According to reports, the number of high-tech companies in Hainan province has increased fivefold since 2016 and reached almost 1,000 by March 2021 and regional authorities plan to help increase their number to more than 3,000 by 2025.
This week we travelled to Resort Software Community (RSC) to talk to one of those companies, Polar Bear Information Science & Technology Development (Hainan) Co., Ltd., who along with their partners PolyReality from Leipzig Germany are developing Finsterwald, a next generation, immersive virtual reality horror game based on European Dark Ages legends.
We spoke with Peter Stieglbauer CEO of PolyReality by phone and asked him what makes this game special?
“The protagonist is standing in the middle of a zombie attack and he is trying to shoot the zombies in a 360 circle” said Peter, “the idea is to put the player into high levels of stress, by generating the stress in the brain, not by showing direct horror elements but based on sound”.
According to gartner.com the biggest barrier to the wide adoption of immersive technologies is lack of good user experience design.
Peter agrees stating that, after the initial euphoria from players when big companies entered the arena the market grew slower than expected.
But he thinks that’s about to change, “The current growth of VR is undeniable, and the long awaited explosion of VR will definitely happen” he said.
Finsterwald is being developed in cooperation with historical museum consultants, German historians, theologists and psychologists along with award-winning sound technicians who aim to create fear before the player can even can see the horror visuals. You can check out Finsterwald’s Steam page here and if you’d like to support Finsterwald on Kickstarter check them out here.
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