Blog Download GE Neuro + UE4 360 Stereo Render Plugin Details ikrima on August 31, 2015 Byon

Ride The Mind Of A Musician

TLDR: Download @

DK2: https://share.oculus.com/app/neuro

Note: 0.6.01 Runtime Required!

We’re excited to publicly release our latest VR Experience: GE Neuro – a musical journey through the human brain.

Working with GE, we created an experience that draws you into the musical mind of Ladytron member and DJ, Reuben Wu. With a jolt of magical tech you shrink to nano scale and enter Ruben’s brain like a Tie-Fighter entering the Death Star. Reubens musically powered imagination is the warm up world which leads you into a beautiful visualization of his amygdala surrounded by neurological responses to thoughts, ideas, fears and memories.

Reuben composed an original score for the experience and stands before you in VR as a full CG digital double. You even get to peer into his actual brain via a volumetric MRI scan he was gracious enough to endure!

A little back story.

Arriving at the final idea for Neuro was quite the journey. Katrina Craigwell at GE gave us unlimited freedom to explore which direction to head so we started with a blank canvas and the most mysterious and complex organ known to man. To kick off our internal exploration GE set up several meetings with prominent Neuro Scientists, allowing us face to face discussions about the current neuro landscape as well as bounce around initial ideas with the experts. During this incubation stage we also took a field trip to Redbull’s headquarters in Los Angeles who have integrated neuro technologies into their athlete training programs. This experience was quite an eye opener and fueled one of our initial ideas of entering the mind of an athlete, to see through their eyes and journey into their brain during training all the way through to a big competition.

After several weeks of immersing ourselves into this infinitely complex world of the brain we found ourselves surrounded by ideas. It seemed the combination of VR with a subject as fascinating as the brain caused a creative chain reaction. We wanted to explore it all but we were gripped by the question, how do we tell one amazing immersive story about the brain with so many equally compelling minds to explore…athletes, creative/logical thinkers, a person in love, the mind of a person with alzheimer’s and on and on. We finally landed on the notion that this should be a VR series and this pilot episode would be more of an introduction to the brain, a compelling, beautiful journey through the mind of a musician, playing on the both the imagination as well as tangible science. We we’re hoping to strike the right balance of education and entertainment that would inspire the viewer to seek more.

Crossing the 90 fps chasm While in the midst of this, Roy Taylor ( @amd_roy ) approached us about creating a VR experience to showcase the power of the new R9 Fury X cards. We thought, well, what better way than to take this graphically demanding musical journey and showcase it on the Crescent Bay in full HD glory with a wide area of tracking. But there was only one problem: our experience was barely hitting 75 fps. Luckily, with the AMD provided UE4 integration of LiquidVR and the new R9 Fury X cards, we were able to hit low latency 90 fps on the 1440p Crescent Bay displays…while keeping the quality settings on high! The experience went on to debut at AMD’s keynote at E3 this year and more details to follow on where else you can see it. We’ll let the AMD guys break the news here. Special thanks to Timothy Lottes, Mitch Singer, Nick Whiting, & Nick Donaldson for the performance optimization help. UE4 Stereo 360 Movie Export Plugin Integrated Into UE4 For the developers out there, we finally released our stereo 360 plugin! It’s integrated into the main branch of unreal (courtesy of Nick Whiting!). We’ll be working on cleaning up the code a little and providing some documentation but for those that are anxious to dive in, here’s the specific commit: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/261eaa306f70da9e1dd76b22e86afce550a13f69#diff-edd59ba7277eedefca807781a99626e8 Future Plans: Launch Content We’re now back to working on original content! We’ve been prototyping and brainstorming some awesome ideas for the last two months in Paris on some cool stuff. Our goal is to have some new content that coincides with the major launch of the headsets next year. It’s too early to start talking about it but I can say that we’re pretty stoked! And yes, we are targeting both the Vive and the Oculus! Stay tuned for details. Cheers!

Ikrima & Cory P.S. Who’s coming to Oculus Connect?