Crytek and Basemark Accidentally Made the Most Spectacular Cinematic VR Short I’ve Ever Seen

You'll be able to see it for yourself this June

20

At GDC 2016 I saw an early version of VRScore, a virtual reality benchmarking program created in collaboration with Crytek and Basemark. To test PC hardware performance to ensure enough power for running VR experiences, Crytek created a real-time cinematic VR short called Sky Harbor which quite unexpectedly blew me away.

It started like hundreds of other VR experiences I’ve seen at trade shows past. Crytek’s booth had rows of PCs with attached Oculus Rift headsets for people to try. All of the systems except for one was showing the company’s new VR game The Climb; on the very end, one PC was running something different.

vrscore treak basemark vr latency testing (5)
See Also: Basemark Has a Dead Simple Solution to Precisely Measure VR Headset Latency

Built in collaboration between Crytek and Basemark, VRScore is a hardware benchmarking suite specifically tailored for virtual reality. Like most benchmarking programs VRScore includes a real-time scene that acts as a stress test to ensure your computer can handle the demands of rendering virtual reality experiences at 90 FPS.

At the booth was Basemark co-founders Tero Sarkkinen and Arto Routsalainen, who asked me if I wanted to take a look inside the Rift headset sitting there on the table and see a cinematic version of the stress test scene (the real version for testing will have a fixed view to ensure consistency from one test to the next). I said ‘sure, why not?’, expecting to see a short little little test scene running in CryEngine with some dynamic lights flying around, maybe a few translucent surfaces… the usual fare for graphical benchmarking. What I was about to experience however turned out to be the most spectacular cinematic VR short I’ve ever seen.

SEE ALSO
'Bulletstorm VR' Review – An Uglier & More Tedious Version of the Game You Love

The teaser we have above doesn’t really do the short justice. Luckily you’ll be able to see it for yourself when it launches with the VRScore benchmark in June (provided you’ve got a VR headset and the PC to run it).

Sky Harbor is the name and it was built in-house by Crytek, presumably using the just-released CryEngine 5, which the company says is improved for VR. The direction of Sky Harbor makes it clear that it was built from the ground up for virtual reality; it was a comfortable experience that still managed to move the viewer throughout some pretty awesome action.

Beyond the usual graphic polish that Crytek is known for, the experience does a great job of emphasizing action and massive scale—something which is appreciated far better through a VR headset than a computer monitor. I have seen plenty of good cinematic VR content up to this point, but nothing that has achieved the sort of spectacle I saw in Sky Harbor, which dropped me in media res into a convincing fiction where an epic battle was unfolding.

Sky Harbor was so impressive that I almost don’t believe it was made for the sole purpose of being a stress test for a VR benchmark, and I hope I’m right; it left off with a cliffhanger, but didn’t need to—I had already decided before the end that I wanted much, much more.

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. See here for more information.


Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Erroll

    This. More of this!

  • Fool

    “Accidentally”?

    • Sven Viking

      There they were, mashing random keys on their keyboards, and suddenly, this came out.

  • Mateusz

    June? By that time something else will become a standard for VR score testing :( :(

  • yag

    Great to see more and more VR stuff from Crytek (after their slow start).

  • Piotrek

    Rift? Vive? Both?

    • realtrisk

      The article says it was on Rift, but if it truly wants to be a benchmarking app, it better work on both, plus OSVR and anything else…

      • VRguy

        It does work on OSVR

  • yag

    Can’t wait for the first real-time VR feature film… (RT-VR films have huge advantages over 360° footages)

    It’s just a matter of time, we have already the hardware to run all kind of scenes, we “just” need a big enough high-end VR market (millions of VR PCs).

    Such advent would be great for the 2nd gen launch (I’m optimistic).

  • Mageoftheyear

    “which dropped me **in media res** into a convincing fiction”

    Should this be “immediately”?

    Great little article though, I’m really thrilled that Crytek are taking their foray into VR so seriously. I wish they’d haggle CIG over their VR support for Star Citizen! CIG need to begin implementation if only for themselves SOON.

    • Sky Nite

      “in media res” means “in the middle of things”. Basically, it means he started in the middle of the action.

      • Mageoftheyear

        Ah, thanks for that. ;)
        I rely on the crutch of italics in these instances.

      • Adrian Meredith

        its misspelled. It should be “in medias res”. media means something else entirely in Latin (the plural of medium)

  • polysix

    We needed Crytek fully on the VR train, thank god they have caught up and are promising to be full on with it as time goes on!

  • marcuskscott3

    Last Exile: The Game.

    Make It happen.

  • Buttsie

    Looks Sweet!

  • VRguy

    Also available (and demonstrated at GDC) on the OSVR HDK. OSVR now supported natively on CryEngine

  • MARKUSedge

    Even the emerging VR gurus seem to not understand where VR shines it seems. I wonder what other experiences are lurking in the dark presumably not worthy of showing off? Love the uncertainly and discovery of new tech. Such an exciting period of time to live in.

  • David Christian

    VRboxoffice.com whats new with VR cinema