OK, so - a rather unexpected prezzie for Friday!

Yep, it’s time for Strange Company to get back on the virtual reality bike, with a bunch of new stereo 360 degree scenes courtesy of Octane Render’s amazing stereo cubemaps.

If you have a GearVR or an Oculus Rift and haven’t checked these things out yet, they’re astonishing - they’re panoramic scenes, but with depth thanks to rendering in stereo.

I’ve been experimenting with this tech over the last few days, and I’ve rendered a few fresh panoramas for everyone to enjoy, as they’re quite thin on the ground.

They come from three of Strange Company’s recent or current film projects: one from the dark fantasy project Hateful Cliffs, one from the Minecraft-inspired Stone And Sorcery, and one from my “Ian Rankin meets Clive Barker” comic Carcosa:

Here’s the image pack for GearVR! On GearVR, you can view using the Panoramic Viewer that comes with the hardware. Drop the images into your Oculus\360Photos folder on your phone and you should be good to go.

And here’s the image pack for the Oculus Rift. On the Oculus Rift, your best bet is the phenomenal Virtual Desktop software. Put these in the Content\Environments folder under the main Virtual Desktop folder and you can then select them in the Virtual Desktop UI when you start it up.

Enjoy! I’m planning to use this tech for more storytelling purposes in future - even investigating video with it - so if you’re interested to hear more about that, ping me on Twitter or FB, or join the StrangeCo mailing list below.

And do let me know what you think, and if you’d be interested in seeing more panoramas like this from SC projects!