This is the full text of Graphine's 24/11/2016 press release.

 

Minority Media and Graphine partner to bring photorealistic graphics to mobile VR in their Google Daydream's title Locked In.

Graphine® announces today that they have teamed up with the Canadian VR group Minority Media to bring yet unseen photorealistic graphics to Locked In, which is an exclusive Daydream multiplayer VR experience with a high degree of immersion.

“Not only did the people of Minority Media want to develop innovative and compelling gameplay on Daydream, they also wanted cutting-edge graphics to create the highest possible level of immersion” says Graphine’s CEO, Aljosha Demeulemeester. “Mobile is a challenging platform for high end graphics. We are excited to partner with Minority and apply our years of graphics optimization expertise to their project.”

Locked In is developed by Minority Media using Unity 3D. Together with Minority Media, Graphine is now porting its texture streaming plugin for Unity to Android to handle large texture data sets specifically for mobile VR applications. To reach photorealistic graphics quality for Locked In, Minority Media is using a 3D scanning technique called photogrammetry. Capturing existing environments using this method results in highly detailed textures with very high resolutions. This requires a very efficient streaming system to prevent high memory usage and performance issues.

“Achieving the level of realism that we envision for our title would only be possible with Granite SDK.” says Alfredo Chaves, Executive Producer at Minority Media. “Being on mobile with the high quality bar we are setting can be achieved with great partners like Graphine”.

Minority Media first success was indie title Papo & Yo and they were among the first companies to release a VR experience for the Oculus Rift when it was released last Spring: Time Machine, available on Steam VR.

Granite for Unity for mobile will be available to selected Granite users by the end of 2016.