Herl Ray Marching Planet-Sized Terrain in VR

Herl is a demonstration of how ray marching can be used to render very large and complicated planet-sized environments in virtual reality. You can also experience it without a VR headest.

Download Here

 

That's really impressive. Can you tell us more about how it works?

EDIT: Whoops, I found a longer explanation via your link. Still super neat, though disappointing that the demo is Windows-only. Would this work on Mac? What about Oculus Quest/Go?

 

I don't own a Mac, so I did not build a Mac version because I had no way to test it before public release. If you or someone else wants to coordinate with me, I could build a Mac version for testing. It should work, as far as I know. It may not work well with an AMD GPU though (used in many Macs)... I'm waiting on hardware to investigate why AMD GPUs have problems.

Stand-alone headsets like Oculus Quest and Go don't have the GPU power necessary to render this at any reasonable framerate. I have created flythroughs of simple fractals (like a Menger sponge, or large fields of spheres) using my ray marching system, and they worked on Gear VR. I didn't pursue it much further because the terrain rendering was my primary objective.

 

Yeah, I was worried about that. Standalone VR headsets are underpowered by PC standards, and yet like all VR have very stringent framerate requirements. That makes them tough for an approach like this.

However, they'll keep getting stronger and faster, and maybe in a few years they'll be up to the task.

As for a Mac build, I'd be happy to test it for you (or grab your source and build it here, or whatever works best). Let's pursue that by PM. I have a big project due tomorrow, but will have a little more free time after that.