Eden River HD launches today in early-access form. While the game is pending some optimization updates before its full launch on Steam in late August, we got an early glimpse at this serene title which is being launched with Oculus Rift DK2 support. When we got our first look at Eden River HD just a few weeks before the Oculus Rift DK2 shipped, there was an unshakable thought in the back of my mind—"I can't wait to try this on the DK2." Eden River HD by indie VR studio Unello Design is one of only a handful of virtual reality experiences we've seen so far that's designed as a calming experience rather than an objective- or conflict-driven game. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but virtual reality's ability to immerse you can be utilized equally as well to bring calm to one's life as it can to bring action. In Eden River HD, you float slowly down a wide river in a serene setting. Beneath you is reflective water with a bed of round stones, above you is a lush canopy, and surrounding you is the sound of babbling water accompanied by a mellow original soundtrack composed by Unello Design's Aaron Lemke. Here's a taste of what we thought about Eden River HD on our first pass with the Oculus Rift DK1: Eden River HD is one of the most peaceful games I’ve ever played. It truly does feel like an escape from a busy world. On occasion while playing, I’ll take my focus off of the river and look at the pixels that make up the image in front of me. I find it amazing that those little dots and some vibrations from my headphones can inspire such peace and tranquility. Experiences like this are only going to become more powerful as resolution increases, and even more so with the advent of multiplayer capability in these types of games. Aside from Adventure mode, there’s also Endless mode, which runs you down a randomly generated riverscape with ambient river noise but no background music—perfect for pulling up your own peaceful playlist in the background. The original Eden River demo (Adventure and Endless mode) is also included with some graphical updates. Eden River HD also offers a more polished user experience thanks to a new menu system which lets you select between the game’s various modes. The entire game is controlled with nothing but head movements. At the beginning of the game, you find yourself unmoving in the river. Tilting your head left or right moves the view correspondingly, and you use your position to select the desired game mode. There’s a glowing orb that you look at to confirm the selection. As you hold your gaze on the orb, flower pedals spawn around it sequentially. If you keep your eyes on it long enough to complete the flower, your selection is confirmed. Continue Reading on Page 2... Now the game has been updated to work with the Oculus Rift DK2—specifically SDK 0.4.0—which includes the tremendously easy-to-use 'Direct HMD Access' mode, essentially a one button operation to get the game started on the DK2. Eden River HD's lush world pops even more thanks to the improved saturation of the DK2's display and everything is far sharper with the improved resolution. Positional tracking support makes it a more comfortable experience than ever before. Lemke has continued to optimize the user interface, making the operation of Eden River HD as easy as tilting your head. This means you can sit back and find your flow without searching for keys you can't see. The game's menu now includes several options for new environments which are teased as coming at a later date, all of which are expected to be just as peaceful and beautiful as the River. The original soundtrack has also seen further work with experimentation of additional instruments lead primarily with some beautiful pedal steel guitar sounds. While the early-access release of Eden River HD has some issues here and there—notably some odd overshooting on headtracking with quick head movements—Unello Design plans to deploy major optimization update next week to make sure all issues are sorted out ahead of the game's full launch on Steam in late August. On my system I found that moving my head slowly alleviated the issue in many cases. Fortunately, given the nature of Eden River HD's calm gameplay, quick head movements aren't a necessity. Unello Design elaborated today on the process of moving the game from Oculus SDK 0.3.2 to 0.4.0 to support the DK2 and the need for an earl-access release: In working to support DK2 we have been using the latest SDK from Oculus (v0.4.0). However there were a number of unexpected drawbacks that arose upon installing the new SDK, the first of which was the lack of Mac support. This meant we had to transfer the entire project over to Windows, which is not too difficult a task if you know what you are doing and have access to PCs, it’s just time-consuming. The main drawback however, was that currently you cannot run DK2 in the Unity editor. Anyone familiar with optimizing games in Unity knows that being able to tweak the game in the editor while monitoring the profiler is a crucial aspect of the optimization process. Over the past few days it became clear that we would not have the game fully optimized by our release date. So I want to emphasize, this is early-access, this is not the final game. The early-access version of Eden River HD can be purchased at Unello Design's website. Pre-order and early-access purchasers will receive Steam keys if desired and also get access to the Opera Nova DK2 demo, according to the developer.