The Gneiss Watch: a small rock watch clone for VR
26 Feb 2022 - faintshadows
It's a Pebble. Gneiss is a type of rock. Pebbles are small rocks. We're very clever.
When I first got into social VR, specifically NeosVR, and I got my own avatar and everything, I knew it was missing something. IRL I wear a Pebble Time Steel, and I wanted to mimic that in VR, since I love my Pebbles very much. I set out and made a CAD model of an original Pebble (the geometry on it is a little easier to measure and more accurately create.) With some help from my very awesome friends, we were able to not only make the watch show the time, but the date and battery level of your VR controllers.
We also added a notification of sorts, it'll vibrate your controller whenever someone joins the session. To help performance, the model is slightly simplified, removing some curves and rounded edges to reduce polygon counts. The watchband is circular, so it doesn't super fit on an actual wrist in game, I just haven't gotten around to measuring out my own wrist to get an idea on a proper band shape.
It's a simple little project, but I'm very happy with it, and it's about time I actually properly posted about it and showed it off.
Currently the only watchface is 91 Dub, since it's the only watchface I use. TECHNICALLY since this is an original Pebble model, it shouldn't be in color, but I didn't want to get a B&W screenshot and editing the one I had to be B&W turned out to be harder than I thought.
However the watchface is in its own emissive texture file so adding new ones is trivial. The harder part will be adjusting the placement of the text for the clock and date.
I don't know if I want to sell or otherwise make this watch public, I am unsure of the legality of having what's basically a 1:1 model of an original Pebble. I just made it for fun to get back into CAD, and have my VR avatar more accurately represent me.
Oh yeah it also gives you a shruggie if you're in Neos's desktop mode, since you don't have VR controller batteries there :P
