Kite & Lightning released an updated version of their 2014 demo experience Senza Peso on Steam and the Oculus Store. If you haven’t tried it, the download is free and certainly worth a viewing on either Rift and Vive.
The surreal journey down the river Styx is a fantastic sit-down demo VR experience with incredible music. The software was a go-to demo for Rift development kit owners and likely introduced a great many people to VR for the first time.
Senza Peso was shown at some of the earliest big VR meetups by Kite & Lightning before the startup took on some work-for-hire projects. That gave them the cash they needed to make a year-long pilgrimage to Paris for artistic exploration. Ikrima Elhassan and Cory Strassburger, the two co-founders, returned to Los Angeles this summer funded with $2.5 million and an idea to create an expansive multiplayer VR world centered around immortal babies with bad behavior.
Senza Peso, though, brought the co-founders a lot of early attention in the VR industry and featured some pioneering work using a mixture of captured performances set inside an environment developed with a game engine. All set to an enveloping soundtrack, even on a DK2 headset the experience made a strong case for the power of virtual reality. The experience features no interactivity and it is a bit like the It’s A Small World ride at Disneyland, but instead of a tour of different cultures you get to see different regions of the afterlife.
We highly recommend you give the free experience a try. It’s available now on Steam or Oculus.
