Freefall is best experienced using high fidelity HMD (Head-Mounted Display) such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or GearVR. Google Cardboard offers a great entry-level budget option for anyone with a smartphone anyone.

You can download the high-quality video for local playback through a link below. If you’d rather watch the streaming version, make sure to set the video quality (gear icon) to 2K and use the eye icon to toggle between mono and stereoscopic views.

Unlike Prismatic, Freefall was a rather quick exercise – I wanted to see how Octane Render performs with extreme quality textures (source Earth maps were in 16K and above). I needed to test the compositing workflow for stereoscopic VR – mainly unwrapping equirectangular animations to cube maps, adding vfx and then re-wrapping.

Finally, I wanted to give the camera a continuous rotating motion on all three axes to determine the range of speeds that are acceptable for VR viewing. In the end I feel I found a sweet spot where the motion is quite disorienting, yet does not induce nausea.