On Steam for the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD) is Realities, a tourism experience which is free to download. Created by realities.io the app is one of the few virtual reality (VR) titles to use the Granite SDK, an advanced texture streaming middleware which its developer Graphine has revealed.
The photorealistic environments are produced through a process called photogrammetry allowing the recreation of real environments for an immersive experience.
“The need to display photo-realistic content at the most detailed quality level, while keeping a solid very high frame rate is a requirement from all companies that want to create state-of-the art content for virtual reality. We are proud to support more and more companies like realities.io that use Granite to deliver extraordinary experiences to the consumers with unseen graphical fidelity.” affirms Aljosha Demeulemeester, Graphine’s CEO.
realities.io’s CEO Dominic Eskofier confirms: “With Realities, we put real, mesmerizing places 1:1 into Virtual Reality and make them fully explorable – at a quality level that we couldn’t achieve without Granite. Walking around in Realities’ unique environments is the closest thing to actually be at the places we capture – thanks to the great performance and extreme texture resolutions we get from Granite in Unreal Engine 4.”
For those that have been fortunate enough to receive their HTC Vive headsets already the app can be downloaded now. realities.io has also stated plans to expand support to other devices, although when and which headsets have yet to be revealed.
VRFocus will continue to report on all the latest VR tech news as details are released.
