Meta Quest's trippy fractal VR experience gets a price cut and new content
The visually stunning VR experience Recombination has received two new free experiences and is now sold at a lower price.
Recombination is an audiovisual VR album by Dutch fractal artist Julius Horsthuis. When it launched a year ago, the VR app offered eight experiences that take you on a journey through beautiful mathematical spaces.
Horsthuis is now celebrating the first anniversary of the album. The Anniversary Edition includes two new bonus tracks and is now priced at $25 instead of $35. The new VR experiences are
- Algebra of Awe feat. Mirage of Deep
- Geometric Properties feat. David Levy
The bonus tracks offer an additional 15 minutes of fractal landscapes, bringing Recombination to 10 tracks and 60 minutes of material. They're free to new and existing customers.
You can purchase Recombination for Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro in the App Lab. The VR experiences can be downloaded individually or as a whole, and are over 25GB in total. Streaming is not supported as it would degrade image quality.
Better on Quest 3, but not perfect
The individual experiences are pre-rendered 180-degree movies in 8K and 3D. They are therefore passive experiences without the possibility of interaction.
I watched the two new tracks on my Quest 3. Geometric Properties captivates with its alien-looking plant worlds, while Algebra of Awe takes you through beguilingly colorful cosmic halls and panoramas to percussive music and vocals. Since the latter experience involves both camera movement and rotation, I recommend watching Algebra of Awe lying down. Otherwise you might get dizzy.
When I reviewed Recombination a year ago, I felt that the VR experience on Quest 2 sometimes suffered from small stutters that detracted from the visual experience. Recombination runs better on Quest 3, but unfortunately the experience still suffers from the same problem here and there. Whether you notice this depends on how sensitive you are to frame rate issues.
Horsthuis may look into Vision Pro
Horsthuis' work can often be seen in exhibitions, for example in New York. In the future, he would like to focus on immersive installations, but he also has plans to continue his work in VR.
"As for VR - It's hard to actually find the correct audience for my work, since most Quest owners are expecting gaming and interactive entertainment, as opposed to passive, high resolution immersive content," Horsthuis tells MIXED.
"I might look into the Vision Pro, since perhaps that market is much more looking for the kinds of things that I create. However, that resolution would require an immense amount of rendering. But I'm really interested in looking at that as well.
But I'll keep creating content for Quest as well."
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