Rovio, the developer behind the mobile smash-hit Angry Birds, has created a virtual reality experience based on the popular game. The development studio showed off Angry Birds VR at the Rock in Rio festival this past weekend.
Shown running on Samsung’s Gear VR headset, Angry Birds VR appears to shift the franchise’s usual side-perfective to a view from behind the feathery protagonists. From the only screenshot released thus far, we can see white rings floating along the bird’s trajectory, with our best guess being that players will use their head to direct the bird through the rings on the way to the destination.
Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise is one of the smartphone world’s earliest smash-hits. The original game of the same name has between 100 million and 500 million installs on Android, according to the Google Play store. The entire franchise reportedly totals some 2 billion downloads across all platforms, as of early 2014.
VIP pass holders at last weekend’s Rock in Rio event in Las Vegas got to try the experience for themselves. Angry Birds VR apparently features landmarks from the event’s venue, so it isn’t clear whether or not this was a one-off promotional piece, or something that Rovio will pursue for widespread distribution. A little more than a year ago, Rovio put out an April Fool’s joke purporting that the company was developing an ‘Eagle Eye’ VR headset.
Should they be turning this into a full-fledged Gear VR title, Rovio will be following a similar path to Imangi Studios, who recently released a VR version of their mobile mega-hit Temple Run on Gear VR.
