Well, Damn, ‘Everest VR’ Is Looking Sweet

You know what us studly Ego-men are like. We're fearless, badass renegades riding straight into the mouth of hell on grandma's mobility scooter. We fear nothing and no-one, we're unstoppable, and we only call our mothers eight times a day. We can achieve any goddamn thing we set our minds to.

The trouble with that last part, though, is that a lot of things are too much darn hassle. You know the kinds of things people put on to-do-before-you-die lists. Going into space, swimming the English Channel, a one-man hot air balloon trip across the world… it's all BS, really. Who can be assed with any of that?

One such lofty dream is climbing Mount Everest. A lot of foolhardy folk have tried this, and a select few have even succeeded. Most, sadly, just got frostbite on their scrotes and ended up frozen entrees for mountain lions or whatever the hell lives up there. The yeti or something. I don't know. It looks like an all-round bad time to me, anywho, and I'd rather sit on the couch at home and feel my ass grow.

If I can do that, while still feeling all heroic and accomplished and such, I'd be a happy man. If you feel the same, you'll probably be all over this latest project from Icelandic developers Solfar Studios: VR Everest-climbing.

‘They're working on a model of the world's tallest mountain for VR systems,' Kotaku reports, ‘which has composited over 300,000 photos to create "a highly detailed 3D point cloud of the whole area". The whole thing is then being built using Unreal Engine 4 and destined for "high-end VR platforms."

It sounds like a hugely ambitious task. If this is the kind of massive scale experience we'll be getting from Oculus Rift and similar systems, though, consider me a fair bit more interested in the tech that's coming our way in the next couple years.

Everest VR will hit some time in 2016.