Titans of Space® is a short guided tour of our planets and a few stars in virtual reality. Works with Google Cardboard.
Important!
• Devices with a Mali-400 GPU are experiencing problems. (Includes some Samsung Galaxy S3 models and several others). Working on a fix if possible.
• A powerful modern phone will give you the best results, not only with smooth framerate but also headtracking latency. Additionally, shutting down other background tasks may help with performance. To give you an idea of what to expect, this experience runs at 50-60 FPS for the entire tour on a cool Nexus 5 running Android 4.4.3 and minimal background activity.
What's Google Cardboard?
• Cardboard is a lowcost, easytoget virtual reality viewer that transforms a phone into a basic VR headset. Learn more about Google Cardboard at g.co/cardboard. Buy or build your own at https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard.html.
Features
• Everything is toy-sized for easy comparison of scale -- all objects are shrunk down to 1 millionth of their actual size.
• The tour is carefully paired with a beautiful and dynamic soundtrack.
• All sizes are to scale (1:1000000), but distances between objects are not.
• Although the tour is on rails, you can enjoy full control over the pace and depth of the tour though a multitude of options.
• No form of input is necessary to experience the full tour, but a controller is recommended for comfort. The next best thing is to use a phone with NFC support with a Cardboard headset that has a magnetic switch.
• Your cockpit will display informational text at most tour stops. There are sometimes additional pages of information with extra detail. If you've been wanting to catch up on what's new in our Solar System, this is a great place to start!
• Translated into multiple languages. Some portions of the experience are still in English, and this is not the fault of the translator(s) as I just didn't have the text ready for them at the time.
• 50 minutes of narration / voiceover is now available as an add-on. To purchase this option, find the Narration panel in the green Options menu during the tour.
Add-Ons
• The Narration add-on is now available! Includes 50 minutes of narration for the entire tour. Male voice only for now, with a female voice coming soon. The narration is in English, and includes English subtitles as an option (off by default). To purchase this option, find the Narration panel in the green Options menu during the tour.
Some other things to know:
• Built using Cardboard SDK 0.4.5. This should improve app stability for some devices, and an experimental drift correction mode is now an option that you can select when starting up the app. Note that this drift correction is great for devices where the scene just keeps rotating and rotating, but if you already had a stable view it may make things worse with a "floaty" feel to the head tracking. Hopefully you will find a mode that suits you!
• Your view may occasionally jump suddenly -- I'm still not sure what is causing this, but I suspect it simply depends on the quality of the sensor data coming from your device. Will keep looking into this.
• If you ever need to reset your "forward direction", simply tilt your headset (with your phone in it) on its left or right side.
• Note that the tour isn't over yet after you've finished touring the Solar System.
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