Psyop jumps in the VR game with “Kismet”

Psyop launched its first wholly-owned VR experience today, “Kismet.” 

Powered by a deck of 22 hand-painted Tarot cards and an accurate real-time map of the solar system, Kismet is meant to be experienced daily, with unique outcomes every calendar day that are directly tied to not only the cards that you choose, but your individual birth date and the actual alignment of celestial bodies at the time of your reading.

https://youtu.be/BfewZxGSSQE

Kismet is a collection of three activities, including a past-present-future Tarot Card reading (“The Cards”), daily Astrology and Horoscope session (“The Stars”), and ancient board game Ur (“A Game of Wit”).

Going all in with real-time VR

Targeted at higher end VR systems like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, “Kismet” is a real-time VR experience that leverages Psyop’s long-standing reputation for building beautiful worlds and engaging characters while showing off its newer chops in interactive development.

Building the scene in Unreal

Building the scene in Unreal

To create Kismet, the team utilized tools including Autodesk’s Maya, Pixologic’s Zbrush, and Unreal Engine 4. Additional effects were created in SideFX’s Houdini.

Animating in Maya

Animating in Maya

Sculpting in ZBrush

Sculpting in ZBrush

The "Kismet" State Machine

The “Kismet” State Machine

“I’ve been obsessed with mechanical fortune telling machines ever since I was a child,” says David Chontos, Writer and Director.

“Virtual reality has given me a platform to not only create one of those machines entirely from my own imagination, but to step inside of it, and to invite the rest of the world inside with me.”

How to get “Kismet”

Kismet is now available for $6.99 on SteamVR for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. It will be on sale for $4.99 on SteamVR for the first week. Coming Soon to the Oculus Home.

“Kismet” Official Site

Screen captures

screenshot_kismet_001 screenshot_kismet_002 screenshot_kismet_003 screenshot_kismet_004 screenshot_kismet_005

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About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

2 Comments

animatedlane

The Kismet State machine: what tool / app is that? The lighting in the trailer looked nice.

Bramagola

All of it is done in unreal engine 4. What they call the state machine is nothing more than unreal engine blueprint code blocks.

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