of gameplay SVRVIVE is one of the longest VR experiences around
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The game's teaser got over 100,000 views on Facebook in 24 hours
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The adventure puzzle gameplay is inspired by mystery game classics such as Myst, and the storyline follows a familiar premise (you explore the universe on a quest to recover a powerful object – the Deus Helix) where the player is abducted from Earth and has to join an alien agent workforce. Under the direction of the player’s commander and guide Nikodemus Salinger, the newly recruited Agent (that’s you) is sent to different parts of the universe in order to recover the missing parts of this Deus Helix device.

The adventure puzzle gameplay is inspired by mystery classics like Myst
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It’s all the brainchild of this cool Nordic trio pictured below: Entrepreneur Faviana Vangelius – shout-out where it’s due: always great to see a woman leading the way in the VR space – and game devs Hampus Granberg and Pontus Petterson.

The studio attracted $1.8 million investment in their first seed round
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Since starting the studio just six months ago in Faviana’s living room, they released a Beta version of the game back in August, which got fantastic traction with the gaming community (the teaser video alone reached over 100,000 views on Facebook within 24 hours) and was chosen as one of the best HTC Vive games of 2016 by PC advisor. After attracting an estimated 28% share of the global consumer market for the VIVE, the studio – perhaps unsurprisingly – went on to attract a record $1.8 million investment in their first seed round.

“To think we made this happen in just six months still feels a bit unreal to our team, but we hope the players will enjoy all the effort we put in,” says Vangelius “We wanted to build on what we think is the strongest feature of VR, and that’s immersiveness and exploration There will never be a repeating puzzle or environment in the game. Players must constantly explore their surroundings and challenge themselves to move forward.”

SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix retails for $24.99 and is currently exclusive to the HTC Vive, but there are plans to expand it to other headsets in the near future.

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Can we SVRVIVE Longer Virtual Reality Experiences? appeared first on Tech Trends.