Immersive VR Education approached Make Real looking to port their Apollo 11 VR experience from Oculus Rift (PC VR) to the Samsung Gear VR (mobile VR) platform, to take the narrative and immersive experiences to wider audiences.
Being an educational application experience, IVRE wanted to widen the potential audience for the Apollo 11 VR experience into schools and colleges, as well as the larger mobile VR marketplace amongst consumers.
Originally the experience was developed for PC VR systems to be ported to support Samsung Gear VR mobile platform, compatible with Samsung Galaxy S6+ mobile phone devices. Make Real was granted access to the as-yet-unreleased GearVR input controller by Oculus to incorporate into the development. Once the mobile VR version of the application was complete, Make Real then carried out further ports for IVRE to the Google Daydream View and Oculus Go platforms.
The original PC VR project was completed by a mixed team of internal and outsource freelance developers. Make Real’s first build task was to take the original source code package and prepare it for mobile VR development by our own internal team. This involved a considerable amount of optimisations required to maintain framerates on mobile devices.
The next challenge was to redesign all the menus and interactions for the interactive component, originally designed for gamepad input, to feel usable and compatible with the comparatively limited capabilities of either the Samsung Gear VR touchpad or the 3DoF input controller that now ships with that headset or the Google Daydream View headset by default. This required a considerable amount of experimentation and prototyping since, at the time, the 3DoF controllers had only just become available to VR developers at the time.
Apollo 11 Mobile VR was submitted to the store in time for a wide-scale educational VR experiences promotion by Oculus for Gear VR.
Apollo 11 Mobile VR has been included in the Top VR Education Experiences list by the Head of VR Education at Oculus.
Apollo 11 Mobile VR has received over 450 reviews on the Oculus app store with an average rating of 4/5
The original developers of Apollo 11 VR have commented that they are amazed that the mobile experience feels 1:1 with the full VR version
We’re always happy to talk to you about how immersive technologies can engage your employees and customers. If you have a learning objective in mind, or simply want to know more about emerging technologies like VR, AR, or AI, send us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.