Jump to the past of Gorky park

Gorky park is the most popular park in Moscow and in the whole Russia. 20.000 visitors attend park every day and 100.000 visitors every weekend.

In 2015 museum of park was opened & a lot of visitors attend it every day.

In 30`s of XX century a lot of people jumped from parachute tower in the park. It was one of the main park attractions.

Park creative team decided to give similar experience to visitors. But it was not possible to build so high building at this place. So we were asked to solve this problem in virtual reality.

Time term for this project was just 1 month! On the 1st of May park should open the new season & park`s museum. So we had to work very fast for finishing the project on time.

We decided to reconstruct whole park with tower. It was not a lot of references of tower, but fortunately geometry was not very complex. After Virtual architecture museum it was like peace of cake for us.

The main idea was: Show the history in the process of entertainment & show to spirit of this epoch.

Situation with other park areas was not so simple. We were living in archives a few weeks like bookworms & become highly qualified specialists in park`s history.

But the main question was about interactive experience and people emotions in the process of this jump. Fortunately we found very useful fragment from old movie "The private live of Peter Vinogradov," where he jumped from this tower. As we said before, this tower was very popular attraction in Moscow in 30`s & it was the important part of soviet mass culture.

God, give me patience!

As you know 3D modeling is always time consuming process. This time our team modeled 300 acres of territory full of buildings and attractions. You can see current state of territory below for understanding this challenge.

But it had done on time & you can see model below.

As always creating massive & dense forest in interactive graphics was a little trick. We solved this task using 3 different render techniques for foreground, background and middle. You can see the one of dozens tests on the image below.

3D model of tower than other territory was created much faster & used for production of tower layout in the museum.

Tower layout looked very promising & we were very happy. Park team was happy too.

For this project we used Oculus Rift DK2. It was the year 2015 & it was the best available headset on the market. But it was not very stable and we wrote a lot of code for workarounds of known problems.

We have made some tests with video 360 and compositing 3d objects in this footage. You saw this result in the intro movie on the top. Now we are planning how to do this work. It will improve level of realism in the project. 

Also it will be very nice to upgrade headset to Oculus Rift CV1. DK2 have worked a few year every day without critical errors & it was big surprise for us all.

And finally the small copy of the tower was built in real world.