Facebook Artist Unveils Impressive Oculus Quest Experience ‘The Last Oasis’, Built in ‘Quill’

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Facebook Art Director Goro Fujita works at the company’s Social VR team, and while he’s typically occupied with creating modest, but fantastical “quillistrations” as a part of his daily regime using Facebook’s first-party art tool Quill (2017)Fujita today unveiled his latest work that he says helped him explore the possibility of bringing larger-scale Quill art to Oculus Quest.

Called The Last Oasis, the room-scale experience is decidedly much larger in size than his previous works, and takes the user through multiple rooms filled with finely hand-drawn characters. From the video (linked above and below), the experience runs the gamut of different emotions, spanning a sense of wonder felt by crawling through a low-hanging entrance into an aquarium brimming with fish, to the trepidation of walking across a rickety building ready to fall apart at the floorboards.

Here’s the synopsis of The Last Oasis in his own words:

It’s the year 2125. A man-made disaster has devastated much of the earth’s ecosystem. Numerous superstorms have made North America’s entire West Coast inhospitable. Ogini Orog, a brilliant scientist and one of the few survivors, has built himself a safe bunker using his wits to survive the hostile environment looking for artifacts in order to extract and save the last remains or nature. Explore each room to uncover clues.

 

Larger-scale experiences like The Last Oasis are something you’d be hard-pressed to truly enjoy with a wired headset, at least without sacrificing some of the freedom you might feel in exploring a new environment. To Fujita, it’s a crucial distinction that lets you make a more direct connection with the artist.

“For me, it was always a dream to dive into my own paintings, or dive into other people’s paintings,” says Fujita. “With Quest, you remove the wires, you become tetherless, which means you can  freely now move around the space.”

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Continuing: “Usually I create a painting, and I choose my compositions. This was more about how [to] design for space, and how [to] create different emotions in each space. I use different color language, different lighting, so when you dive into a new space, you feel different. It’s not just a painting anymore. You can actually send people into your mind, and I think that’s the most powerful thing for an artist—I could have never dreamt of doing [that].”

 

Like many VR art tools, Quill essentially represents a way for artists to create everything from standalone assets to larger works like The Last Oasis without having to master a game engine, allowing artists to use a VR headset and motion controllers to build the work entirely from the ground-up. Fujita says it took him only five days to build, done in collaboration with a small team of Facebook software engineers. That said, works created in Quill are certainly making their way to the company’s standalone headset, although the app itself hasn’t been confirmed as a Quest-compatible title yet—The Last Oasis was most likely created using an Oculus Rift and Touch controllers.

The Last Oasis is premiering at CTN Animation Expo through November 14th – 18th in Los Angeles. It’s not certain exactly where the work will be featured when Oculus Quest launches in Spring 2019, but you can be sure we’ll be looking out for it.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • jj

    sure would be nice if developers could work with the quest before hand like oculus teams get to do… I know we can use the rift in the mean time but to be relevant for the release you have to test it first.

    • cartweet

      There are developers with quest dev kits although I suspect you’ll need to show them something spectacular to get one. It also helps if you previously released a title on rift.

      • jj

        fb and oculus in-house devs have them, and i havent heard of anybody else getting one. unless under very very special conditions like being a studio receiving investments from oculus or fb.

        • jj

          yeah they had roughly 50 headsets sent out to people who applied but you could only apply if you were a studio they had already been working with. so basically they had to contact you first just to apply and then most still didnt get in. basically this is a move to ensure their own apps are on the top of the market for release, and any submitted after that have to fight their way up the established ranks of all fb/oculus apps… kinda cheap

          • cartweet

            There are quite a few devs with kits. Just recently Solfar devs made it known that they had quest kits as well. I know of a couple other smaller devs with quests but they’re all under NDAs. They’ve all previously released high quality content on the rift. Oculus is heavily curating content for the quest and unlike rift will not accept just any title or any port.

  • Ted Joseph

    Day one purchase for me. I can’t wait to be able to move around without continuously flipping the wire around, stepping on it, and running out of length even with my extension chords… GO OCULUS!

  • Xron

    Looks amazing

    • fuyou2

      Get your eyes checked dude, This looks fucking lame!!..

  • Foreign Devil

    It looks great! But it also demonstrates the limitations of “Quest” in that you have to use a “Rift” to create it.

    • As far as I know they are working on optimizing Quill to bring it to Quest without losing much quality so that premise won’t be true for too long I guess…

  • Well, it is hard to play this at home, where we don’t have the space to walk through different VR rooms, but for VR installations this looks amazing. Fujita is a genius

  • Mateusz Pawluczuk

    Goro Fujita is the best ^_^ I saw someone ask on his YT chanel “How much does this Quill cost?” probably thinking Rift is a dedicated hardware for artists, just like sketching tablets etc ;D Kinda blew my mind for a second. VR’s potential is immense.

  • JesuSaveSouls

    Let me know what you think.Its working in vr with vorpx.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTJ3WYIkNdk

  • Baldrickk

    The (physical) room they show is probably ideal for camera based inside-out tracking – high contrast dots on a dark background are easy to track.
    If they didn’t just create that to look good in promotional shots, then I wonder how good the tracking is in a “normal” style room with mostly plain walls?

    • jj

      right at first i thought it was lame like they were making it super easy to track for it to look great during demos, but really it wouldnt work at all if u didnt have those and normal rooms have contrast in them while warehouses dont. so it all makes sense