138 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit

This new VR experience is called Homebound. Created by a veteran 3D artist promises to put you inside a crippled spacecraft, bound for a crash landing on earth and it features some of the most compelling visuals I’ve seen in a VR title to date.

There’s no doubt there’s a sizeable portion of our readership out there for whom travelling beyond Earth’s atmosphere into the vast beyond would make the perfect VR experience. But what if that experience also put you aboard a virtual, crippled spacecraft, hurtling back through that atmosphere, bound for earth and a collision of unquestionable finality? Yep, still piles of interest then …

Enter Homebound, the creation of one Wiktor Öhman, a nine year veteran 3D artist from the games industry and sole developer of Homebound, which Öhman describes as “a frantic VR Experience.” Built on Unreal Engine 4, Homebound is a VR experience which puts you through a series of catastrophic events beginning with you escaping a disintegrating mini-space station which is falling apart thanks to an unknown event. Your job, as you’re put through a series of increasingly hair-raising set pieces, is ‘just’ to survive.

What strikes you about Homebound‘s visuals is the sumptuous detail, with some stunning lighting to boot and a general level of production design and polish which seems entirely beyond a one-man project. Öhman works for Swedish company Quixel, who claim to be a leading light in the field of computer graphics tools, supplying companies like Tesla, ILM and (appropriately) NASA.

We asked Öhman what inspired him to take on such a mammoth development. “I’ve always been a huge sci-fi fan and I’ve been following SpaceX’s endeavours closely,” he says, “The whole environment started out with me wanting to create a SpaceX-styled environment, similar to the prototype Dragon V2 capsule.”

On that decision to work with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4: “While creating the environment I kept envisioning all these cool scenarios that could take place there, so I started looking into how [UE4] Blueprints worked in order to try these ideas out. I’d never used Blueprints or scripted before, so it was all new to me. This all happened around the same time as Unreal Engine 4 got better VR support, so I thought I’d give VR game development a go as well. It felt like a very natural thing to do as the environment is very high res with a lot of cool material definition going on. There was a lot of firsts and a lot to learn, but I’m incredibly impressed with how easy UE4 is to learn”