Sony’s God of War might not be playable in VR, but one fan has brought its iconic protagonist, Kratos, into headsets in a project worthy of the gods.
Reddit user d_cay recently shared the below video, which makes incredibly clever use of God of War’s newly-released Photo Mode, paired with photogrammetry. For those that don’t know, photogrammetry refers to taking hundreds or perhaps even thousands of pictures of an object and then using that information to rebuild the subject as a near-photorealistic 3D asset. You can already see it in use in apps like MasterWorks VR.
In the case of God of War, d_cay used the game’s Photo Mode, which allows you to freely manipulate the camera in a freeze frame to capture epic moments. As the video shows, they took hundreds of pictures of Kratos at every possible angle and then moved these files into Agisoft PhotoScan. Once pictures had been imported and additional calculations had been made, a convincing version of Kratos could be turned into a mesh and then imported into Unity. The result is a fully viewable 3D model of the angry god inside VR, as if he were standing right in front of you.
This isn’t Kratos’ first encounter with VR; back in 2014 at the reveal of PlayStation VR Sony itself showcased a demo of God of War III running inside VR, developed during its R&D testing. The new game also got a tie-in augmented reality app in recent weeks, too.
This is still a pretty innovative use of a technique we’d previously only thought could be used in the real world. Plenty of console games boast their own photo modes, so we’d love to see more scenes imported into VR.
