Having experimented with shooting stereoscopic 360 video a few years ago, I’ve always wanted to make something in ‘real’ VR.  And so I recently created ‘The Raven’ an interactive gearVR tribute app to Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous poem.

If you’ve played around with a GearVR you’ve likely seen the Netflix app which allows you to view a virtual wall size tv in a luxurious mountain lodge. I found that once I strapped in and was fully consumed in watching a show there was a brilliant moment when I became entirely present in the virtual space. Somehow by paying full attention to the tv show I was more easily pulled into the reality of the immediate experience. It got me thinking about why there currently isn’t a similar VR experience for the Kindle and how much fun it might be to enhance the reading experience with different genre-based environments.

So that was my general line of thinking behind building this experience where the user is transported back to a 19th-century parlor in an armchair, next to a fire, to experience reading Edgar Allan Poe’s short poem ’The Raven’.  The fun part was that the content of the poem could then easily be brought into the experience with various props and environmental effects triggered as the reader flips through the pages.

While this app was a fairly quick kit-bashed concept demo and exploratory project for the Gear VR, it was not without its challenges. The GearVR is an extremely restrictive platform since it is running on a small mobile device with limited resources compared to desktop and console VR platforms. Achieving the target 60 FPS on the GearVR was not easy, and elements like fire (overlapping transparency) and flickering dynamic lights made it doubly so. I found that through baking all of my static meshes, applying lightmaps, and careful application of shaders and shared texture atlases I was able to come in just on budget for the required 60FPS.

is currently available as a free download on the Gear VR store in the concepts category. As of Dec 2017 it has over 41K installs.