Astonished By Design

Hi. My name is Stephen Palmer and I work in an IT support company in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my limited free time, I play around with things, which is currently Unreal Engine 4 and music composition as well a finding time to play actual games. One thing over recent years that I have started to wonder and attempt to resolve, is the idea of losing the feeling of first person cameras just being hovering cameras which simply pan and move as if they were just operated by camera controllers. There is a lack of feeling that the view is not eye and head movement but just eyes stuck in the forward looking position whilst the head is moved by the player. Many years ago I tested an idea out in Macromedia Director which was to base the users direct control of the eyes rather than the head and then the head tracks to follow the eyes direction. This subtle but important difference gives the viewer different information and creates a different "picture" of the environment. The "eyes" are attached, child to the head so their 3D position is effected and rotation compensated for as the head rotates automatically to realign with the eyes, as in real life.

With the introduction of VR, the idea of being able to "look around" objects is now present to some degree although eye movement is still not easy to deal with using a VR headset. Without the VR head and using the conventional controller to viewport movement realty removes the immersion in the environment.

As I said, this is subtle and is hard to demonstrate with just a video, however I do have some older demos including the original Director one and early UE4 based version on YouTube. I have been working since those videos to deal with less "drift" however I do not want to show them on YouTube or such at this time. What I am looking for is to try to contact developers who may be able to develop this idea. A build of an Unreal Engine demo is available for testing.

Thanks for your time. I have a site hosted on www.astonishedbydesign.com which may seem a bit formal but I guarantee you that is just for show and I'm only trying to get this idea out there if possible.

I have linked to a post on Giantbomb's forums, which I used to try to get the idea out which is almost three years old now. I brings up good points as it is a hard idea to demonstrate.

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/8-years-on-1484618/

Stephen