nDreams, the company behind this year’s VR intriguing adventure title The Assembly, have announced a new project which offers an altogether different experience. Perfect is a transportative, relaxation experience which aims to whisk your mind away to beautiful locations in order to escape the daily grind.
One of the most potent promise of VR is for it to give creators the ability to shift a person’s mood or state of mind completely by mentally transporting them somewhere other than their physical location. We’ve seen good examples through the gestation of this latest generation of VR already, with company’s like Cubicle Ninjas and their Guided Meditation and Unello Design with Eden River proving that experiences such as these may well form an important part of the VR content line up as it becomes more mainstream.
Now nDreams – the company best known in VR circles for the excellent early release VR title The Assembly (which we awarded 4.2/5 earlier this year) – is dipping their toe in the relaxation experience genre too, with a newly announced project called ‘Perfect’.
“We are constantly bombarded by emails, texts, IMs, advertisements and alarms. Technology makes us available 24/7, and that leaves little time to sit back, breathe deeply and recharge away from the chaos. Perfect provides beautiful virtual locations to escape to and unwind. Seeing the beauty of the Northern Lights in VR makes an ideal first VR experience ” said Patrick O’Luanaigh, CEO nDreams. Sentiments I suspect many of you reading this would relate to.
The trailer certainly depicts some appealing environments, with idyllic beach-side locations, mountaintop vistas and winter snow-scapes shown. It’ll be interesting to see how effectively Perfect, with its production design angled towards realism, fairs in mental immersion. Environments designed to be realistic don’t work as well in VR thanks to ‘uncanny valley’ syndrome, where the closer you strive for realism the more jarring it can be to the human brain. That said, the title seems to be contain environment devoid of other humans, which that problem can be felt most pervasively and from what we can see, Perfect‘s scenes do seem plenty detailed and enticing enough to us at first glance.
Releasing in the PlayStation Store for PSVR in the US on December 13th and in Europe on the 20th the title will follow soon after for PC VR headsets HTC Vive and Oculus Rift on the 16th. Perfect is priced at $9.99 / €9.99 / £7.99 on all platforms.