Interview with creators of Otherworldly

We’ve seen plenty of rollercoaster experiences for the Oculus Rift, but Otherworldly is easily the most abstract and surreal.

It’s a 360-degree video experience, rendered with vibrant colours and featuring a bizarre twisting track. Released on Oculus Share just one week ago, the main purpose of the playing this game is not to finish a main objective, but to enjoy the full variety of colors of its world. To find out more about this lucid rollercoaster ride, we met up with Kuba Matyka and Kamila Staszczyszyn, the developers and artists behind this indie VR game, in an interview exclusive for The Rift Arcade!

Tom: Hey Kuba! I see that you’ve been working on some earlier 3D projects, for instance Fafankula. How did the project come about?

Kuba: You know what Fafankula sounds like? Imagine how quickly a ‘natural evolution’ of our brand came after we realised it sounds almost exactly like this one Italian word… We started it in 2012 together with Kamila and focused on animation and motion design. After a year of hard work our first show-reel was so fresh, it was featured in Computer Arts magazine. We started experimenting with interactive works and about a year ago we became MELT. We always had a problem with categorizing our work, because our roles always exceeded beyond motion design studio. Animation is just a medium, one element that lets us create what we really love – the whole experience for our audience. So I guess we can call ourselves Visual Storytellers.

Tom: Tell us about the other projects that you’ve created – I see on your website that there are quite a few!

Kuba: We really get excited to experiment and try something new outside of our comfort zone, so many of our works are like milestones to us. When we look back we realise that we tackled many different kinds of experiences.

Membrane for example, was a private, tactile experience where viewer touched the man-sized touchscreen made of elastic fabric, so he could really felt it reacting with sounds and animations really close in front of him.

Then there was a huge 25m long and 4m high Wall of Wonders, where we played our 5K resolution animations that were designed for audience to take a break and amaze in the chill-out zone in front of this monumental display.

We loved the experience we had when working close with Heineken Global Design Team to build an experimental Lounge Bar of the Future and we were really honored to prepare an artwork for Adobe 2014 Creative Cloud premiere.

Then again, a year ago we discovered the thrill of bringing a spectacle to the really huge audience when we created and live performed a 3d projection mapping opening show for the Museum of Polish Jews that looked astonishing on a gigantic curvilinear wall that symbolised crossing the Read Sea. Oh man, I can go on and on about our stuff!

Tom: How different is it working on a virtual reality game, and how does it differ from your earlier experiences?

Kuba: The workflow is still a pain in the ass, with 4 times longer render times and not much control in compositing. Of course we tried real-time game engines like Unreal Engine 4, but that came with even more limitations. Now we have experience with all of that and we know that with every project we have to choose the workflow carefully for the best outcome. But workflow is the boring stuff and what really matters is how can VR improve on storytelling. How can we use the new medium to show more than a moving picture. Making transition from film or animation to VR is amazing. In one moment you have to consider that your audience can look all around them and that’s a lot of stuff to prepare for. We still don’t really know what works best and what just makes you sick because we don’t have decades of experience, but we’re getting there. Now is the best possible moment to help define a VR medium, so let’s experiment the hell out of it!

Tom: How did you came up with the idea of Otherworldly?

Kuba: It’s a funny story cause it evolved from our previous ‘ordinary’ animation. The basic concept was to make an animated Christmas card where the rollercoaster track was somewhere in the Christmas tree (that’s why we can still see some Christmas baubles in the sky) and at the end we flew away to see the whole tree in the Lunapark motion arts collective office. When our first Oculus DK1 arrived we felt the urge to try something of our own and we begun expanding our little rollercoaster beyond the closed frame of 16/9 screen. It looked really ridiculous when all the animations stopped just when they exited the original view and we had to build a lot of background stuff and create many more creatures to populate the world around you. It’s all animated with no account to physics, so you can’t really feel the ride like in the original famous Rift Coaster, but looking around all the weird and cute stuff makes you feel like in some kind of Pixar movie on acid.

Tom: Otherworldly looks like a showreel of your skill. Are you going to continue developing it or start a new project?

Kuba: I think it’s most definitely not a showreel of our skills. It’s more like a little ad for our studio screaming ‘Hey! Virtual Reality is a freaking fact, and we’re having a blast creating it!’. It’s done as it is. We can show it on youtube to give a glimps of our work and the kids love it. We’re now focusing on 2 awesome VR projects. One is commercial and mysterious and the other’s a close collaboration with electonic music duo RYSY to create a VR music video to rule them all (while there’s still not so much of a competition. It’s really hard to choose a passion project to work on for VR.

Tom: What are the plans of the Melt for the future?

Kuba: In September we’re opening a showroom in Warsaw allowing everyone to experience VR in the perfect conditions for the first time and showcase our works. We want to show everyone that VR is not only destined to be in the homes of gamers and enthusiasts and it’s marketing power is beyond architectural visualisations. We belive that with an artistic touch, lots of experiments and a pinch of awesomeness we can create a medium full of amazing experiences for everyone.