Virtual Desktop added a new environment from BRINK Traveler, bringing a stunning 3D capture of Iceland’s Landmannalaugar to Guy Godin’s popular VR PC streaming app.
BRINK Traveler brings real-world destinations into VR as explorable 3D environments captured on location by developer BRINK XR. Unlike 360-degree photos and videos that limit users to a fixed viewpoint, BRINK’s locations let you move around a small area with six degrees of freedom, giving a better sense of their scale and depth.
Virtual Desktop lets VR headset owners access their computers from inside a headset, stream PC VR games, watch media, and use virtual screens within a choice of immersive environments. Its latest update adds BRINK’s Iceland Riverbed to those surroundings.
I spent some time in the new environment before speaking with BRINK XR co-founder Akin Bilgic, who told me the collaboration grew out of something the three-person studio has wanted to do for years.
From BRINK Traveler To Your Virtual Home
When BRINK Traveler launched on Quest in 2021, it came with a bonus Quest home environment based on one of its locations. Bilgic says the response convinced the team there was an opportunity to do more.
“We’ve wanted to do more,” Bilgic told me. “These locations are all perfect. It’s like the desktop wallpaper of VR.”
BRINK continued talking with Meta about bringing more of its locations to Quest home environments, but Bilgic says those efforts eventually stalled as Meta’s priorities shifted.
The team explored other possibilities before Bilgic eventually approached Godin about bringing one of BRINK’s locations to Virtual Desktop.
“There’s a lot of Virtual Desktop users,” Bilgic said, noting his respect for an app that has remained popular despite years of competing alternatives. “That app has stood the test of time.”
There was one problem. Getting a BRINK environment running inside Virtual Desktop wasn’t as simple as moving it from one app to another.
Making Room For Virtual Desktop
BRINK’s environments already push standalone hardware hard. Bilgic says roughly 90% of the team’s work involves optimizing the experience to run on VR headsets, something BRINK has been wrestling with since shifting its original PC-focused project to the first Quest.
“When you’re in our locations in our app, the Quest is redlined,” Bilgic said. “It’s using all the resources.”
Virtual Desktop can’t give an environment that luxury.
Virtual Desktop still needs resources to handle PC streaming, virtual displays and PC VR gaming while rendering the environment around the user. Bilgic pointed to a demonstration of the new environment showing three PC monitors at once, with Netflix, Steam and Discord running across them.
“There’s a lot going on,” Bilgic said. “If you had shown that to somebody like 10 years ago at Oculus, they would just be like, ‘What are you talking about?'”
BRINK therefore had to create a more heavily optimized version of its Iceland capture.
Iceland Riverbed was particularly well suited to that process. Bilgic said its relatively flat topography made it a good fit for a Virtual Desktop environment, where users aren’t expected to explore the same five-meter radius available in BRINK Traveler.
“It was definitely a process of pushing what we could do visually, but also giving as much headroom as possible for Virtual Desktop to do its thing,” Bilgic said.
The differences aren’t necessarily obvious when you first put on the headset.
BRINK Traveler gives users roughly a five-meter radius to move around each location, which means the captured terrain around you has to remain detailed as you explore it. A Virtual Desktop environment is designed around a much more stationary experience.
That gave BRINK somewhere to save resources.
Bilgic says that standing in the center of the Iceland environment, the Virtual Desktop and BRINK Traveler versions should ideally look the same. Walk several meters away from that position, however, and the differences become more apparent. Ground that remains sharp in BRINK Traveler can become blurry or distorted in the Virtual Desktop version.
Selecting the new Iceland Riverbed environment in Virtual Desktop.
BRINK could therefore reduce detail in areas a Virtual Desktop user isn’t expected to explore while preserving the view around their workspace.
Having tried the environment myself, that compromise isn’t apparent from where you’re intended to use it. The mountains still have the depth and scale I associate with BRINK Traveler, except now they’re surrounding my virtual workspace instead of being the destination itself.
An Idea That Goes Back To Oculus Story Studio
Bilgic’s interest in capturing real-world places for VR goes back to his time at Oculus Story Studio, the experimental VR filmmaking team behind Lost, Henry and Dear Angelica. Story Studio explored how placing viewers inside an experience could change the way stories were told.
While working there around a decade ago, Bilgic began experimenting with photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction in his spare time.
“What is the VR equivalent of photography?” Bilgic recalled asking himself.
His early experiments involved scanning places he visited, reconstructing them in 3D and viewing them through a headset. Photographs of the same places couldn’t give him the sense of scale he experienced while standing there.
“It was kind of this like, ‘Whoa, holy crap, it’s like a teleporter device,'” Bilgic recalled.
After Oculus closed Story Studio in 2017, Bilgic chose to pursue the idea that eventually became BRINK Traveler.
Nearly a decade later, the Virtual Desktop collaboration puts one of those real-world captures to a different use, turning a destination into an immersive space for working, gaming, browsing or watching media on virtual screens.
More Environments Could Follow
Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin told UploadVR that BRINK approached him about bringing its environments to Virtual Desktop after receiving numerous requests from users.
“We’ve had to do some back and forth testing the limits of what was possible with today’s headsets (in terms of texture resolutions) and also where to focus more details in the environment,” Godin wrote.
That testing ultimately produced the more heavily optimized version Bilgic described, concentrating detail where Virtual Desktop users are most likely to see it while leaving resources available for the app itself.
Iceland Riverbed may not be the last BRINK location to make the jump.
“We’d be happy to bring more environments from BRINK in the future or from other apps who reach out to us,” Godin said. “Always open to collaborations like this one.”
