This is the image I submitted, all the text is in Swedish but I have provided the translation below.

Top left:

This scenario is based on the co-op game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. The goal of the game is to work together to travel through space, save bunnies and defend against enemies and asteroids.

On the ship there are various stations that can be manned by any of the crew, as long as it’s not already occupied. Depending on what has to be done; steering, shooting, shielding or firing, players have to run to the specific station to perform the task, this as there are more stations than players.

During the journey you get access to upgrades and repairs for the ship. The further you get the bigger and scarier the enemies become.

Image text:

[Map]
See where in space you currently are, and if there are enemies nearby.

[Fuel storage]
Catch fuel while travelling and throw it towards the automatic hatch.

[Energy distribution]
Divert extra energy to a specific station for a short amount of time.

[Defense turret]
Use this to shoot down enemies.

[Shield]
Move the shield around to defend in the direction enemies come from.

[Navigation]
Use this station to control with which speed and in which direction the ship is moving through space.

[Upgrades]
Invest in your ship to improve the various systems, weapons and properties.

[Repair]
Open the hatch to repair the inner circuits of the ship.

Below image:

In the VR-version of the game your ship is basically a platform that floats around on a horizontal plane. Players can walk between stations or locomote virtually if your room is not large enough. The game is meant to be a room-scale experience but obviously it will not be possible for everyone.

The point of the game is that you man the ship with some friends, at least a total of two people should be in the crew. More people will obviously make it more manageable, but might also cause more enemies to spawn! Co-operation and co-ordination is key to success!

Bottom list of features:

• To navigate you pick out a remote from the center console, the ship travels in the direction you point with the remote. Just like in the 2D game the ship cannot rotate but only move in different directions, this to reduce the risk of simulator sickness.
• The various panels are operated by touching the controls.
• Defense turrets are controlled by grabbing the two handles and angling it towards what you want to shoot at. The display will show a zoomed in image of what you are targeting.
• Everyone can at any time catch floating fuel while the ship is moving through space, then throw it against the auto-accepting hatch that sucks it in.
• By defeating enemies you earn the credits you use for buying upgrades.
• Find hidden bonuses by shooting boxes placed in the environment, these can contain automatic repairs, nodes for the map or modifications for the ship. These modifications can change the properties of different stations of the ship, like how strong your engine is, how your shield is shaped or what your turrets fire for projectiles.
• Through energy distribution you can divert spare power to a specific station over half a minute to increase its’ performance. These stations would be weapons, engines or the shield. The panel is lit if there is power stored up to use for this temporary boost.
• If the crew has enough credits to upgrade anything the panel is lit, go here to improve the various properties of the ship.
• The shield can be rotated around the ship to defend in any direction, it will stay in the direction you leave it and protect against incoming attacks.

That is it! Even if it wasn’t a winning scenario I’d still like to experience something like this eventually. I do enjoy co-op games the most out of anything, and in VR it becomes close to normal human collaboration, which can make or break relationships I guess ;)

I’ve been doodling with a whole slew of random projects this year, but have as usual neglected to blog about things, mostly as I bring the project up to a functional level so I can use them but not with the polish with which I’d be comfortable to make anything public. For posterity I need to get some more content onto here though!

This is a pretty nice place, the apartment and area, but I know nobody here so it’s mixed emotions. I’m happy about finally having a place where I can stay as long as I pay while a bit sad that I have absolutely no prior contacts here. As soon as I have this place under control so I focus on other things I’ll try to explore the local organizations and clubs though.

But! While my life has been kind of crazy lately I did manage to produce a Christmas Card this year as well, or rather last year by now. Ideas had been flying around in my head for weeks but a concept matured in my mind the night before Christmas Eve, the day Sweden usually celebrates Christmas. Here is the final picture below.

Of course as this was the year when consumer virtual reality was re-introduced to the marketplace the main theme was kind of a given, especially considering it’s been my main hobby for more than four years by now. For some reason I cannot let go of this semi-dystopian line of thought when I think of virtual reality, perhaps as I am an incurable escapist I can imagine just what is to come. It does fit my current living situation though, so I guess it’s more true than one would expect.

My actual parents were nice enough to participate in this project, the top image was taken before the gifts were battled about and the bottom photo some time later in the evening. As I had people around I did have my younger brother as a photo assistant, that was a nice contrast to my otherwise entirely solo operations.

Hopefully it is obvious that there has been some photoshopping, both to make the top photo more colorful and to make the bottom photo less so. And a bit grimy. And for your information, I’m wearing the HTC Vive headset, and as a random detail if you read this far, yeah, I forgot to connect my headphones :P I still think it looks fine, luckily the cable ends outside the frame!

The most technical part was matching the second photo with the first one, both the posing and the editing, the perspective was a bit off and I had to digitally tilt my head to match the original. Overall I’m quite happy though, especially as I used no filters, flashes or other accessories taking the photographs. There’s a short clip of the evening process below.

