I have figured out how to get binocular screenshots off my Oculus Quest 2, and make them into rectilinear stereopairs! Here’s a batch, in addition to some 3D sequential hyperstereos taken in-game. All the parallel-view stereopairs here should be viewable on Quest, by the way!
These are all scenes from the Safe House, the ‘home base’ of Apex Construct, but if you’ve played the game, most of these viewpoints may seem strange to you…and that’s because, à la the title, I broke Apex Construct and found out how to go out-of-bounds, and explore where clearly the player was not meant to be! Where I’ve gone, I’ve seen missing building textures, floating trees and rocks, transparent walls, disappearing ceilings, objects that blink on and off, and more.
The key to this out-of-bounds VR urbex, as it were, is the game’s teleportation system. To avoid motion sickness, you push a control stick in a certain direction, and an orange line emanates from your robotic hand; when that line alights on certain nearby surfaces, it glows blue and produces a funky halo (the 2nd pic), and when you let go of the stick, you instantly teleport to the spot marked by the halo.
Now normally, when you wave your hand around, you find that you can’t teleport on top of buildings, or through skylights, or over walls, etc.: those surface are too high, too far away, or in some cases, I suspect marked as verboten by the designers, such as piles of rocks. Generally, these inaccessible surfaces combine to form a sort of 3D boundary, which keeps the player contained in a certain area.
But sometimes, there are cracks in this boundary, and you can squeeze through them :) And once you get through one hole in the boundary, often you are then completely free to explore widely, since the tops of buildings, signs, rocks, grass, and other areas are often teleport-accessible. An example in the Safe House: to the left of the upgrade machine, there are some computer racks, and you can teleport on top of those (3rd pic). Once there, if you move as close to the upgrade machine as you can, you can teleport up to a pipe along the left wall (4th pic is after that teleport). From there, you can teleport out the window!
The 5th and 6th pics show the beautiful floating scenery you can see outside (unfortunately, you can’t teleport further onto the rocks). The first pic is a cha-cha hyperstereo, with better depth to appreciate the scene, and the second is a direct screencap that’s a bit shallow, but may look better when viewed on the Quest. The next shot is looking down through a skylight into the bedroom, and the following two show the broken tiles as seen from the outer building’s roof. The latter shots were taken from the positions marked in the final pics by the blue lamp and box (bit hard to see), which I carried up there and left next to the air duct.
Stay tuned for some great 3D scenes from other levels of Apex Construct, as well as more out-of-bounds shots. Eventually, I’ll post some 3D stereovideos showing how to reach some of the best spots :)
Parallel stereopair downloads for VR viewers: 01 / 02 / 03 / 04 / 05 / 06 / 07 / 08 / 09 / 10 / 11
TAGS: urbex; VR > Oculus Quest, VR games > Apex Construct
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