Escape through space on stolen plasma engines while slinging photon bolts at deadly asteroids. How many can you blow apart? Put on your virtual reality headset and pick up your hand controllers. You’ll need them if you want to survive.
Play Space Rocks now at https://spacerocks.moar.io
And read more about Space Rocks on Stewart’s Medium post.
You’ll need a position-tracking virtual reality rig with two hand controllers, and a WebVR-capable browser. Right now in 2017 the most expensive part is the computer needed to run a room-scale VR rig, but take heart—by 2022 all of this hardware will be much cheaper. And the Web will still be free. In the meantime here’s what Space Rocks is tuned to run on:
Bring your senses of curiosity and wonder. VR is still new and exciting — don’t become jaded. (Also, if your headset isn’t detected right away try reloading the page. Your pioneer spirit is appreciated!)
The simplest way to fire this up on your own desktop machine is to start a simple Python server. Open up a command line prompt, navigate to wherever you’ve stored this code package, then type the following command depending on the version of Python you have installed.
Python 2: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
Python 3: py -m http.server 8000
In your browser you can now navigate to http://localhost:8000/ to see Space Rocks running locally. You can shutdown the local server by returning to the command line and hitting Control + C.
Space Rocks is a WebVR experiment created by Stewart Smith and brought to you by Moar Technologies Corp, a consultancy for emerging technology and strategy in Brooklyn, New York. Built with VRController for Three.js. Display typeface: Big Noodle Titling by James Arboghast for Sentinel Type. Body typeface: Roboto by Christian Robertson for Google.
Many thanks to everyone who has helped to make WebVR possible, from the hardware teams to the browser teams, to the framework developers, and everyone in between. And a very special thanks to Lyle, Ed, Dominic, and whoever else had a hand in making Atari’s Asteroids (1979) which was a childhood favorite of mine and an obvious influence here.
Copyright © Moar Technologies Corp 2017, 2018. All Rights Reserved. See license for details.