I have always wondered what would it feel like to find myself in a free-fall, lost in space. From 2001: Space Odyssey to Gravity to upcoming Adrift, sci-fi media presented this scenario, often in first-person perspective, yet I have yet to feel like I truly experienced it.

In this short VR Experiment I decided to try and recreate the sensation – tumbling out of control in orbit of our home planet, Earth. Needless to say, Freefall is best experienced using high fidelity HMD (Head-Mounted Display) such as HTC Vive or Oculus Rift and headphones. GearVR is pretty good, too. You can download the high-quality video for local playback through a link at the bottom of this post.

If you’d rather watch the streaming version, make sure to set the video quality (gear icon) to 2K and use the eye icon to toggle between mono and stereoscopic views.

Unlike Prismatic, Freefall was a rather quick exercise – I wanted to see how Octane Render performs with extreme quality textures (source Earth maps were in 16K and above). I needed to test the compositing workflow for stereoscopic VR – mainly unwrapping equirectangular animations to cube maps, adding vfx and then re-wrapping.

Finally, I wanted to give the camera a continuous rotating motion on all three axes to determine the range of speeds that are acceptable for VR viewing. In the end I feel I found a sweet spot where the motion is quite disorienting, yet does not induce nausea.

Download for best quality

For best quality, I recommend viewing Freefall locally, using a dedicated app on your computer or mobile device. I had best experience using Virtual Desktop on Windows 10 with DK2 of Oculus Rift. Other popular players include Vrideo player on mobile or Kolor Eyes for both mobile and desktop. There is more information on watching stereoscopic VR in Prismatic: 360° VR Animation.

Freefall by QubaHQ (2K, Stereo 360, 420MB)

Download from Google Drive

Big thanks to Dominic from Littlstar for the amazing size/quality ratio encoding!

Needless to say, the download is offered for your personal enjoyment and does not authorize you to re-upload or re-publish it online or offline without prior written authorization.

Watch it online

Here are a few options for watching Freefall online. All should work on mobile and desktop.

Vrideo (2K Stereo and Mono)

http://www.vrideo.com/video-manager/videos/bgI8R8ma

Compatible with Oculus, GearVR, Google Cardboard

(2K Stereo and Mono) http://www.vrideo.com/video-manager/videos/bgI8R8ma Compatible with Oculus, GearVR, Google Cardboard Littlstar (2K Mono, with Stereo available really soon)

http://littlstar.com/videos/853ee5a7

Compatible with GearVR, Google Cardboard

(2K Mono, with Stereo available really soon) http://littlstar.com/videos/853ee5a7 Compatible with GearVR, Google Cardboard YouTube (4K Mono only)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb1bcavwna0

Compatible with Google Cardboard

(4K Mono only) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb1bcavwna0 Compatible with Google Cardboard Kolor Eyes (4K Mono only)

http://eyes.kolor.com/video/5dfbc76a629427fa1f1031cb0cd506ee

Compatible with Oculus, GearVR, Google Cardboard

Credits and Technical Details

Directed and animated by Quba Michalski

Audio design by Quba Michalski

Rendered in OTOY Octane Render

Edited and Composited in Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects

Satellite imagery by NASA Visible Earth

Rendered at 30fps and enhanced to 60fps via timewarping. Mastered in 2K^2 (2048x2048px) top-bottom equirectangular stereo.