The Problem with Cameras

Cameras, cameras, cameras… – Regular third person cameras are always looking down at the character. Normally, this has several advantages. The character is the focal point, they can always been seen, and the player can still make out a good amount of the world. If you think of a regular sphere world and you put a person on it and tell them to look at the horizon, they are going to be looking in downward direction. So, with a regular third person camera you get both, the ability to never lose sight of your character yet still see the horizon. Its all happy go lucky until your world gets turned inside out… (queue dramatic music).

The Horizon is the problem – This however, isn’t the case in an inverted world. After playing around for a bit it becomes apparent that the horizon is completely out of wack. Instead of being down or at the very least perfectly horizontal to the player, the horizon in the player eyes is about half way up the hemisphere they are facing. This creates an extremely strong desire to constantly look up. This causes all sorts of problems, the camera is either colliding through the ground or at the very least the player is only ever looking at their own rear end. Even in the most perfectly aligned or offset camera the player can end up entirely blocking their own view.

The Rift to the Rescue – After messing around with the Oculus Rift it becomes apparent it makes it far easier to see where you are going. The default unity camera setup for the rift is set to a self pivoting camera. This means instead of the camera rotating around the player like the image above, it pivots about its own center point. This makes viewing the inverted world far easier and with minimal focal loss on the player character. You do however run into problems with the player losing sight of their own character if they are looking too far up. The camera setup also limits the players ability to look down at their character, as looking down only pivots to look at the ground.

The Combo – Hopefully a combination of these two will sort things out…