While I was in VR watching myself trying to match up with the original picture my brother acted automatic shutter release. Such a welcome change indeed! I used Virtual Desktop to show a webpage that had a low opacity image on top of the webcam feed showing the LCD of my camera. It’s very similar to what I did in 2014, just a bit more refined as back then I displayed a raw stereo pair of the webcam directly in the headset.

Eyes
2015-11-30
Linework | Fillwork

You can travel from the left corner to the right of this structure in two different planes that are perpendicular to each other.

Arrow
2015-10-30
Linework | Fillwork

The bottom left corner of the frame connects horizontally to the top right corner.

Depending on if you look at the center or the top and bottom this figure is facing left or right.

Flower
2015-08-31
Linework | Fillwork

This constellation consists of four interwoven impossible tribars.

From the top three pillars turn into a solid wall and then to four pillars.

The center frame goes from jutting out to being a cutout without changing elevation.

As I recently did a photo project with the consumer Rift, I decided to use the Vive for my profile to kind of balance things out. I had already featured Oculus hardware for several years so it just seems fair, no? I might swap back to Oculus in a few years or perhaps even to a third brand!

For reference you can see my old and new profile picture next to each other to the left.

The concept itself is based on the camera mode that exists in the Vive headset, dubbed Tron-mode because of the traced outlines and blue color. This is basically the Tron-mode but reversed to show what’s inside the headset rather than outside!

I posted the resulting image to Reddit as I thought it was good enough to share and there I was asked to provide details on how I made it. As I have now written it up once already I figured I could just as well post it here too.

Photo shoot

1. I used my Panasonic Lumix G5 with a 20mm f1.7 lens. This was mounted on a rail with a webcam facing the back of it, this put what was on the camera LCD on my screen through using OBS Studio. The rail itself was mounted to a tripod.
2. On the PC I ran Virtual Desktop to see what happened on the camera screen while in VR. I used a wireless keyboard so I could press F4 to reset where my desktop was positioned in space, this so I could see my old profile picture to try and strike a similar pose.
3. To trigger exposures I connected my TriggerTrap dongle to the camera and mounted my phone which ran the TriggerTrap app to a video monopod. I set it to do time-lapse with an exposure every 10 seconds, this to give me time between shots to adjust. I also set the camera to three seconds of review to let me see the result.
4. I had my flash unit mounted on a separate tripod and I bounced the light off of the white ceiling. The flash was triggered via wireless FlashQ trigger units. The flash was set to manual mode and the second highest gain level.
5. On the camera I manually set the white balance, aperture, shutter speed and ISO but used single shot auto focus. With the focus area around my nose and eyes and at the same time the front of the headset I could get both shots I needed to be sharp. Manual settings were used to get as close to identical exposures as possible as the result is going to be a composite image.
6. When I thought I had gotten a good shot with the headset on I would try to stay as still as possible while quickly removing it so I had the same face and pose in the next shot. This was a process I had to repeat a number of times until I was happy with what I got, I actually swapped lenses a few times too. It’s easy to get a mismatch in head angle between the two exposures.

Photoshop

1. I lifted the shadows in the two selected RAW files and then put them in layers with the no-HMD one on top, setting its blending mode to Difference and matching position on my top row of teeth as they are fixed to my skull.
2. Then I made a smart object of the top layer which again is only my face. I applied Surface Blur, Find Edges and Invert. Then put the layer in a group, set blending mode of the group to Screen and applied a layer mask to remove everything that was outside the headset profile.
3. Finally put a new layer above the face layer in the same group and fill it with your tron-mode color of choice, set layer blending mode to Color.
4. The thumb graphic is just painted, blurred and with blending mode set to Overlay.

Virtual photo shoot

1. I had to get a background as I did the shoot against a boring dark roller blind. My tripod was still in the same position and angle so I mounted the Vive headset onto the rail to get the same angle of the virtual camera as the physical one I had used.
2. I booted up The Lab and after some experimentation (and a ton of crashes) I ended up taking a screenshot from the Valve demo room #1. I chose this room as it had similar lighting conditions to my actual room. There are yellow tinted reflected light on me as the photo was shot in a room with yellow walls and the demo room naturally had yellow tinted light.
3. I scaled up the screenshot and put it in the background, applied blur and brightened it up to match my photo. I extracted myself from my original background with a layer mask so the new background became visible then walked over the edges with a soft eraser to clean it up.

Final touches

1. Levels adjustment layer just below the tron-mode group, adjusted all three handles to my liking, it’s basically a more versatile contrast adjustment.
2. Cropped it to use as a profile picture. Export. Done.

To the left is an animated gif showing the major Photoshop steps, a bit simplified but it’s basically what is going on.

Additionally to the right, as a reference if anyone wants to recreate this, are all the Photoshop layers I ended up .

Phew, well, it took way longer than I expected both to do this and to write it up! I did all in all four different versions of this profile picture before reaching something I was enough satisfied with to use :P Not sure how many hours went into it but more than I want to think about ;)

From the top the center column vanishes and the two loops flip their orientation.