Tim today pointed me at Enterprises, a lovely little free project that renders Star Trek’s most famous ships in virtual reality. Better yet, they’re to-scale both in terms of each other and the player. It’s absolutely wonderful if, and I’m willing to guess this is a reasonable portion of our lovely readerbase, you’re a big fan of space lasers and TV shows. The work of one-man squad William Palmer using various sources for the meshes and models, it works perfectly fine without a VR headset too.
The included ships are every iteration of the Enterprise across its now-50 year history. You’ve got the original series version, its various movie outings then The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D from the TV run and E from the movies. C is also in there, from that one fairly good time travel episode. Rounding it off is the rebooted version from the latest pair of films.
Sadly there’s no interiors, but just flying around the outsides and hearing the soft hum of the engines (I’m very happily accepting the artistic license of sound in space) is lovely. The sheer size of the models does wonders for the details and it’s the first time I’ve realised just how different in size these vessels are. You can also peer into the odd room that had an outward-facing window.
It’s a shame Voyager didn’t make it (the first time anyone has ever thought this), nor Deep Space 9, but perhaps they’re on the cards for the future. You’d probably need to build in an extra speed boost on top of the already-implemented sprint function to be able to explore DS9 properly. Equally, there’s plenty of other ships from the franchise I’d like a closer look at. Flying between the struts of a Romulan Warbird? Don’t mind if I do.
You can grab the 161 meg download from Reddit. It ran fine on my aging rig, but I was sans-headset so it’s possible you’ll have more issues if you’re Oculusified. I also found something about floating in space quite terrifying, particularly when I looked down to see where the surrounding texture joined together, creating a black hole-like effect.
