Space Rocks (WebVR)
Escape through space on stolen plasma engines while slinging photon bolts at deadly asteroids. How many can you vaporize? Put on your virtual reality headset and pick up your hand controllers. You’ll need them if you want to survive. Play Space Rocks now at https://spacerocks.moar.io
Space Rocks is a room-scale virtual reality space shooter game. And what VR system is this for? Oculus? Vive? Windows Mixed Reality? The answer is all of them. Space Rocks is a WebVR application and that means it runs right in your browser. There’s no store to sign into. Nothing to pay for. And nothing to download or install. If you’re lucky enough to have a virtual reality rig then all you need is a WebVR-capable browser. Good news: Your copy of Mozilla’s Firefox or Microsoft’s Edge already support WebVR. (Thank you, auto-updates!) And Google’s Chrome Canary browser also supports WebVR — with full support landing in regular desktop Chrome in the near future. (In Chrome Canary visit chrome://flags in the address bar, find the WebVR flag, and enable it.) Apple’s expressed interest in WebVR so it’s reasonable to hope Safari will also support WebVR soon.
It’s still early days for WebVR so rather than all devices working with all browsers — the true promise of WebVR — you’ll need to take a quick look at this compatibility matrix to make sure you’ve paired up your VR headset with a browser that supports it:
Curious about how I created this — and how you can make your own WebVR experiences? Space Rocks is built on Three.js and uses the VRController library to support VR hand controller input for an array of VR devices. I’ve open-sourced Space Rocks and made the codebase available on Github. It’s a quick experiment and I’m sure you’ll find some quirks to resolve so jump in and contribute to the fun:
Two years ago I tried room-scale virtual reality for the first time. I realized immediately that I would spend the next few years building exclusively for VR. As the Web has been central to my creative output for over two decades it was natural that I gravitated toward WebVR. In 2016 for my first “VR Anniversary” I launched Day & Night — a very early WebVR project for children and wonder-struck adults — and wrote about that here:
A few months later I created VRController with the good folks at Google’s Data Arts Team. VRController extends Three.js to explicitly support an array of 3DOF and 6DOF virtual reality hand controllers, and it implicitly supports any similar devices. (Both the upgraded version of Day & Night and Space Rocks use VRController.) You can test drive it, download it, contribute to the source code, and post issues here:
Just this past summer I worked on Dance Tonite, a WebVR music video for LCD Soundsystem’s single Tonite—a collaboration between the Data Arts Team, Studio Puckey, and Studio Moniker. It was by far the most complicated WebVR experience I’ve ever had a hand in. (Jonathan Puckey deserves a medal for his herculean effort in bringing this concept to life.) Dance along with other LCD Soundsystem fans right here—and for a rundown of the people and tech involved tap the question mark in the upper left-hand corner:
Over the past two years I’ve also worked on traditional native VR, of course. I created my company, Moar Technologies Corp, in part to facilitate some interesting native projects. Those stories will have to wait to be told—but I can say the Tilt Brush team at Google is full of wonderful folks and there’s a very talented illustrator in Los Angeles named Teek Mach that you should definitely keep an eye on! (But beware of VR companies from Miami…!)
So here we are at the tail-end of 2017. Moar Technologies Corp will continue into 2018, but in early January I’ll have some exciting news to share 😉. Please enjoy my 2nd VR Anniversary project, Space Rocks. And happy holidays!
